The embargo has lifted and Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” has a 67 on Metacritic (based on 21 reviews) and 76% on Rotten Tomatoes (based on 25 reviews). Not that shocking. It does have four perfect 100 scores.
The embargo had lifted at 3:01AM ET embargo, a perfect time when everyone is asleep and the studio can suppress the response. I don’t blame them.
We all expected Chazelle’s silent-era epic to be polarizing. Some will love it and some will hate it. I think I loved it, for the most part. It has its flaws, but it’s very hard not to forgive them, especially when the filmmaking is this punch-drunk gorgeous.
I wrote about the film earlier last week.
Chazelle shoots his film like a madcap painter throwing tone and subtlety out of the window. He doesn’t mold his movie as much as just splatter it with surreal brush strokes. From scene-to-scene there’s constant wonderment at what exactly it is that you’re watching: Drama? Comedy? Horror? It’s really just a consistent blend of genres.
“Babylon” is such a strangely conceived film. I can’t seem to put my finger on it, but there’s something to be said about a film that goes from gross-out humor to sheer Greek tragedy in the blink of an eye. There’s shit, piss, cum, and vomit mixed total cinematic virtuosity. This “Babylon” is really something.
The whole thing feels like a hallucination, a fever dream of total chaos. It’s Chazelle’s dark odyssey through the last days of silent-era Hollywood where actors were being brushed aside for theatre-experienced performers in talkies. If Chazelle had a positive outlook on the industry in “La La Land,” he’s far less optimistic here — tackling the system, the politics, the money that fuels this machine. The characters here are all cogs in what will inevitably be a Hollywood that spits them out.