It’s no secret that Hollywood loves to make movies about Hollywood, whether detailing the ins and outs of filmmaking, the cultural importance of Film, or a bit of both. 2022 was a perfect example of this, where several major middle-aged auteurs leaned heavily on their autobiographies to examine their personal connection to the form.

The best movie-about-movies last year wasn’t any of those, however. It was Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s ambitious, audacious attempt at distilling several tales tied to an inflection point for Hollywood: the silent-to-sound transition.

Babylon is a cinematic thrill that left me buzzing in my seat; I’ve seen it twice this month. It’s a glorious, intentional mess that swings and misses as often as it hits home runs. At its best, Babylon is pure cinema; at its worst, it’s self-important and masturbatory. Yet it’s the only movie I’ve been able to think about for weeks. 

The highs of Babylon come in the form of epic set pieces that prove Chazelle and his countless collaborators to be masters of the craft: the camera tilts and whirls around frames overloaded with rich detail, cutting between the perspectives of a handful of characters. From the drug-and-booze-fueled bacchanalia that opens the action to a chaotic snake fight in the desert to its eventual descent into hell, Babylon is everything we love about movies.

Unsurprisingly, the two scenes most concerned with the actual making of movies are its highest peaks. The first sequence after the title card (at 30 minutes in, a flex) captures a frenetic day at Kinescope Pictures, less a backlot and more a field where the studio can film several silent pictures simultaneously, from slapstick farce to exoticized adventure to Western to historical epic.

For the film’s main characters, the day is a high point: Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) proves she’s a star during her first scene on film; Manny Torres (Diego Calva) proves he can handle the demands of filmmaking on his first day; and Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) proves he can still run up that hill, even after a day of drinking, operating and screenwriting (“Frankly, Scarlet: you’re a cunt,” he adlibs to an onset scribe). No matter how apocryphal about how the silent era actually worked, the scene is a celebration of the era, and what the studios could get away with — including, in this case, literal murder — before the advent of sound. Even as Nellie and Manny will see their fortunes rise, the scene is the high they’ll be chasing for the rest of the film.

As in Singin’ in the Rain, which Babylon borrows and steals from liberally (to the point of including actual footage in the final sequence), the main focus is how that turning point in technology changed not only what film could and would be, but how they were made and by whom. When Nellie shoots her first scene on a sound picture, it’s the polar opposite of the Kinescope lot sequence, and Babylon replaces bombast with anxiety. The first is a fight against god’s light; the second a fight against man’s technology. Both leave dead bodies in their wake.

In Babylon, the introduction of sound is equivalent to cocaine in Goodfellas and VHS in Boogie Nights: it’s essentially all downhill from here. The anything-goes orgy of the opening is reduced to a dozen people in the desert, in the silhouette of headlights and hoping to see someone fight a snake (it doesn’t go well, and it will only get worse for the characters by the end).

The character whose fate is most tied to the cost of sound is Pitt’s Conrad, and he is tasked with giving and receiving monologues about the importance of film. What begins as inspiration (“We need to dream beyond these pesky shells of flesh and bone — map those dreams onto celluloid — imprint them into history…”) turns to insistence (“What happens on the screen means something — maybe not for you up in your ivory tower, but down on the ground where real people live, it means something”), before a gossip columnist gives him an existential reading.

“In a hundred years, when you and I are long gone, anytime someone threads a frame of yours through a sprocket, you will be alive again,” says Elinor St. John (Jean Smart). “Your time today is through, but you’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.”

These scenes aren’t bad, per se, but they break the spell the film has cast by telling instead of showing. This didactic urge also undermines two characters that are often propped up to be as significant as the starring trio but are woefully underserved throughout. 

Trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) rises from party band to film star, but we are only given glimpses of his life (before or after fame) before he is asked by Manny, now a studio executive, to don blackface — a fraught scene unearned by the film. Palmer loses the battle but wins the war, in a way, walking out of Hollywood with his pride mostly intact. Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) fares a little better, and her cabaret performer-slash-Hollywood hand is given more to do. She twice goes toe-to-toe with Conrad, steals that snake fight scene and is often shot and costumed to look like pure sex… before Manny also upends her career and she exits stage right.

While both Sidney and Lady Fay could have used more moments to fill out their characters, their screen time fits their role in the world of Babylon. And the film does not totally hand wave the role of race in Hollywood, with the film’s POV character, Manny, a Mexican immigrant who whitewashes himself and his heritage as he moves up the corporate ladder. Unfortunately, his rise coincides with a rote stretch of the movie, which primarily becomes concerned with him saving Nellie’s career and then life, first by Pygmalion and then by way of Dante.

The climax of Babylon approaches the filmmaking excess of the early standout sequences while never reaching those heights. Manny’s visit (alongside the pill-dealing Count, a hilarious Rory Scovel throughout) to the den of a gangster (an absolutely ghoulish Tobey Maguire) takes the Rahad drug deal scene from Boogie Nights to its hellish conclusion (complete with Ethan Suplee hocking loogies like he’s lighting firecrackers). Yet the visit to “LA’s last real party” — despite its blood-soaked cage fights, freak show-sex show hybrids, chained gators and roid-freak geek headliner — is both too over-the-top in meaning (“This is what Hollywood will become!” the film screams at us) and not over-the-top enough in depiction (especially in a year when Barbarian made an even more upsetting descent into the dark).

For some, “the asshole of Los Angeles” is the most horrifying scene in the movie. For me, the most horrifying would be the film’s conclusion. After flashing forward to the ‘50s, Manny is a schnook visiting Los Angeles from New York who happens to take in a screening of Singin’ in the Rain. He’s deeply moved by moments in the film that were ripped from the one we just watched. But as the camera pans over a theater of enraptured moviegoers of all ages, races and concession choices, the overly earnest message — movies are magic for everyone! Jack Conrad was right! – feels like Don Draper dreaming of buying the world a movie ticket.

Then, Manny’s memories appear as a montage of moments from the film that soon build into a cascade of moments from the history of film, from the Black jockey that we learned about in Nope through to slicing eyeballs in Un Chien Andalou to going off to meet The Wizard of Oz. Then we hit hyperspace and are shown the most well-known moments in the CGI era, from Jurassic Park to The Matrix to (hilariously) Avatar.

Exactly how earnest Chazelle is with this sequence — which plays like something that a theater chain would show after the trailers — is an open question, but I think a big hint is in the speechifying his characters do throughout Babylon. (Including Avatar in the montage as the equivalent of a guy eating a rat for a bunch of junkies hopped up on brandy and ether is a more cynical reading.) On first viewing, I headed for the exits; on the second, I chose to view it like the opium den scene that brackets Once Upon a Time in America (a title this film could have borrowed, if Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood wasn’t already taken): equal parts dreams and memory, about what could have been. 

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