‘Babylon’ Is a Depraved, Disgusting Ode to Hollywood

The madcap, sometimes downright slapstick spirit of Babylon is embodied by Nellie LaRoy, played by Margot Robbie. Nellie shows up uninvited at that early party (she crashes—literally in the parking lot as she drives up) and pronounces herself a star, despite having no experience in movies. “You either are one or you ain’t. I am,” she explains to Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican immigrant doing menial work adjacent to the party and, by extension, Hollywood (since it’s such a hot ticket with a guest list including Greta Garbo). Nellie goes on to blow massive rails of coke with Manny, as they wax effusive about breaking into the movie industry. She ends up commanding the dance floor and nabbing a role as a result. His ascent to studio exec soon follows.

the effect so often is like watching a guy chew his food with his mouth open and then show off the big mass of pre-swallowed mush proudly.

Any movie about Hollywood comes built-in with a hallmark of camp: love of the unnatural, per Susan Sontag’s manifesto on the sensibility. Movies about movies obsess explicitly about the synthetic representation of reality. Chazelle certainly provides plenty of scenery for the chewing, and his cast sinks its teeth in. Pitt rants and raves, and Robbie…tries really hard. Unfortunately, she does that thing Madonna often does in movies: devise a very specific characterization for her character but do little to fill it in. As Nellie, Robbie is a kind of outline of a “wild child” with more than a dash of her Harley Quinn thrown in; there’s little there beyond the luridness of her every over-the-top move. She’s the kind of character who, in a public meltdown, tells a room full of people, “I’m gonna go home, I’m gonna stick some coke up my pussy, and you all can stick your champagne flutes up your rose-smellin’, candy tastin’, snow white fuckin’ assholes!”

Her downfall—and this is very much a movie about downfalls, which means there will be an amazing symmetry if Babylon is Chazelle’s first real flop—is typical “crazy broad” shit, a paranoid K-hole of drug abuse and gambling debt. It’s along the lines of Sharon Stone’s final scenes in Casino, but Robbie is no Stone. She isn’t even Elizabeth Berkeley—Nellie’s supposedly attention-commanding dancing at the party looks like Nomi Malone with less technique. (A later accusation from a co-star that Nellie is icing her nipples seems to be an explicit reference to Showgirls.)

The main issue with Babylon is that it’s not believable within its own ersatz spin on reality. This is not to say that it isn’t at times virtuosic. Chazelle is commanding a literal cast of thousands (the press notes report that the script has over 100 speaking roles alone), and he choreographs an early scene of chaos—battles, set-building, quieter acting—into something coherent, much like the beach scene in Apocalypse Now. Babylon relies on these sprawling, intensity-ratcheting sequences, which cross-cut between multiple characters and are set to a big-band backdrop; its pacing feels not unlike that of Chazelle’s breakthrough, Whiplash.

Yet for all the complications, this is a very simple narrative of how people go out of style in an industry that commodifies humanity. In fact, when Chazelle participates in that very commodification, it’s as crass as anything else in Babylon. Chazelle ostensibly has some half a dozen principal characters, but two of them—trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and renaissance woman Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) are barely present. Much of their interior or daily lives is passed over to focus on Nellie, Manny, and Jack. Chazelle, who once directed a movie about a white dude saving jazz, is overtly gesturing to diversity, and yet he keeps these marginalized identities on the margins. Oh well, better luck next time.

Babylon’s main concern is razzle dazzle, but there’s insight here and there. Jean Smart plays a gossip columnist named Elinor St. John, who is a composite of many real-life people, including Adela Rogers St. Johns and Louella Parsons; she also retreads ground laid down by Judy Davis when she played Hedda Hopper in the Ryan Murphy series Feud. Elinor’s pen can be life-giving or poison, and during a pivotal scene, she tells Jack that he’s outmoded in the wake of the talkie takeover. He says that she could never understand what it’s like to be him, because she doesn’t create, she just writes about those who do. She is, in his estimation, a cockroach.

He’s as brash as his gilded trash.

“Did you ever stop to think why, when there’s a house fire, the people all die but the cockroaches survive?” replies Elinor. “You thought the house needed you, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t need you any more than it needs the roaches, and the roaches, knowing this, crawl back into the dark, lay low, and make it through. You, you held the spotlight, but those of us in the dark who just watch, we’ll survive.”

It’s a great scene played wonderfully by really good actors. If only more of the writing were so soulful, Babylon might not have the feel of a major misstep from a director who has seemingly let praise go to his head. That said, even if it’s a product of arrogance, Chazelle is taking risks, and he’s using a ton of studio money to do so. He’s as brash as his gilded trash. Toward Babylon’s end, Manny sits watching Singin’ in the Rain (1952)—another movie about the awkward transition from silence to talkies—and then we’re treated to a montage of scenes from sources as varied as Un Chien Andalou (1929), The Wizard of Oz (1939), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Matrix (1999), freaking Avatar (2009), and Babylon itself. It seems clear that Chazelle has little to say beyond, “Movies are good…and so is my movie!” But if Babylon is a failure, it’s a fabulous failure, and there are far too few of those today. I was never—not for a second of its three-plus-hour runtime—bored, and I also thought it would never end. That is showbiz.