Review: An 'it' girl does the Dante shuffle in 'Babylon'

“Babylon” begins with an elephant first spraying excrement all over working class men trying to keep it from careening off a cliff, and then on the camera lens itself. This is perfect, because “Babylon” is a massive beast sliding through hairpin turns and bombarding its audience with all manner of bodily fluids.

Metaphorically, of course.

But.

Also literally.

The oversized, coked-up film follows two upstarts — feral actress Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) and ambitious gofer Manny Torres (Diego Calva) — as they climb (or perhaps sink) to the top in the golden age of Hollywood. As new stars rise, the old ones, like Valentino-esque heartthrob Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), struggle to find their place in unfamiliar constellations.

Let’s unpack writer-director Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” a filthy, funny, frenetic film that might be the weirdest holiday-season release in recent memory.

‘Babylon’ has fun with a familiar story.

Chazelle has built an Oscar-nominated career out of reinterpreting Americana, from the Technicolor musical in “La La Land” to the moon landing in “First Man.” Now, he takes ball-step-change from Emma Stone dancing at an observatory to a wilder west: the very birth of Hollywood.

Specifically, “Babylon” charts the heyday of silent pictures as it transforms into the brave new world of talkies. And yes, this is well-trod soil, which the movie knows. The title evokes “Hollywood Babylon,” the 1959 book by Kenneth Anger that put to print some of the most salacious gossip of the studio set. The most obvious touchstone is “Singin’ In the Rain,” of course. “Babylon” agrees, and to say more would be to spoil a little too much.

You’re not crazy to think that a story exposing the seedy society lurking beneath our most treasured silver screen escapades has been done particularly often in recent years, too.

I watched all of Ryan Murphy’s revisionist fantasy miniseries “Hollywood,” which I should discuss with my therapist, and “Babylon” bangs a few of the same drums. Murphy’s show starred Samara Weaving, who also appears in “Babylon,” which is a funny in-joke, because she famously looks strikingly similar to Robbie. Wait, I’m not done: Robbie, of course, helped headline Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood …” That’s another revisionist Tinseltown fantasy, where she plays an ill-fated starlet, Sharon Tate, and infamously was given almost no dialogue by Tarantino. And “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood …” also starred Pitt as a past-his-prime film set lifer, which he plays in “Babylon,” and —

You guys get it. Look, “Babylon” is a lot like Taco Bell: same ingredients, just wrapped a different way and given a new name. But at least this metaphorical Crunchwrap Supreme is the best of its contemporary bunch.

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Most of its runtime of three hours and eight minutes (pause for laughs) is Chazelle telling Tarantino “stop hitting yourself” as he does a little historical tourism. Thrill to the chaos of multiple silent pictures being filmed in a field and somehow turning into art! Lose your absolute mind laughing as Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy tries to get a single take right on a new-fangled sound stage! Internally scream “Jean Smart!” every time Jean Smart shows up as a Hedda Hopper analogue with an accent of indeterminate origin!

Justin Hurwitz's score turns your brain into a flapper, shimmying reflexively with the whirling dervish onscreen. The scenes look lush; you could reach out and run the depravity through your fingers like velvet.

From a modern vantage, Chazelle tries to talk about race and sexuality through the film, mostly through Lady Fay Zhu (Lil Jun Li), a character who’s basically Anna May Wong with a tincture of Marlene Dietrich thrown in, and Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a jazz trumpeter who finds renown starring in big band pics marketed toward Black audiences. I said he tries — Lady Fay is a hoot but disappears for most of the show, and Sidney's story feels grafted onto the film in post. And a harrowing scene tackling the very real history of blackface in cinema perhaps overestimates the need for a white director to hold such an image on the screen, in tight closeup, for an excruciating extended take.

To hit on the Tarantino piñata just once more: Chazelle structures “Babylon” in a way that recalls the elder director’s best impulses, and characters like Nellie and Manny pop in and out of tonally varied scenarios that span the Hollywood universe. A mock anthology, if you will. At its most “Pulp Fiction,” Tobey Maguire (also a producer) makes the most shocking cameo of the year in a sequence more hellish and (almost) more hilarious than anything that comes before it.

Margot Robbie is our 21st-century 'it' girl.

Every Hollywood story needs a “discovery” moment. Nellie is drafted from among the hoi polloi of a hillside bacchanal as a warm body to replace an ingénue fallen to the night’s depravity. Then, she takes to a bartop and dances so intoxicatingly, tears up so easily, that her stardom cannot be denied.

We've seen Robbie in this mode; Nellie is like if Harley Quinn did a reverse “Take On Me.” But Robbie’s cartoonish brass becomes blood and bone in "Babylon," as she digs into her character’s desperation and delusion. There’s a touch of the clown still around. A scene involving a rattlesnake is one of the year’s funniest.

One benefit to cinema constantly cannibalizing itself by making movies about movies, however: You sometimes get to see the art spill into reality. Robbie’s a marquee name, of course, but “Babylon” is the kind of muscle-stretcher that actors can only hope for, a geometric proof of their ability to be, well, a movie star.

That said, Robbie’s hair in this movie is inexplicable and I have not stopped thinking about it for days.

Imagine Lita Ford if she stuck her head in dishwasher and dried it going 90 in a 65 with the top down.

Imagine a labradoodle pelt turned into a lace front.

Imagine bean sprouts.

The film’s hairstylist told Allure magazine that Chazelle wanted to avoid stylistic clichés (fair), and that Nellie’s hair was modeled after Robert Plant. Mmm, yes, famed 1920s starlet Robert Plant.

Sometimes you should stop while you’re ahead.

When you thought, “God, does anything need to be more than three hours long?” (I’m in your head), “Babylon” seems dead set on answering you. Perhaps when a filmmaker covers that much ground, it’s hard to show restraint. Yet even those bodily fluids we talked about, gross as they may be, are artistically effective — these fantasy worlds are built on nothing so shiny.

Still, it’s disappointing to notice the clever little cinematic references throughout the film, and see Chazelle end his mega-movie with a big neon arrow pointing at the screen, as if to say, “This was the point!” It also reveals the limitations of making movies about movies. Yes, cinema is magic. We wouldn't be there if we didn't agree, no?

Then again, it does start with an elephant taking a dump on the camera.

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If you go: ‘Babylon’

Grade: B

Starring: Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Diego Calva, Jean Smart

Director: Damien Chazelle

Rated: R for graphic nudity, drug use, bloody violence, pervasive language, strong and crude sexual content

Running time: 3 hours, 8 minutes

Watch: In theaters Dec. 23

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: In 'Babylon,' Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt make a Hollywood hell story