Film review: Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are excellently cast as the stars of Babylon

Writer-director Damien Chazelle pulls back the curtain to give us a glimpse of the chaos that reigned in early Hollywood, both on and off-set

Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad and Diego Calva plays Manny Torres in Babylon. Picture: Paramount Pictures.

★★★☆☆

Damien Chazelle’s La-La Land (2016) was an artfully naïve reworking of ‘A Star is Born’, but Babylon (18s), which opens in Hollywood in 1926, is rather more raucous affair.

The story revolves around the aging matinee idol Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), who has plans to reinvent the cinematic form as the era of sound dawns, and the starlet Nelly LaRoy (Margot Robbie), who will do whatever it takes to get in front of a camera.

The plot, however, frequently feels like an excuse for a series of loosely linked extravaganzas, as writer-director Chazelle pulls back the curtain to give us a glimpse of the chaos that reigned in early Hollywood, both on and off-set.

The tone is set with a party of unbridled licentiousness at the palatial home of movie producer Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin), which features hot jazz, oodles of drugs, an elephant, and a corpse: it may be Nelly LaRoy who is described as an intoxicating blend of ‘bad taste and sheer magic’, but there’s no doubt that the description extends to Hollywood itself.

Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon. Picture: Paramount Pictures.

And yet, as the film meanders on through the 1920s, incorporating the stories of a number of supporting players — jazz musicians, studio gofers — it becomes difficult to figure out what Chazelle is trying to say. Is Babylon a satire on Old Hollywood? An exposé?

And is it really such a tragedy that movie stars — as opposed to musicians, say, or studio gofers — are obliged to change and adapt to new technology? The movie star characters, naturally, believe that it is, but they insist on the meaning and importance of movies so often that you start to wonder who it is, exactly, Chazelle is trying to convince.

Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are excellently cast as the photogenic stars, and individual sequences are superbly executed, but the muddled whole is considerably less than the sum of its parts.

In cinemas January 20.