Babylon is Margot Robbie gyrating manically like the Energiser Bunny for three hours and nine minutes. It’s her dream role.
As the rising young star of Hollywood circa 1920s (before the talkies) Nellie LaRoy, she is convulsing with excitement and ambition (and cocaine pulsing through her bloodstream). Nothing can stop her from fulfilling her desires — which in the prelude of Damien Chazelle’s operatic fourth film, sees her brazenly flirt her way into the town’s biggest party.
Her doe-eyed servant is a low-ranked no-body, Manny Torres (played by newbie Diego Calva) who, rather than think as I did that “she should be resting back home with a bottle of water and a packet of aspirin” — simply falls in love with her.
Here, the manic pixie dream girl form comes into blinding brightness, as Manny and Nellie share their greatest dreams and darkest secrets while snorting mountains of coke the size of a car.
The first fifteen minutes of this film is like being bludgeoned across the head with a large, rubber prop — not unlike the giant dildo we see a dwarf jump on and use as a pogo stick in the eighth minute.
The party is tribal in spirit and garish in flesh — it’s a giant orgy of naked bodies, throbbing and humping and jerking and thrusting. Chazelle injects every frame with hallucinogenic energy. Think of the sex scenes in Eyes Wide Shut and The Matrix Reloaded, plugged into an amp and turned on full volume. It’s so loud that it prohibits you from actually feeling anything. Venereal pleasure is best conveyed subtly, carefully – unfortunately, there is no softness here.
Enter Brad Pitt, who plays Jack Conrad, a famous actor at the top of his game — microscopically observed and universally loved. He has a rotating carousel of wives and lovers and is never seen without a cigarette or drink in his hand. We circle around his dwindling star-power, and it’s a sympathetic storyline Pitt pulls off effortlessly.
Unfortunately, Jean Smart is wasted on this small role as Elinor St. John, an entertainment writer whose appearance is sprinkled throughout the film with no substantial depth.
Chazelle’s frantic camera style pulls us from Nellie’s exposed torso to Jack’s permanent squinting to Manny’s teenaged wonder, while a glowing ensemble of black jazz musicians, led by Sidney Palmer (played by Jovan Adepo) punches our ears with Justin Horowitz’s original score – the same composer who did music for Chazelle’s 2016 musical La La Land; though the music in Babylon is not as interesting, original or dynamic.
Little known actor, Li Jun Li, steals the show, playing Lady Fay Zhu, a queer, Chinese-American cabaret genius who is based on the real-life marginalised Hollywood star, Anna May Wong.
Despite the overexposure this film is getting (clearly, a lot of budget money went to the marketing department) — it’s a somewhat long and tiresome experience. I wasn’t looking at my watch, exactly – but let’s just say the three hours and nine minutes felt like being on a rocky boat out at sea and trying to manage my nausea.
Speaking of nausea and its occasional consequences — there’s a lot of bodily dregs in this film. Get ready to be shat on by an elephant, and appreciate Nellie’s impressive projectile vomit. The corporeal landscape of human beings flexes its muscles, as we witness our characters confront violent animals – there’s a glorious scene involving Robbie in overalls and a rattle snake, and another with an alligator.
Excess is a tone colour in this film — everything is engorged, swollen, exploding or shattering.
The frenetic rigour of the film is fuelled by Nellie’s lust for life (and her drug and gambling addiction) and only a few tender moments offer reprieve from the noisy chaos – one involving a wise Jean Smart teaching Brad Pitt about the bittersweet impermanence-cum-legacy of his fame.
Sadly, Adepo’s story feels like an add-on — he is given nothing to work with, and is vanished almost as soon as we come to familiarise ourselves with his face. This is even more upsetting to see since music, especially jazz is the spiritual core threading through all of Chazelle’s films; except First Man (2018).
Same goes for Li’s character Lady Fay. The real-life career of Anna May Wong was tragic and sad, but nothing of her internal life or external circumstances is examined here.
In fact, none of the characters are really given the space to develop. Nobody is allowed to be ‘complicated’ — which is probably why this film has gotten slammed by the critics.
The film is a little bit of a scatterbrains — it feels like sitting down for a long lunch with a person who literally cannot stop talking. Chazelle’s first and second feature — Whiplash (2014) , La La Land (2016) were monumentally gorgeous and thrilling to watch — but sadly, Babylon is a vortical sweep I wasn’t too keen on experiencing.
I’d never left the cinemas feeling physically exhausted. There’s so much on-screen exertion, just watching it made my brain (and body) tired.