Babylon

Attempts to out-Fellini Fellini are regrettable and for much of its length Babylon is an unsubtle and indigestible mess so that despite all the talent involved and the fascinating subject matter, it must be seen as something of a disaster.

Subtle it is not. Nor is it good.

Chazelle’s film commemorates the era’s hubris as it indulges in a bit of its own. This is how a world ends. Not with a whimper but a great deal of banging, baby. And vomiting. And snorting.

Babylon is a disaster of biblical proportions, precisely because it had so much potential.

Babylon is not so much a film of two halves, but a third of a brilliant movie and two hours of unmitigated mess and chaos.

In the end, Chazelle does evoke the elegiac mood he’s after, finishing with a wistful meditation on the evanescence of fame and the fragility of those who fail to survive its demands.

Babylon is ambitious, and costly—and almost a complete shambles. It is badly constructed and unconvincingly done, providing little or no insight into the film industry, culture in general or American society.

For all that is great and grand in its use of history, the film is long and you can feel it, a problem when making an epic.

As it stands, after two movies that started the “White People Freaking Out About Jazz” genre, I don’t have a lot of faith in Chazelle telling these stories and Babylon has shown me that my fears were founded.

Babylon’s sound-recording scene replicates Singin’ in the Rain’s as something dire and unfunny and way too long.