‘Babylon’: The Biggest Movie That Slipped Through the Cracks

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The year 2022 in film, looking back, was a year of Grandiosity. Yes, Grandiosity, with a capital G. In this year’s Best Picture category, we have such hits as ‘Avatar 2: The Way of Water’, ‘Elvis’, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, and ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’, whose title itself even nods to Grandiosity. Even Todd Field’s ‘Tár’ has a sense of epic proportions to it.

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Babylon

And then comes Damien Chazelle’s, ‘Babylon’, a film of immense proportion excitedly dreamed up by the mind behind the multi-Oscar-winning ‘Whiplash’ and ‘La La Land’, and packed with some of the biggest stars of our time – Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, to casually name a few. A gigantic opus of a film clocking in at three hours and nine minutes long, reaching new heights in Chazelle’s oeuvre, audacious and ambitious as ever – and it flops!

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With a budget coming in at around 80 million USD, the film released on December 23rd, 2022 to an opening weekend of 3.5 million USD box office revenue and was immediately declared a flop. Early reviews before its release were divisive, to say the least, with some offering passionate praise and others unenthusiastically disappointed. It currently sits with a 57% Tomatometer and 52% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes, and as of May 18th, 2024, it has made 16.6 million USD domestically and 47.9 million USD in other territories for a total of 64.5 million USD. Conversations about the film continue and debates over its quality burn onward throughout comment sections of every social media site and it seems that anybody you talk to either loves it or hates it.

Babylon’s Unapologetic Message

The film itself deserves to be seen on a big screen. The monstrously large title page emerges onto the screen about a half hour into the film, and at that moment the film makes clear its Grandiose plans (people call this self-indulgent as if being celebratory is a sin). The three-hour ride right before your eyes aboard a rollercoaster of drugs, love, and misery, and the film doesn’t let up until you’ve walked out of the theater and re-immersed yourself in the real world outside. It is a demanding experience, and that much is undeniable. To determine Babylon’s power, it’s necessary to consider how it carries the burden of these intense demands.

Chazelle’s message about an industry that eats up its stars and spits them out is abrasive, and that’s the point. That is how a filmmaker might decide to relay his message – the contingent part of this platitude is that there are a million ways an audience can react to that. Challenging your audience is a dangerous line to walk, and ‘Babylon’ certainly teeters many times over that line and back again, and it proves itself a trying experience many times over.

But any repulsive or difficult segments of the film only make the multiple climactic moments of clear vision and beauty even more rewarding. Tim Robey of the Daily Telegraph once said of John Cassavettes, “Like steep hill climbs, [his] films can be jolly hard work, but the view from the top is worth it.”

There is a scene in the first half of the film where Diego Calva’s character, Manuel, steals an ambulance to get the only remaining camera in 1920’s Los Angeles to a crazed director (played by the always amusing Spike Jonze) before the sun goes down– and it is setting fast. Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad has spent the day boozing it up in a tent and the director is having a meltdown, apologizing profusely to God for wasting the beautiful sunlight he was given. But in the nick of time, Manuel arrives! Brad Pitt stumbles into the frame, and kisses the damsel in distress; explosions go off like fireworks in the background, and miraculously, a butterfly flutters in and lands gracefully on Pitt’s shoulder. The perfect shot happens, somehow, after twenty minutes of heart-attack-inducing stress. This is the miracle of cinema.

Meanwhile, on another film set, a passionate young director watches Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy dancing hysterically on a bar counter for a bunch of grizzly men, and tells her to cry, and bam! Nellie cries. And they do another take and she cries again. And again, and again. Robbie makes it clear through her performance that these are Nellie’s real tears. Because of her ability to sob over and over, the director gets her perfect shot as well, and again, cinema is created.

Everything is flipped upside down when silent films turn into talkies and the great star actors are left in the dust. The film borrows a lot from ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ and has ‘Boogie Nights’ DNA all over it, but it synthesizes these old ideas into a new thesis statement that feels as timely as ever. The characters lose themselves in their passion and angst and they give the movie industry everything until they have nothing left to give. But born in the process is an art that cannot be replicated without the trials and tribulations of chaos that by this point we as an audience have experienced through these characters.

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What It All Says

Calva and Pitt are fantastic, but the true standout is Margot Robbie in the performance of a lifetime; her character, like the film industry itself, is unwieldy, and falling in love with her is surely a path to destruction. But we do it anyway because in her chaotic unruliness is a unique beauty.

The world in its rapidly evolving technologies of ease and convenience today finds itself in an anti-intellectual rut; the pandemic did a number on movie theaters everywhere, and streaming services and an endless array of entry points into the oblivious rabbit holes that limited series and seasonal shows offer in your living room television set threaten to finish theaters for good. But what about a movie that wants to live on the big screen, a movie that works best with a community together, watching in harmony?

The real question as to what happened and what is happening with ‘Babylon’ can be simplified to this: in the age of TikTok and the infinite scroll of endless dopamine from the comforts of our beds and couches, how much will audiences give, how far will you stick your neck out, to be rewarded by the view from the top?

Read our official review of ‘Babylon’ here:

https://www.hollywoodinsider.com/babylon-damien-chazelle/

By Ben Brown

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Ben Brown

Ben Brown is an aspiring writer-director located in Burbank, CA. Born in Rochester, NY, he studied film for four years at Ithaca College before moving to California to follow his dreams. As a writer at The Hollywood Insider his goal is always to discuss and dissect all forms of art, his greatest passions. His mission statement is to talk openly and philosophically about film while always elevating and never putting something down for the sake of negativity. There is talent around the world to be celebrated and praised, through facts, not gossip or rumor, and that is Hollywood Insider’s mission. Ben is also a screenwriter and film director and actor, as well as a published author from a very early age.

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Ben Brown

Ben Brown is an aspiring writer-director located in Burbank, CA. Born in Rochester, NY, he studied film for four years at Ithaca College before moving to California to follow his dreams. As a writer at The Hollywood Insider his goal is always to discuss and dissect all forms of art, his greatest passions. His mission statement is to talk openly and philosophically about film while always elevating and never putting something down for the sake of negativity. There is talent around the world to be celebrated and praised, through facts, not gossip or rumor, and that is Hollywood Insider’s mission. Ben is also a screenwriter and film director and actor, as well as a published author from a very early age.

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‘Babylon’: The Biggest Movie That Slipped Through the Cracks

Babylon

Babylon’s Unapologetic Message

What It All Says

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