The Verdict: "Babylon" is the Movie We Deserve (but not the one we need right now)

Damien Chazelle’s unrelenting three-hour epic is also 2022’s most underrated movie.

Margot Robbie in Babylon | Image via Paramount Pictures

Welcome to The Verdict, a weekly column in which I group the film and television I’ve been watching into one of three categories: Underrated, Overrated, and Perfectly Rated. This week, I take a look at Damien Chazelle’s Babylon—his crazed, unrelenting, nonstop party of a film about fervor in early Hollywood.

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Until this week, Babylon was my biggest blindspot of 2022. I missed the theatrical release window for Damien Chazelle’s latest cinema extravaganza, and as a result found myself participating in the 21^st-centry habit of catching up with the latest Oscar-bait film on streaming. And, as is often the case when I do this, I found myself wishing that I had paid the money to watch it on the big screen. Whatever else you can say about Chazelle’s three-hour bacchanal of early Hollywood—and people have said a lot—the only thing that people seem to agree on is that Babylon is big, by which I mean BIG. The film opens at a truly batshit Beverly Hills party, replete with mountains of cocaine, an elephant’s explosive shits, and Golden Showers so disgusting they might even please Donald Trump. The dial begins at 11, and it doesn’t stop for three hours.

If ever there were a movie that demands to be seen on the big screen, this is it—and I wish that I could have. I wish that you could have, too, because you probably didn’t. The film made a measly $60 million on an $80 million budget—a flop by anyone’s standards—and only added more credence to the belief that the in-person cinema experience is at death’s door. But I will not abide. I am a passionate moviegoer, a movie theater acolyte, and dammit, I refuse to accept the death of the cinema.

I admit that this is something of a contradictory statement, since I’m talking about a film that I only just watched on Paramount+. But here’s my case: For years, evidence has shown that movies which open in cinemas do better than day-and-date releases or direct-to-streaming ones, and Babylon is a case in point. In last week’s overall streaming charts, it reached the number five spot, beating out the likes of Yellowstone and The Woman King—a good sign indeed. The theatrical experience still means something, even in its second life on a streaming service.

So while the cynics proclaim the end of cinema and the onslaught of streaming, allow me to instead make the case for Babylon, for streaming services, and for the tortured, hectic, off-the-walls beauty that is the Hollywood dream-making machine.

Babylon is Underrated

Brad Pitt and Diego Calva in Babylon | Image via Paramount Pictures

Between all the drugs and defecation, critics have found themselves split on Babylon. Understandably so: The film’s debauched largesse would always have been divisive. Some, like Mark Kermode, have called it an “overcooked portrait of a nascent Tinseltown [that] is more hysterical than historical,” while others, like Robbie Collin of The Telegraph, have praised it as “a lavish, hyper-energised epic of old-movie-world misbehaviour.” Yet for all the polarized responses, the most succinct description of the film comes from Dana Stevens of Slate: “Babylon is a defecating elephant of a movie: gigantic, often repulsive, but hard to look away from.” Indeed, to enjoy Babylon is to enjoy the insanity that is Los Angeles—a crazed, drugged-up, topsy-turvy town that founded that beautiful thing we call cinema.

The film’s opening sequence sets the tone. The year is 1926, the place is Beverly Hills—a desert of undeveloped land, save for one mega-mansion owned by movie studio executive Don Wallach. Within that mansion rages what appears to be the final party on Earth: an unrepentantly chaotic orgy of sex, drugs, jazz, and movie stars and their wannabes. The movie stars are Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), legends of the silent screen at the height of their power. The wannabes are Manny Torres (Diego Calva), an upstarting assistant to Don Wallach, and Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), an aspiring actress who proclaims one of the film’s many mission statements: “You don’t become a star. You either are one or you ain’t.” Blaring in the background is the sound of a seven-piece jazz outfit led by Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), Babylon’s fifth and final protagonist.

As if it weren’t already overstuffed with the introduction of these characters, the film never hesitates to show you the sinful excesses of which these movie stars were born: Cocaine, Golden Showers, and a Shitting Elephant. Chazelle weaves between these instances of unkempt bacchanalia as effortlessly as Jack Conrad divorces his many wives, and somehow manages to get each of his actors to shine their personalities through it all. It’s extravagant, excessive, and—for my money’s worth—utterly transfixing.

If debauchery isn’t for you, then stay away, because it’s this kind of energy that churns through Babylon from beginning to end. After this introductory party set piece (thirty minutes long!) comes a scramble-to-get-the-shot set piece, in which Manny races to acquire a camera before sunset while Nellie simultaneously achieves her long hoped-for stardom. (This panicked scene is as magnificently epic as anything I have ever seen.) Then the talkies are invented, and so comes a set piece best described as the “Sound Barrier” scene from Singin’ in the Rain if it were directed by the Safdie brothers. Then there’s a Nellie-fights-a-snake set piece, a Nellie-vomits-at-a-party set piece, and finally a descent-into-hell set piece featuring a devilishly evil Tobey Maguire.

In case it wasn’t clear: Babylon is defined by its set pieces, each of them as overwrought, overproduced, and overpriced as the last. They are deliberately designed to have you asking, “Just who the hell would subject me to something so depraved?!” whereupon Mr. Damien Chazelle, Babylon’s maniacal director, laughs a laugh that signals the end of the world. Because, more than anything, Chazelle seems to be directing Babylon as though it were the final movie on Earth, as though there will never again be an opportunity to spend $80 million of Paramount’s money on something as utterly demented as this.

Look, if this isn’t for you, I get it. Moral depravity isn’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea. And to this point, Babylon does sometimes try a bit too hard to scream at its audience, “Cinema was born as a shitshow and it still is one!” Set piece after ridiculous set piece, the trick begins to feel a bit inane. (The aforementioned “Nellie-vomits-at-a-party” sequence exists for the crass purpose of showing just how piggish Hollywood stars truly are. It’s the sole instance in Babylon that teeters into outright stupidity.)

But despite it all, I came out the end of this three-hour-and-nine-minute spectacular feeling what I can only describe as a cinematic high. I was charged with the kind of fervor that only the movies can give us—the kind of fervor that makes us scream when Captain America lifts up Thor’s Hammer, the astonishment that we feel when walking out of a theater thinking, “Wow, that really was that batshit fucking crazy.” Because Babylon really is that batshit fucking crazy. And I’d have it no other way.

If only we had gone to see it in theaters.

Actually, Streaming Services are a Good Thing

Still from Babylon | Image via Paramount Pictures

I am a fan of the movie theater. Call me a purist, but cinema is not designed to be watched at home—it is designed to be big, to be communal, and to be watched on a big screen in a room filled with strangers. I felt this all the more when I finished watching Babylon on my cracked laptop screen at a youth hostel in New York City, where, pondering the meaning of my existence, I thought, “Damn, I really missed out.”

Still, watching the movie on a cracked laptop screen is better than not watching it at all, a fact that only became truer once I started diving into reviews and interviews about the film. In an interview with Sean Fennessey at The Ringer, Chazelle spoke on the capacity for movies to gain life after their cinematic release:

When I grew up [around the mid-90s], already at that point it was understood that movies eventually would live in home video. […] It only feels like recently that it’s become this sort of oppositional thing, of, like, “Movie Theaters VERSUS Home Video,” whereas I think it can—and should just be—additive. […] Even movies that don’t do great in movie theaters—if they go into movie theaters first, they tend to do better once they go to home video. That’s sort of been proven now down the line, with a lot of examples over the past couple years when studios started experimenting with day-and-date and things like that.

Hearing this said out loud was something of a revelation to me. Being the cinephile that I am, I have long been wary of the encroachment of streaming services upon movie theaters and their capacity to sustain themselves when people have the far easier option of staying inside with their 40-inch LED monitors. Rather than go out to watch Babylon in the theaters, audiences can just as well wait the two months until it drops on Paramount+. Why wouldn’t you?

But as Chazelle points out in this interview, maybe this doesn’t need to be a bad thing. We’ve already seen post-cinema success stories like Encanto, Disney’s 2021 animated feature which performed middlingly at the box office (at least by Disney’s mammoth standards), yet became a streaming megahit after strong word-of-mouth reception. Even in a year like 2022, where Oscar-bait movies wildly underperformed in cinemas, a film like Banshees of Inisherin found a second life after premiering on HBO Max, reigniting Twitter freakouts about how good Colin Farrell’s performance is. (It is damn good.) Even more simply, megahits in cinemas continue to be megahits in streaming, as Top Gun: Maverick’s arrival on Paramount+ proved to us all.

This is not a new story. Films from the 1990s like Shawshank Redemption and Fight Club are now considered all-time classics, but were box office failures upon their release. The reason for this is obvious: DVD sales and hot word-of-mouth gave them new legs. I can only imagine that these are the kinds of films Chazelle is thinking about when he argues that movie theaters and home video are—and should be—working together in harmony.

With COVID and the rapid domination of streaming, the movie industry has been going through a lot of change, much of it scary. Nobody is sure what the moviegoing world is going to look like over the next five years, and because of this uncertainty, skeptics are proclaiming the end of the cinema as we know it. I myself have sometimes been a member of these doomsday proclaimers.

But what if Chazelle is right?

Consider a hypothetical world. The nerds go to watch Babylon in theaters first, then the casual viewers catch up with them at home two months later. The film isn’t a box office hit, but it doesn’t need to be if it’s doing well enough on streamers. In the years to come, it will become a reclaimed masterpiece, as divisive movies like these often do.

This is of course purely speculative, and only accounts for a typical film-release structure that Babylon adheres to. I’m not considering “day-and-date” movies that drop in theaters and on streaming on the same day, nor movies built purely for streaming, nor the fact that streamers like Netflix and Apple are now major contenders in the Oscars race without ever having to consider those pesky in-person experiences. These are all major considerations, each of which annoy and terrify me in their own unique way.

I’m choosing to remain optimistic. As studios and streamers stumble through the tumult of our anti-social digital age, I’m hoping that they’ll realize the best way to get their movies out there isn’t by shuttling their movies directly to the home, but to start them off on the big screen. From there, send it to Netflix or HBO or Apple or MUBI or wherever else. I don’t care. People will watch them there too. But let the movies begin where they belong: in cinemas.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sad that Babylon didn’t explode at the box office and generate the kind of mass attention it should. (Hell, it might have even forced me out of my laziness and into the movie theater.) But at the same time, when I did catch up with in the months after its release, I was blown away. And I wasn’t blown away in the manner of a TV show or some other visual medium. No, I was taken by Babylon because it is a film. That may sound like an arbitrary point, but with so many filmmakers turning to television and beyond, I find myself needing to join the cadre of cinema purists who believe that cinema is its own thing.

It’s a magical, magical thing, this weird form of art we call the movies, and it’s one that Babylon celebrates and denigrates like a cocained-fueled monkey riding upon a giant shitting elephant. That isn’t always a pleasurable experience, but it is honest to to the bacchanalia of which Hollywood was born, and by God, it is a rip-roaring ride. If, like me, you didn’t get the chance to watch Babylon in theaters, you owe to yourself to check it out at home. With its release on Paramount+, it is starting to generate the kind of conversation it deserves. In the years to come, I hope people will come to see it for what it truly is: a crazed, misunderstood masterpiece that celebrates the movies (as movies often do) in an honest, chaotic, unrelenting, and entirely memorable way. If Hollywood collapsed tomorrow, we’d have the commemoration that we deserve.

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A quick note:

• Apologies for posting this rendition of The Verdict a couple days late. I ended having a lot more to say than I expected while also needing to begin a roadtrip from Los Angeles to Seattle. Still, I’m glad I could get this piece out, and I hope you enjoy!

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Agree or disagree with these takes? Have any underrated/overrated takes of your own? Let me know in the comments!