There’s been so much talk this year about if Margot Robbie is a “movie star”, or just an actress. Beautiful, talented, and charming, she has all the individual elements, but some suggest she lacks the bonafides. Yes, she’s acted in blockbusters, but would you call her the star of those films? Maybe not. But this 2022 holiday season, we got our first real taste of Margot Robbie selling a film.
It made $3.6 million in its opening weekend, behind ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’, ‘Puss In Boots: The Last Wish’, and ‘Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody’. That’s roughly a quarter of what it was projected to do. We have our answer, folks.
Movie stardom isn’t just about selling tickets, but that does come with the package. You’re a brand unto yourself, and a certain level of fan will follow you to the moon, or at least to the theatre. But between this and the abysmal box office of ‘Amsterdam’, Robbie is on shaky ground in terms of her draw. When you take into account the underwhelming box office of ‘Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)’ (2020), the argument feels lost. Or won, if you’re one of the weirdos who hate her.
I really do think it’s a project-based issue.
So much felt like it was riding on ‘Babylon’, the Damien Chazelle written and directed monstrosity. Much like ‘Tenet’ two years before, this film was meant to represent the theatre experience being “back”. You know, like ‘Everything, Everywhere, All At Once’, ‘The Lost City’, and ‘Elvis’ also were this year.
In 2022, every non-franchise film felt like the potential death nail of cinema, here we have an expensive failure. “Studios will stop making mid-budget films” the whispers say, for the fifth year in a row. We sit and we wait for the ultimate final blow that seems to never come. Maybe this is it, but probably not. I doubt it’ll even be the death of “Hollywood” – the setting, the theme, or the character.
Pining the failures of ‘Babylon’ on Robbie seems harsh in context of the film. She’s one of three leads, and not even the main one. That honour goes to Diego Calva as Manny Torres, who gives an astonishing performance as an immigrant who rises from the sidelines to direct films. If this film wasn’t a flop, I’d say we just found the next star of cinema. Hopefully we still have.
Robbie is, in many ways, less a character and more a representation of the people talkies left behind, as are all the characters that aren’t Torres. Brad Pitt plays a John Gilbert analogue, Robbie is a caricature Clara Bow, and you get funhouse mirror images of various other actors and actresses, from Fatty Arbuckle to Anna May Wong. In this distorted version of 1920s Hollywood, we see so much and so little, because it’s just removed enough from the truth to feel unsettling. It isn’t an “honest” depiction of the era, that would require some level of reality. Chazelle plays it safe by playing it false.
I know this response is 100% is exacerbated by my knowledge of the era. I don’t care. The vibe is off and I am going to call it out. There was nobody I knew as excited for this film as me.
Nobody gives an abysmal performance. But outside of Calva, nobody has the material to do anything particularly interesting. There’s nothing touched upon here that hasn’t been done a million times, from the fellow flop ‘Hail, Caesar’ (2016), to the Ryan Murphy show ‘Hollywood’ (2020). Bitchy reporters, shady business deals, and badly behaved women – this is the Hollywood of yore that we’ve been seeing for decades. What’s worse is the film ends with ‘Singin’ In The Rain’ (1952), a movie with essentially the same plot (in broad strokes) that, in 1952, did a much better job of handling the central premise. Both films are bloated and easily distracted, but the delightful musical earns it in a way that this hyperactive comedic drama does not.
But to return to Robbie, she does some of her best work in a role that is completely miscast. Yes, this might be the first time I’ve ever believed her romantic chemistry is real, but the movie isn’t a love story. In her case, it’s a tragedy.
Even without acknowledging the Clara Bow comparison, which makes the original casting of Emma Stone make significantly more sense, she’s just not able to assimilate into the world of silent cinema. Margot Robbie looks contemporary. She’s gorgeous in the wrong way, gifted in the wrong way, delightful in the wrong way. As the saying goes, she has a face that has seen an iPhone. The performance is giving so much, but little of it fits. Even when dressed in the most period appropriate clothes and pushed into a scene where she’s forced to pull back the energy and just respond, that tightly coiled energy that is magnetic as Harley Quinn feels so false. The best comparison of performance I can give that isn’t one of her own is Elizabeth Berkley in ‘Showgirls’ (1995). Enthusiasm cannot make up for bad casting.
If Margot Robbie is a movie star, she’s one that needs a better agent. Better taste. ‘Barbie’ will likely right the ship next year, but the fact that her two choices for 2022 were expensive and poorly received comedies with all-star casts in period settings is…worrisome. Her choices have always been confusing from a branding point of view. She’s clearly going for range, but she (or, again, her agent) lack good judgement. Never count out someone who is both talented and beautiful. That’s always a mistake. But the film industry has spat out actresses with just as much potential as Robbie.
I mean, that’s what the movie was about.
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