It’s an old industry adage that Hollywood likes nothing more than films about itself. But the line between alluring insider lore and indulgent navel-gazing can be a fine one, and Damien Chazelle bounds so heedlessly across it in Babylon (2022), a three-hour ode to 1920s movie-making and off-camera debauchery, that even Hollywood found it a bit much. Rejected by audiences and awards voters alike, the film, now streaming on multiple platforms, is a grand, beautiful folly but not a disaster. There’s something wryly self-knowing about its excesses, a love for warts-and-all Hollywood that gives every wart its own meticulous closeup. I think it’ll find its cult.
Still, it joins a crowded subgenre: even under the more specific criterion of “portraits of Tinseltown in the transition from silent cinema to talkies”, it was never going to match Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952) for ageless exuberance and nimble comedy. More recently, Michel Hazanavicius’s Oscar-laden The Artist (2011) tackled the era with a spry, metatextual sense of pastiche.
