Seen That? Watch This is a weekly column from critic Luke Buckmaster, taking a recent release and matching it to comparable works. This week, Margot Robbie’s cranked-to-11 performance in Babylon inspires him to revisit the greatest movie drug fiends.
The ghost of Hunter S. Thompson is alive and well, reincarnated as Margot Robbie in Babylon. Various drug fiends have paraded their liver-and-sinus-damaging debauchery across the big screen over the years—entering narcotic-induced oblivion for our amusement. But Robbie is next level wild; observing her feels like watching somebody chew their own face off. Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy, an intensely dynamic actor from New Jersey who becomes a Hollywood star in the 1920s, before—due to her wild ways—turning into a liability for the studios. LaRoy knows how to work the room, but she’s more likely to barf all over a key stakeholder than kowtow or curtsy.
In fact at one point she does precisely that, projectile vomiting onto a character inspired by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. This icky visceral moment occurs during a fancy soiree at Hearst’s house, immediately following LaRoy’s declaration that she isn’t having the greatest time. She subtly suggests this by yelling at the top of her lungs “YOU’RE NOT BETTER THAN ME!” to the well-to-dos around her. Then she announces her evening plans: “I’m gonna go home, stick some coke up my pussy, and you all can stick your champagne flutes up your rose-smellin’, candy-tastin’, snow white fuckin’ assholes!” And then it gets worse. With the vomit.
Robbie’s unhinged amphetamine-charged energy makes or derails every one of her scenes, depending on your perspective. It stands to reason that the performance should be loud, because by god Damien Chazelle cranks up the volume from the director’s chair—conjuring party sequences that’d make Baz Luhrmann or Paolo Sorrentino blush. With great portrayals of drug fiends, this is often the way: actors must match or eclipse the energy of a crazy-eyed director. Here’s five other examples of great movie drug fiends in raucously bold films.
Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
He just really, really wanted to head to Vegas and write about The Mint 400 while taking a galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, laughers and screamers. Johnny Depp brings hilarious OTT cartoonishness to his portrayal of the aforementioned gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, whose novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was considered “unfilmable”—until British auteur Terry Gilliam went and filmed the damn thing, with a terrifically bold and idiosyncratic style.
Depp conjures the defining caricature of Thompson, much more entertaining than Bill Murray’s impression of the legendary writer in 1980’s Where the Buffalo Roam. Starring opposite a never-funnier, weirder or more bestial Benicio del Toro, Fear and Loathing gets off to a roaringly absurd start, the two lead, convertible-riding fiends hitting the gas as they enter “Bat Country” and implore Tobey Maguire’s hitchhiker to hop along for the ride (“get in, we’re not like the others…”).
Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
The Wolf of Wall Street
He just really, really wanted to make a tonne of cash and snort lines of coke from womens’ buttocks. “On a daily basis I consume enough drugs to sedate Manhattan, Long Island, Queens for a month,” Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) brags early on in Martin Scorsese’s part-biopic, part explosive satire of corporate America. And he ain’t kidding. Jordan Belfort takes Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, pot to mellow out, cocaine to wake up, and morphine because “it’s awesome.”
Like in Babylon, Scorsese conjures a party-like energy that’s exhilarating and exhausting: merely watching the film feels like a challenge to keep up. DiCaprio gives his flibbertigibbet subject a smug, almost sickly charisma that eventually spills over into full-blown absurdity during the famous quaaludes scene: a grotesque union of slurred speak and slapstick.
Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Requiem for a Dream
She just really, really wanted to be on television and fit into that red dress. Ellen Burstyn’s wall-rattling performance in Darren Aronofsky’s shocking drama reminds us that being a drug fiend doesn’t necessarily mean breaking the law. Or involve any kind of fun. With his trademark hammer-to-the-head subtlety, Aronofsky makes the point that pharmaceutical substances can be just as addictive and dangerous as any narcotic.
That includes diet pills, the drug of choice for Burstyn’s Sara Goldfarb, who is determined to slim down through chemical assistance rather than good old fashioned diet and exercise. There’s an aching sadness and desperation in Burstyn’s performance that grabs your heart and squeezes it. We want the best for Sara, but, once she builds up a tolerance to her pills and receives a higher dosage from her blasé doctor, things go very badly very quickly.
Dave O’Brien and Lillian Miles in Reefer Madness (1938)
They just really, really wanted to star in an insanely awful propaganda film created by wowsers attempting to convince youth that one toke of a joint will send them hurtling down an irreversible path resulting in heinous crimes, prison and insanity. This is the Know Your Dope Fiend scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, dramatised into a legendarily bad production, justly regarded as one of the worst movies ever made.
Ralph (Dave O’Brien) and Blanche (Lillian Miles) are drug-dealers, dope fiends and (as we learn in one very famous scene) fans of fast-paced piano music. The shrilly melodramatic plot engulfing them involves bad hallucinations, accidental death, murder, insanity and various forms of trauma. Not the greatest night out.
