The old adage is “sell the sizzle, not the steak.” Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie give this overcooked slab plenty of sizzle. Enough to sit through a one-time watch.
And it is a long sit: a full three hours that feels like it. The first half hour – I mean, like 30 minutes, take place inside a Hollywood VIP’s private party. It’s full-on depravity, an orgiastic, bombastic spectacle. With great lighting and costumes. This doesn’t include an elephant prodigiously pooping in the faces of some unlucky characters – that takes up a bit of time, too.
Director Damien Chazelle’s sort of historical fiction seems to be saying that modern immorality ain’t got nothing on the late 1920s. A time of change – the silent stars were fading out as sound was coming in. The Hollywood Hills still looked like barren, well, hills. For any of us who thought those were more innocent times, this film spreads its legs wide open for us gawkers to be disabused of our naïve notions.
In many ways, Babylon is a chaotic shit show, but you don’t dare look away. The locations, the art direction, the sense of being there – all top shelf. I expect many technical awards nominations next year.
And the cast? Well, when you want to cast someone who is kind of like the laid-back version of Brad Pitt, you can do no better than…the laid back version of Brad Pitt. Here, Pitt plays Jack Conrad, a silent film star who has been a household name, but might become just a has been, if these new talking pictures put him out of work like so many others. Brad does a great job.
And Margot Robbie, reportedly taking over for first choice Emma Stone, inhabits her character, Nellie LaRoy, with a sexy exuberance and wounded soul that will become the background of so many souls in the decades ahead for Hollywood. Nellie is an aspiring actress, but she is already a star, we are reminded.
Finally, Diego Calva, a Mexican actor previously unknown to me, is sort of the same center of the film. Maybe he was a 1928 version of Kato Kaelin? Calva’s character journey has sort of become a familiar micro-trope in itself. The guy standing in the right place at the right time who goes from gopher to a place way above his pay grade- just like everyone else in Tinsel Town.
And whether it’s historical true or not, Babylon shows us that everything has changed and nothing at all has changed in those hills of West LA. Grandiose dreams and false bravado are the currency of the industry.
Fake it til you make it, indeed.
Babylon | Rated R | (Graphic Nudity|Drug Use|Bloody Violence|Pervasive Language|Strong & Crude Sexual Content) | 3 out of 4 Stars | Expands wider theatrically December 23rd
