once upon a time in hollywood (2019)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood finds Tarantino at simultaneously his most mature and his least focused. As a film, the narrative weaves itself around our characters, they do not weave their way through a plot, and it is the film’s strength to be structured this way. The film’s weakness, and ultimate undoing, is its mix of lore and legend with verbatim historical record, its entwined imaginative flourishes and its adherence to reality. Where the film works beautifully, and it frequently does, is in meshing 1960’s Hollywood western actors (or stunt men) into their own version of the west; a west where hippie outlaws trip and zone out to the same TV shows our heroes spend their days making, dreaming anarchic dreams of the end of a society they can’t assimilate with. The old school Rick Dalton is an alcoholic, the new school Sharon Tate smokes weed, the hippies drop acid and the whole place seems to emanate its cowboy roots as macho men rip down the boulevards and freeways in their Cadillacs, just as jaded by their sense of malaise as their younger hippie counterparts, but willing to defend the values of the established order when push comes to shove. The cowboy’s role in any Hollywood western is just that, he brings with him the traditional, established values that transform the wild west and bulldozes vigilantes who threaten the balance and civility in a land he fought to tame. Now, in Tarantino’s legend of the west of 1969, not 1869, those same varmints are the Manson family and the sheriff is a washed-up movie stunt man. This is where the film begins to spin its yarn and where it ultimately entangles itself to the point where it loses its way. With the first 2 hours or so, Tarantino lets the narrative drive where it wants to go and with great results; with act 3 he attempts to wrangle us back to the story he expects we want to see, but only due to our familiarity with the reality of the world the plot takes place in.
After a nod and wink (a sound bite plays, “and now the moment you’ve all been waiting for”) he takes us where he assumes we want to go, but writes himself into a corner. It’s the Manson murders, we don’t really want to go there. What’s a filmmaker to do? Give the people what they DO want, of course, and yet when we finally get our gratification, it leaves us wondering why we took this trip in the first place. There’s a lingering sense of dread in the air all around the light events of the film’s first 2 acts, Tarantino does well to capture the spirit of the times. The film has more than its share of cutaways to 60’s-themed pop culture clips of DiCaprio starring in WW2 flicks, westerns, even a variety show; the music immersing us in the soundtrack is all period-accurate, yet never serves as more than window-dressing. The atmosphere is shockingly effective, however, as the spirit of the times is evoked with nearly every sequence. Cigarettes and cars, cocktails and cowboys. The sequences take their time, the film is in no rush to get anywhere and much to its credit. We take long and luxurious tangential scenes like Pitt’s brawl with Bruce Lee, and plenty of moments of deep introspection from our leads. Amongst it all is the thrill of Hollywood and the movies. Margot Robie’s Sharon Tate goes to a movie house and puts her (surprise) feet up. She laughs at her own performance, she feels the warmth of the applause. It’s a genuine film about the genuine love of filmmaking, the glory and elation of our successes, the self-hatred resulting from our failures. It feels good to be on the ascent, taking off, and the pain of the comedown, a one-way ticket to palooka-ville, our new life as a has-been instead of a hero. DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton meets an eight year old with all the discipline and devotion to craft he’s lost, and winning her admiration is one of the film’s best moments. However, in the peripherals, struggling to come to the forefront, is the sub-plot that slowly reveals itself as the actual plot: Tate, Polanski and Manson. And yet, it’s not. As the film quickly shifts gears in the last act, speeding itself along with voiceover narration courtesy of Kurt Russel, we rocket toward the inevitable final sequence. It’s not an exciting conclusion to a film that’s been mostly comedic, it’s a morbid murder of a pregnant woman who’s become the film’s portrait of pure innocence and starry-eyed dreams come true. Tarantino’s solution to his problem not only bizarrely gratifies the audience, but begs the question, why bother with the Manson plot in the first place? There’s an axe grinding through Tarantino’s grindhouse and it only really made itself known during his car chase horror Death Proof, solidified during Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained and now is undeniable with Once upon a Time in Hollywood’s face-slamming conclusion: Tarantino is damned determined to ensure that his audience learns to love bloody movie violence, by any means necessary. What sets this film apart is how unrelated its fits of blood-splattering are to the film overall. From serial killers, to Nazis, to slave-owning white southerners, Tarantino searches high and low for the American psyche’s hate buttons, villians so vile that we are not only allowed to hate them, we are encouraged, we are applauded for our hate, and we’ll applaud anyone who grants us the catharsis of watching these boogey-men brutally killed onscreen, in as lengthy a scene as possible, luxuriate the lens on the carnage. It is this element and this element alone that hampers his strongest efforts, deflates his best dirigibles and sinks his most potent scripts.
This preoccupation with movie violence is rampant in his best efforts (like Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill), but what his villains did for us previously, like Bill or Bud or O-Ren Ishi’i, was to show us well-written, three-dimensional warriors who died within their code of honor in one way or another (or surprise snake bites). The Hateful Eight showed a bunch of unscrupulous outlaws taking each other out in a bid for survival; Once Upon a Time in Hollywood shows us a bunch of insufferable, cowardly hippies destroyed for the would-be amusement of a righteous audience thirsty for blood and justice. Manson and his cronies killed, so the story goes, because they believed a revolution was coming and all these rich celebrities were on the wrong side of history, These killings were committed because they were convinced they were killing “pigs”, but Tarantino rips them limb from limb in just as gruesome a fashion as he blew away Hitler ten years ago. The aim is to give us a villain we feel justified in applauding as they are exterminated in ever-more degrading fashion, the more subhuman the better. The film ultimately succeeds as the spinning of a Hollywood legend that Tarantino seeks, it ultimately becomes the epic he intended, but the mixture of fact and fiction detracts too heavily from the cinematic heights of the rest of the film. In the film’s best scene Pitt finds himself on Spahn Ranch, a dusty movie ghost town inhabited by the teenage terrorists of the Manson family, it’s a modern western and it works perfectly. Leaning into this blend of men who act like cowboys becoming the real deal was a strong direction to take the film in, but the brilliant fiction is distracted by the dark reality, and when we flip the script for our Hollywood ending, it winds up deflating.
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