Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie lead Damien Chazelle’s starry, manic reimagining of the time before talkies.
ButBoogiehad a dramatic throughline, and something genuinely unsettling to say about the strange soul-bargaining of fame.
(Were people really waxing their personal bits circa Prohibition?)
Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is carried aloft during a big-scale Hollywood production in ‘Babylon.'.Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures
But even a full-blown fantasy needs its own internal logic, a thingBabylonrarely gestures to or simply disregards completely.
You’ll have to ask the ghost ofLois Weber.
Race and class, too, don’t seem to mean anything, until suddenly they do.)
