Warning: This post spoils the end of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon.
When Nicole Kidman strode into that AMC Theatre to record her now-iconic pre-roll, did she have any idea she’d be anticipating the most popular scene of the 2022 awards season?
At a moment when the theatrical experience feels imperiled, Oscar-winning directors have treated us to shot after shot of characters gazing beatifically up at the silver screen, transported out of their ordinary, humdrum lives through the wondrous power of cinema. Results of this trend have been mixed: Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans has been widely acclaimed, while Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light landed with a thud. (India’s official Oscar entry, The Last Film Show, reportedly includes a similar scene, but as of this moment it is unseen by me.)
And then there’s Damien Chazelle’s Babylon.
Like its counterparts, Chazelle’s Jazz Age fever dream sets its emotional climax in an old-fashioned movie house. But while the characters onscreen may applaud the spectacle, many reviewers have been far less kind. Babylon has received a mixed critical reception, and its version of this now nearly obligatory scene has functioned as a Rorschach test for audience sentiment: If you admire Chazelle’s go-for-broke ambition, you likely appreciated the big swing he makes in the film’s final minutes; if you think the whole thing’s totally fraudulent, this was probably the moment that made you grab your coat and start heading toward the exit. The Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang calls it “an explosion of cinema” that’s “simultaneously dazzling and depressing.” At Slant magazine, Keith Uhlich calls it “jaw-droppingly wrongheaded … a flourishy final summation that should inspire as many death stares as eyerolls.” And RogerEbert.com’s Brian Tallerico dubs it “the falsest material in Chazelle’s career.” How could a single sequence cause such consternation?
To get a sense of the three hours leading up to this moment, it helps to understand two things. The first is that Babylon is a movie all too aware that it may be the last of its kind, a no-expense-spared period epic intended for grown-ups with little connection to any preexisting IP beyond its glancing allusions to Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. The second is that its plot is essentially Singin’ in the Rain by way of Boogie Nights. Like the 1952 musical, it’s a retelling of the seismic shock of sound pictures in the world of 1920s Hollywood told through a trio of archetypes occupying disparate rungs of the industry hierarchy: Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), an established star; Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a go-go-go newcomer; and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a gofer who yearns to enter the biz. And like Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 drama, it’s a tribute to a golden age of hedonistic creativity pitched at the moment right before the music stops. Babylon’s silent-film professionals may be fools who dream, but they do it while lying hungover in a gutter full of elephant diarrhea. In the words of Stephanie Zacharek, “We’re invited to party with them and look down on them at the same time — the best of both worlds.”
Whether a straight-A student like Chazelle, who grew up near the campus of one Ivy League university and graduated from another, has an eye for debauchery is an open question. “An R-rated movie that plays like three PGs stacked on top of each other inside the trench coat of an NC-17 … Babylon feels about as dangerous as a Broadway musical,” says Indiewire’s David Ehrlich. But the director pairs this excess with a nostalgia for the whirlwind energy of the silents, and the flamboyant disregard for convention the industry lost as it made its transition to sound. Babylon’s leads each lose something, too: Jack his star power, Nellie her spark, and Manny his soul. All three are chewed up by the merciless industry, as are the film’s supporting players, such as trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and chanteuse Lady Fay (Li Jun Li). Gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) informs Jack at his lowest moment that while his career may be dead, “in 100 years, when you and I are both long gone, anytime someone threads a frame of film through a sprocket, you’ll be alive again.” Many have pointed out that this is not how the actual denizens of early Hollywood would have understood themselves, but so it goes.
For Jack, figurative immortality is cold comfort. As some silent stars of legend did — like comedian Karl Dane — he takes his own life. As for Nellie, she amasses an unfathomable gambling debt to a local gangster that Manny, now a studio executive, struggles to pay off. In a third-act turn that is the movie’s most obvious debt to Boogie Nights, he and a flunky attempt to defraud the gangster (a bug-eyed Tobey Maguire in the Alfred Molina role) during a visit to a secret underground hellhole known as “the asshole of Los Angeles.” The scheme goes belly up, the flunky’s murdered, and Manny’s life is spared only when he promises to flee Los Angeles and never return. Like an apparition, Nellie simply vanishes into the night.
In a flurry of trade headlines, we zoom forward in time. Nellie dies in obscurity before the decade is out, her blistering stardom reduced to a brief obituary about someone who used to be sort of famous once. Then, suddenly, it’s 1952. A middle-aged Manny returns to Los Angeles with his wife and daughter. He wanders the sets he used to call home and finds he has left no trace. Emotionally bereft, he begs off from the family vacation and catches a movie alone.
That movie, of course, is Singin’ in the Rain. As the film unspools, Chazelle underlines its similarities to the one we’ve just watched. Don Lockwood is a Jack Conrad, the silent-film paramour whose onscreen lovemaking loses its effect once verbalized (“I love you, I love you, I love you”). The ear-screeching starlet Lina Lamont is unmistakably Nellie LaRoy. This is the legacy of Manny’s entire professional life: All his friends are dead, and they’ve been turned into punch lines.
Events in my personal life have made me more susceptible than usual to tenderhearted tributes to lost friends, so I will not pretend this didn’t work for me. But if that seems a touch too dark a note to end on, Chazelle zooms out, intercutting clips from Singin’ in the Rain and Babylon with dozens of films spanning from the silent era to the 21st century: The Passion of Joan of Arc, Duck Amuck, Meshes of the Afternoon, Psycho, Tron, The Matrix, Avatar. The effect, as multiple critics have noted, is not dissimilar to that of the montages that have filled space at Oscar telecasts since time immemorial. The movies — ain’t they grand?
Critics (mostly) hate it! “There’s a sense that Chazelle is suggesting that we don’t get Singin’ in the Rain if lives aren’t destroyed during the transition from silent to talkies,” writes Tallerico, who calls it “a deeply cynical and superficial way to look at filmmaking.” Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson is even more astringent, slamming Chazelle for learning the wrong kind of lesson from Hollywood history: “No matter what’s come before, you can always just end your picture on the easiest sentimental note and all will be forgotten.”
There have been more bullish interpretations. Ehrlich calls it an “endearingly galaxy-brained prayer,” proof that the movies have always been dying “and thus they’ll live forever.” Chang is inclined to give Chazelle even more credit. Spotlighting the director’s inclusion of more unsettling material in the montage — most notably the eyeball-slicing scene from Un Chien Andalou — he says, “The Dream Factory careens into nightmare territory, and the forces of nostalgia and nihilism duke it out to a draw.” In this light, the montage is simply expanding the same thematic tension at work in the rest of the film: Hollywood as garden of dreams versus Hollywood as hellish nightmare, both visions existing side by side without ever coming into synthesis.
This is not a million miles away from the message of The Fabelmans, a film that is simultaneously awestruck and terrified by the quicksilver power of cinema, and by the way its meaning can slip from the hands of even its makers. In a sense, the ending of Babylon does Spielberg one better: It doesn’t merely illustrate this lesson; considering Chazelle’s not entirely successful attempt at growing up to be a cinematic debaser, it also embodies it.
More on Babylon
- The 46 Best Movies Over 3 Hours Long
- The Year the Movies Died (Over and Over and Over Again)
- ‘There Couldn’t Be Any Normal Scenes in This Movie’