Movie Reviews: 'Babylon' has a maximalist vision that offers a wild ride

This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Margot Robbie, center, in "Babylon." (Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures via AP)

BABYLON: 4 STARS

There is nothing modest about “Babylon,” the new three-plus hour epic from “Whiplash” director Damian Chazelle, now playing in theatres. It is unapologetically epic in themes, in length and in sheer off-the-wall exuberance.

A multicharacter treatise on the movies and knowing when to leave the party, it is “Boogie Nights” by way of Fellini’s “Satyricon” with a dash of “Singin’ in the Rain” thrown in for good measure. Love it or hate it, and there are valid reasons for either response, it is audacious, chaotic, vulgar, and, like its leading lady, it always makes a scene.

The action begins in 1926 in Bel Air, then a dusty patch of dirt. Hollywood wannabe Manny Torres (Diego Calva) is an up-and-comer who’ll do almost anything to break into the film business. That includes the wrangling of full-sized elephant to be used as entertainment at a wild Hollywood party later that night. Pulled over by a cop who amusingly informs him, “You can’t drive an elephant without a permit,” the quick-thinking Manny talks his way out of a ticket and gets the job done.

Later, while working as security at the decadent bash, he meets Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a bombshell party girl with an attitude and a taste for cocaine and attention. “You don’t become a star,” she says. “You either are one, or you ain’t.”

She isn’t famous, but she is a star. To Manny she represents everything he aspires to be and it’s love at first sight. For Nellie it’s a chance to expose herself to the Hollywood elite and sure enough, her provocative wild child style catches the eye of a producer who hires her on the spot to replace an actress who overdosed at the party.

Meanwhile, as a live band, led by trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), blows the roof off the place, matinee idol Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) splits with his third (Or maybe his fourth. Who’s counting anymore?) wife and is drowning his sorrows in champagne and cocktails.

As the music blares, the dancers dance, the drinkers drink, the touchers touch and the snorters snort. It’s a bacchanal, the kind of party that only could have existed before the invention of the cell phone camera and TMZ.

As the sun rises, the party breaks up. Nellie drives off, on her way to the studio to make her big screen debut, and Jack takes Manny under his wing, giving him a start in that business called show.

There is more. So much more, but “Babylon” is not a film that lends itself to a Coles Notes treatment. Put it this way, one of the stars fights a rattlesnake, surely the climax of a regular film, but in “Babylon,” there’s still two more hours of story to go.

Chazelle’s maximalist vision is gloriously off the hook. He fills the screen with overstuffed detail, creating an avalanche of images and ideas. It is, by times, unfocused and sloppy, and begins to “Babylon-and-on” near the end of the 3-hour and 15-minute runtime, but the sheer exuberance of it won me over.

A story of loving something that can’t love you back, whether it is the movies, a gig, drugs or a person, Chazelle weaves a complicated tale of the highest highs and lowest lows, of glitz, glamor and grime that examines the notion of stardom and what happens when times change.

Adversely affected by shifting tastes is former matinee idol Jack, played by current matinee idol Pitt. A king of early Hollywood, he’s a Douglas Fairbanks style action star who always gets the girl in the final reel. He believes in the power of the movies—“What I do means something,” he says earnestly.—to uplift people beginning to feel the sting of the Great Depression but as the sounds of Al Jolson’s voice begins to fill theatres, Jack is the last to realize his time at the top has passed.

Pitt finds a balance between comedy and tragedy in Jack’s character. When we first meet him, he’s a hedonistic Hollywood a-lister who embraces the town’s loose morality. Often drunk, frequently ridiculous, he’s never less than charming. As the good times evaporate and the industry he loves, and helped build, moves on without him, there is real pathos in his downfall.

“You thought the town needed you,” says gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart). “It’s bigger than you.”

Robbie has a showier, if slightly less rich, character arc. Nellie is a rough and tumble Hollywood creature with a taste for cocaine and fame. Her rise and fall may be more predictable than Jack’s career collapse, but it is just as colorful. From all night coke binges to a vomit scene that brings to mind Mr. Creosote, she’s troubled and troubling, a person whose self-destructive motivations are only truly understood by herself. Robbie plays her as a brash and bold woman enabled by Hollywood, her youth and Manny’s unrequited love.

In a breakout performance Calva’s Manny begins his journey as an ambitious show business outlier. As he becomes an insider, Manny’s character becomes the avatar of the film’s theme of transformation.

Each of these main characters, including Adepo’s trumpet playing Sidney Palmer, are in flux. They are adrift in the winds of change, flailing about, at the mercy of public opinion and an ever-changing industry. Manny’s makeover is undoubtedly the biggest step up, mostly because he is the only character not living in the moment. “Everything is about to change,” he says after seeing “The Jazz Singer,” the first sound movie, and one of “Babylon’s” harbingers of transformation.

Pitt, Robbie, Calva, Adepo and a stacked list of supporting players, including Tobey Maguire, Olivia Wilde, Flea and “SNL’s” Chloe Fineman, among others, are given lots to do, but the real star is Chazelle. “Babylon” is big and sloppy, but Chazelle shoots for the moon in a way that few other recent films have dared.

PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH: 3 ½ STARS

In 2011, I accused the first movie in the “Puss in Boots” franchise of neutering the once-charming character. We fell in love with the frisky feline, as voiced by Antonio Banderas, in the “Shrek” movies, but his journey from supporting to leading character was far from purrfect. The movies were predictable and worse, had none of the purr-sonality (OK. I’ll stop with the cat puns now) of the “Shrek” movies.

Now, one television series, sequel and video game later, comes “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” a movie, now playing in theatres, that raises the stakes.

The new film opens with the plucky ginger cat (once again voiced by Banderas) in a life-or-death battle against a fur-midable (last one, I promise) opponent. “I am known by many names,” he brags. “Stabby Tabby. El Macho Gato. The Leche Whisperer. I am Puss in Boots!”

He’s been in sticky situations before, but this one is different.

“I have bad news,” says the doctor who attends to his wounds. “You died.”

It looks like the end for Puss in Boots, until he reminds the physician, “Doctor, relax! I have nine lives!”

“And how many times have you died already?”

“Oh,” says Puss, “I’m not really a math guy.”

Turns out, Puss is on his last life and must give up his adventurous ways if he wants to survive.

Rather than become a lap-cat, the swashbuckling Puss, along with love interest Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek) and chatty therapy dog Perro (Harvey Guillén), sets off to into the Black Forest to find the mystical Last Wish and restore the lives he lost. “I need to get my lives back,” he says. “Without them, I am not the legend.”

But after eight lives lived, Puss has many enemies, all of whom want track him down. “I find the idea of nine lives absurd,” says the Big Bad Wolf (Wagner Moura), “and you didn’t value any of them.”

Animation is generally thought of as entertainment for kids, but legends like Don Bluth and Ralph Bakshi made their careers creating films that addressed darker subject matter. Now, “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” is no "The Secret of Nimh" or “Fire and Ice,” but it is bleaker and more experimental than anything else in the franchise. Like the recent “Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio,” “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” treads into adult territory theme wise, with higher stakes than we’re used to in a film aimed at kids--the Cave of Lost Souls, anyone?—but does so with family audiences in mind.

The character of PiB may be in peril, but the flamboyance that made him such a scene stealer in “Shrek 2” is still on full display. He’s a huge personality in pocket-size, and Banderas brings a perfect combination of roguishness and righteousness to the voice work.

Fun, villainous voice work from Florence Pugh, John Mulaney, and Wagner Moura, as Goldilocks, “Big” Jack Horner and Big Bad Wolf / Death respectively, add some spice and beautiful animation lifts the adventure sequences skyward.

Best of all, the film’s underlying life lesson, that time is precious and we should enjoy it while we can—"When you only have one life,” says Kitty Softpaws, “that’s what makes it special.”—is nicely woven into the film’s fleet-footed, if slightly predictable plot.

THE WHALE: 4 STARS

Despite its dark subject matter, “The Whale,” Oscar nominated director Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, is coloured by a swirl of love, understanding and empathy.

Brendan Fraser, in his first leading role in nearly a decade, plays Charlie, a house-bound, online English professor who is 600-pounds. Agoraphobic and unable to leave his apartment, the only outside contact Charlie has is his nurse and only friend Lis (Hong Chau) and the occasional visit from a pizza delivery guy (Sathya Sridharan). He is large to the point where even simple tasks, like standing up to retrieve a dropped remote from the floor, becomes a Herculean task.

“You will die by the weekend,” Lis says, clocking his blood pressure at 238/134. “Then I have to get to work,” he says optimistically. “I have papers to grade.”

Charlie suffers from a twice broken heart; once by congestive heart failure, the second by the death of his partner Alan. “Someone close to me passed away and it had an effect,” he says with great understatement. “I was always big,” admitting he binge-eats to make himself feel better. “I let it get out of control.”

Now, with just days left to live, he has one wish. He wants to repair the relationship with his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), a 17-year-old he hasn’t seen since he left his family after falling in love with Alan, one of his students. “I need to know I did one thing right in my life,” he says.

Ellie, just eight-years-old when he deserted her, wants nothing to do with him—“I’m not spending time with you,” she says. “You’re disgusting. You’d still be disgusting even if you weren’t fat.”—but reluctantly relents when he offers to pay her and tutor her in exchange for spending time together.

As Charlie’s condition worsens, Ellie spends more time at the apartment, uncovering aspects of her father’s life with the help of a new friend, a naïve missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins).

Aronofsky brings us into Charlie’s world, a place where grief and forgiveness live side by side to create an intimate and compassionate portrait of a man who allowed his life to spiral out of control.

The specter of death hangs over every frame of “The Whale,” and yet Fraser manages to bring optimism to a character not long for this world. He's looking to set things straight and make sure Ellie will have the tools to have a decent life after he goes. It is a tremendous performance that soars, transcending the stage-bound nature of the story.