An Ode To Tobey Maguire's Coke Gremlin In Babylon
Damien Chazelle's "Babylon" is a fantastic, over-the-top tale of debauchery and a melancholic look at the roaring '20s in Hollywood, where everything could and often did happen. This is a film of excess, beginning with an opening scene so ridiculous you'd think Baz Luhrmann directed it — or at least stood up, hooting and hollering through the scene — and the only 2022 film that ends with a shoutout to James Cameron's "Avatar," a movie it seems to both admire and deeply fear.
This is not a reverential look at the power of filmmaking like "The Fablemans," or a tender story that crosses with a tale about the power of cinema like "Cinema Paradiso," but a go-for-broke, "Animaniacs" sketch about the endless cycle of death and rebirth in Hollywood. Scenes about the making of several pictures in the same lot are fascinating if kind of cartoonish. An incredibly long opening set at a huge party so ludicrously excessive it could make Leonardo DiCaprio's character in "The Wolf of Wall Street" (a movie that lends this one half of its cast) salivate. And yet, nothing can prepare you for the film's craziest scene, or its craziest character — Tobey Maguire's The Count, aka James McKay.
Maguire's scene is so out of left field, so incredibly memorable and weird with a capital W that it simply had to make our list of the 50 best movie moments of 2022. As our own Chris Evangelista wrote, "Maguire, covered in sickly makeup and really going for it, is a hoot as this weird loony."
He is a bilious, coked-up lunatic, a real-life Gollum, and the best part of the film.
A real-life Gollum
After what feels like 8 hours following the rise and fall of stars and would-be stars in the transitional period to the talkie era, we are introduced to the mobster James McKay, aka The Count. He is owed a lot of money and is threatening to kill a starlet, so studio exec Manny goes to the Count to pay her debt and save her life — albeit not knowing he is actually delivering fake bills.
The Count immediately strikes a memorable image. Unlike everyone else in the film, who looks either dapper and larger than life or scruffy and relatable, The Count is a cartoon character brought to life, with sunken eyes, and gremlin teeth. He is essentially the Bully Maguire meme from "Spider-Man 3" on a lot more drugs.
The Count also happens to be a major cinephile, and he has a lot of ideas to pitch Manny, all of them both incredibly problematic and hilariously deranged. His biggest idea, however, is one that he promises will revolutionize Hollywood, a whole franchise revolving around a single man, who they simply have to see to believe. So he suggests they go meet him, in a secluded location.
What follows is a trip through "the a-hole of Los Angeles," a sequence that echoes the massive party from the opening scene, only twisted and corrupted. Rather than a bacchanal, it's a Dantean tour of the layers of Angeleno hell, with deathmatches, a dark sex dungeon that feels more like a proper torture dungeon, and even a hallway guarded by an alligator, all before finding McKay's star: a giant of a man who eats live rats for money.
A Dantean trip through hell
This is a movie that's over the top, yet tries to be earnest and heartfelt, and even achieves that at times. But just when this gargantuan 3-hour-plus-long epic starts to wind down, just as you start thinking it is getting tedious, along comes Tobey Maguire's Count and, just like the metric ton of cocaine the character must be inhaling with every meal, completely revitalizes the film with a jolt of energy so powerful it might send a DeLorean back in time.
The character, on the page, is already a delightful weirdo, but what sells it is the casting of Maguire himself. Once a prince of Hollywood debauchery, he could easily have played a role that got him participating in the bacchanal of the opening scene. But no, Maguire, who is also an executive producer in the film, actually, wilfully chose to play the part of the count. "I don't know what that says about Tobey, but that's what he picked," director Damien Chazelle told Entertainment Weekly. Something about playing a sickly weirdo with rotting teeth and an affinity for depravity simply called Maguire, and we are all grateful that it did.
It's been a while since we've seen Maguire on screen. Before his not-so-surprising appearance in "No Way Home," his last live-action role was in the 2014 Bobby Fischer biopic, and "The Great Gatsby" the year before. That this is the type of juicy, non-Marvel role that gets Maguire to act again is just a blessing for all of us. The magic of movies, indeed.