Babylon review: a glamorous, depraved look inside the Hollywood cult of I'll Do Anything

It’s a dark desert night; but certainly not quiet. A window-smashing, bottom-pinching mansion party wild enough to frighten off even the most brazen Tatler editor is detonating. There’s Margot Robbie snorting from golden trays of cocaine, barely dressed in a glittering red showgirl outfit. An elephant. Jazz, orgies and cabaret. A half-dead prostitute; Brad Pitt slurping a martini in black tie and sunglasses; attempted suicide. Dancing, card-playing and an intoxicated drive home by daylight. This is the overwhelming opener to Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, in cinemas now.

Welcome to Hollywood: land of the depraved, where everyone will do anything to become a star. But didn’t we know that already? Chazelle won an Oscar for portraying this in La La Land (2017), after all. 

Set in 1920s and ‘30s Hollywood, as silent films became outmoded by talkies, Babylon is all shock-and-awe: a familiar showbiz tactic. Every scene is overwhelmingly intense. Music and sex and colour dominate every spare scrap of space and sound: the screeching of jazz trumpets; the smacking rhythm of an orgy; a gross sniff of cocaine. Death is a frequent side-gag, but the toll ramps up. This is a story of addiction, not just to alcohol, drugs and gambling, but to Hollywood, that place born and surviving on desperation and fantasy. But how deep does it go?

As my plus one for the Burlington Arcade screening of the film last night said, ‘Chazelle should have co-credited Luhrmann and Tarantino as directors, he ripped from their style so much.’ Babylon certainly takes unsubtle notes from Luhrmann’s Great Gastby and Moulin Rouge. And he’s nicked Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood cast, which featured Pitt and Robbie in lead roles. La Plus One’s overriding feeling? ‘It’s time directors like Chazelle stop making films about the movie business with stupid speeches about how great movies are just so they can get an Oscar nod for a job poorly done.’ 

It’s true. The meta quality of this film detracts from its weight. In Hollywood – populated by desperate and desperately talented people who have very little to lose and bet it all on stardom – the cult of I’ll Do Anything is very real, and the wheel’s gonna keep on turning. 

The acting, on the other hand, is phenomenal, with further gravitas added by real-life inspirations and their somewhat bitter ends underpinning the lead roles. Nellie La Roy, played by Margot Robbie, is inspired by silent-era starlet Clara Bow; Jack Conrad, played by Brad Pitt, by silent-era star John Gilbert; Manny Torres, played by Diego Calva, by directors like Enrique Juan Vallejo and René Cardona; Lady Fay Zhu, played by Li Jun Li, by Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American to make it on screen; and Sidney Palmer, played by Jovan Adepo, by Curtis Mosby. 

Robbie as Nellie is a compulsive, aggressive, seductive aspiring actress from New Jersey: a scene-stealer who will boot anyone off the ladder she’s climbing in return for success. Nellie knows how to use her brazen sexuality to draw in the camera, manipulate the men and piss off the women. She’ll do anything for the limelight, but is shaken by the dawn of talkies, just as Bow was. With a common New Jersey accent and no affinity for etiquette, she fails to crack the ‘in’ crowd of Rothschilds, financiers, and high society culture buffs, and is left an outcast with ever lessening grand illusions. 

‘There was always something. I was too young, or too little, or too fat. Usually I was too fat,’ she says at one point – a line Chazelle has taken directly from Bow. In both real life and fiction, Clara/Nellie suffers from a sort of schizophrenia that worsens as her fame becomes more intense. At one point, Nellie visits her mother in a sanatorium: it is a rare quiet scene that offers some context to explain how desperately the young actress longs to escape from the reality not just of her family, but from the eternal the trappings of her own head, which seem to yield only to drugs. 

As Jack Conrad, Pitt operates a quick-change act between ostensibly deep thought and comedy. His tale is stark. He’s the toast of the town – friends with everyone, with a new wife every minute – until suddenly he’s not… and he’s last to know about it. Conrad is handsome and popular and unbelievably rich. He has starred in at least 80 films and despite his willingness to evolve into talkies, to create the cinema of tomorrow, he falls flat. He’ll do anything to hold on to it.  

Diego Calva as Manny, Nellie’s paramour, takes the journey all the way through Hollywood, from immigrating from Mexico to Los Angeles as a child, to La La Land’s ‘asshole’ – a vulgar party so dubbed by Tobey McGuire as the powder-faced Charon-like criminal, James McKay. From the jump, he is prepared to do anything to make it onto a movie set: he wants to be part of something bigger than himself, he tells Nellie on a cocaine high after they meet. From herding an elephant to corralling knife-wielding Skid Rowers into play extras in a battle scene that ends in real-life murder (oh well! He was an alcoholic anyway, say the producers) and landing an executive role, he does it all. Money and success eventually pour in, but the challenges get deeper and darker and deadlier.  

Li Jun Li plays Lady Fay Zhu, the cabaret star, with a soft sensual power that holds all these actors – and their mess – in her grip. Her charisma is off the charts: in this city of disarray she seems to be the only person in control. In that opening scene the ruckus stops when she takes the stage, engulfed in a hazy cloud of cigarette smoke and sings My Girl’s Pussy to a crowd in rapture. When Nellie gets bitten in the neck by a snake, totally off her face, Wong severs the serpent, removes it from her flesh and sucks out the poison. She’s a survivor and a protector. Li told Vanity Fair how she took all her inspiration from Anna May Wong: the first trailblazer for the Chinese American community. 

One of the most poignant moments in the film is when Jovan Adepo, playing the black jazz musician Sidney Palmer, is asked to darken his skin further: the bandmates hired for the movie in which he stars have deeper complexions than his. Manny explains that if he doesn’t darken his face, the audience won’t know that he is black. A latino asking a black man to change himself; it shows how twisted the industry can get. The request is met with a chilling silence. A close-up of Palmer’s eyes. A flicker of a tremble. He opens the tin of makeup and slathers it on, because if he doesn’t, the band won’t get paid, and then he hands in his pass and leaves. He did everything – he even did this – but no more. 

Dressed up with bells and whistles and cocaine, this is another movie about the dark underbelly of Hollywood that fails to really crack the surface. Ultimately, Chazelle is an insider. Another director making another film about the movie business under the pretext of uncovering its depravity. But really, his is a celebration. An act of chauvinism. A romanticised, flawed, self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Of course, the lesson is that despite the shock, the horror, the murder, suicide, mental illness and greed, it is all worth it. Because movies, they stand the test of time. They allow us to live far beyond our years. A taste of the glamour and fantasy is worth everything you have to give and more. 

Babylon might not be the true Hollywood epic it’s hoping. But its running time certainly is: at over three hours long, I’d have done anything for another glass of champagne. Hell, a bottle!