‘Babylon’: Margot Robbie’s most overlooked performance
When you have a filmography as stacked as Margot Robbie‘s, it’s perhaps hard to pick out a notable performance after multiple Academy Award nominations and collaborations with some of the finest directors working today.
With humble origins as Donna on the Australian soap opera Neighbours, Robbie then took Hollywood by storm through her fearless characters and eventual takeover as a producer, starting her own production company and quietly taking over the industry through blockbusters like Saltburn, Barbie and an upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean remake.
However, while she might be accustomed to the dizzying heights of fame and success, something that continued to soar after starring in The Wolf of Wall Street and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the actor has one role that remains sorely overlooked in her filmography, yet might just be the performance of a lifetime. After becoming the youngest ever director to win the prestigious Academy Award for ‘Best Director’, the pressure was on for Damien Chazelle to live up to his towering reputation, with unprecedented success after his stellar debut feature Whiplash and his original music, La La Land.
The genre had a resurgence in popularity that was all down to Chazelle and his glorious vision of love and ambition in the city of stars, charting the romance between Mia and Sebastien as they struggle to realise their dreams and maintain their relationship. But after its release, there was intense speculation as to what Chazelle would do next, with the announcement of his Hollywood epic about the rise of talking pictures making perfect sense given his cinematic obsessions.
But while the film’s thematic strands made sense, many were baffled and put off by its runtime and marketing campaign. Babylon became a huge flop at the box office, a hugely undeserved failure that meant few people appreciated Margot Robbie’s larger-than-life performance as Nellie LeRoy.
The film follows the lives of three people who are trying to make it in the movie industry during the transition from silent to talkies, highlighting the corruption and greed within Hollywood and the people who exploit the talents of marginalised people to get ahead. Whether it be Nellie, a working-class actor who is used by the studio and then thrown away when she no longer serves them, or Mannie, an aspiring producer who is forced to do all the dirty work in order to earn his place, Chazelle comments on a system that chews people up and spits them back out again, longing to be part of something that will never value them.
Robbie is fantastic as Nellie, playing someone with so much spark and natural talent that it often gets her into trouble, with an unbridled and almost manic level of energy that causes quite the stir in an industry of people who coast by on their ability to conform and be silent. From the jaw-dropping dinner scene in which she throws up all over the wealthy Hollywood elite or the opening party sequence as she shimmies her way through the front gates of a film set, Robbie brings a sense of electricity and danger to LeRoy’s character, never quite knowing how she will act or what her next move will be.
It’s Robbie’s greatest performance, embodying the soul and spirit of a relentless dreamer and unpredictable wild child who will do anything she can to make it, even if at the cost of losing herself to the machine. Despite not being highly rated in Chazelle’s or Robbie’s filmography, it remains my favourite, and one that desperately needs revisiting by those who missed out on its frenetic and life-affirming energy.
