PHOTO: COLUMBIA PICTURES
Oh dear God another three hour long Quentin Tarantino movie is upon us–a film simultaneously so languid and so filled to bursting with Tarantino’s ticks, mannerisms and periodic greatness it’s both a chore and a delight to witness.
About that greatness: it has been wildly overpraised, including by me back in the day. With their cartoony Scorsese-meets-Bugs Bunny violence, temporally unstuck narratives, and operatic blizzards of comedy noir dialogue, the early Tarantino movies (RESERVOIR DOGS, PULP FICTION and TRUE ROMANCE) were stylistically so out of sync with mainstream American cinema they seemed revolutionary in their moment.
Imbued with a spirit of grindhouse traditions the Hollywood action factories forgot existed, his more florid middle period–KILL BILL through DJANGO UNCHAINED–gave him the resources to emulate and exceed the chop-socky, ozploitation and spaghetti western movies inspiring him, and his visual craft expanded to meet the challenge. His ugliest film–THE HATEFUL EIGHT–is a remake of RESERVOIR DOGS in all but name. There’s a dark parable about racial apocalypse embedded in its bowels, but in so garbled a form it isn’t worth swimming in all the grue and sadism to retrieve it.
But how you say something and what you’re saying are two different things, and despite the reference-driven originality of his technique, Tarantino has been loudly telling us what a reactionary he is for years. He’s on record saying revenge is the only suitable topic for a movie–an infantile notion, and one he probably gleaned from the primal grindhouse classics he’s so desperately fond of. And how exactly does that idea distinguish his ouevre from the collected works of Jean-Claude Van Damme? At the same time, homage is necessarily backward looking, and homage is so entrenched in Tarantino’s psyche he’s begun to pay homage to himself.
In ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD, Tarantino has another go at the dream factory, and as always in a Tarantino movie (even the ones with female leads), it’s a world that dreams men. In this case they’re a panicky and fading star of TV Westerns named Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his laconic stunt double and dogsbody Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt).
Tarantino has indicated this relationship was based on the partnership of Burt Reynolds and stuntman Hal Needham, but it’s hard to see how. Reynolds used his stardom to turn Needham into the A-list director of CANNONBALL RUN. Cliff is essentially Rick’s gofer by the time we meet him, though we do get a flashback where Cliff kicks an eerily exacting replicant version of Bruce Lee’s butt.
Dalton’s moment of glory came on a TV show called BOUNTY LAW about ten years ago (the 1958-1961 Steve McQueen series WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE appears to be the touchstone), but thanks to alcoholism and uncertainty he’s been reduced to playing heavies on shows grooming younger stars. He’s a man out of time, a fact emphasized by the arrival of his new neighbors: a rising starlet and her European husband, whom Dalton recognizes as the “hottest young director in town.”
That director’s name is Roman Polanski, and his wife is Sharon Tate, because this is 1968 and Rick lives on Cielo Drive, where Charlie Manson’s first massacre is about to take place. With typical audacity, Tarantino has chosen one of the most sensationalized sprees in criminal history as backdrop for his most elegiac movie–a loving look back at a moment in the history of both cinema and masculine identity, just before both were changed irrevocably by a tectonic social and aesthetic apocalypse.
Except… that apocalypse never really happened did it? Mainstream movies are still entirely dominated by masculine imperatives, even if they’re no longer dominated by Westerns. And if there was a meaningful cultural revolution in 1968, the hippies lost it–bigtime.
Manson, who we would probably label today with the enraging euphemism “white nationalist,” was a racist intent on seizing political power by stoking racial tensions–a technique that has positively gone mainstream in 2019, even if the tactics utilized differ somewhat from Manson’s hideous atrocities. His cult had the trappings of hippiedom (the sex, the drugs, the clothes) but little of the ideology, and his made for TV villainy was a useful cudgel to beat the flower power generation over the head with when the time came to bludgeon to bits the hippie dream.
Tarantino probably doesn’t realize just what a John Wayne fever dream of a movie he’s created by pitting iconic cowboys against zombie-like hippies, and he maybe thinks his fetishistic resurrection of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) as a goddess of flower power positivity gives the hippie argument a fair hearing. That could be true schematically, but perhaps out of an understandable sympathy for so legendarily innocent a victim, Tarantino has chosen to depict Tate the way Jesus used to be shown in silent films–as a benign ghost who cannot be allowed to carry a scene, on pain of heresy. He has nothing interesting to say about the Manson cult, and he seems to have based his vision of it on the sub-genre of 70s and 80s exploitation pictures devoted to Manson-eque killers as hypnotized robots–a genre prolific enough that Sam Raimi once played the Manson manque in a potboiler called STRYKER’S WAR.
Women remain a problem for Quentin the dramatist. He’s just not that interested in them, except as objects (and he still really likes their feet, especially those of Robbie and Margaret Qualley). In a particularly ugly touch, there’s a rumor Cliff may have murdered his own wife with a spear gun–the flashback is inconclusive, but long enough to depict the woman as a cartoon shrew who in the film’s logic probably deserved it.
Sharon Tate barely has any dialogue, a fact Tarantino was notoriously defensive about in his press conference at Cannes. We are also literally halfway through this very long movie before Tarantino gives us a scene featuring Tate that doesn’t revolve around her shimmying to the beat of his hamfisted soundtrack of 60s hits (he actually goes to a cover version of the Rolling Stones’ “Out of Time” when depicting Tate dining with friends on the eve of the Manson atrocities).
There is one touching bit with Tate watching herself from the audience of a Westwood moviehouse as she plays opposite Dean Martin in the Matt Helm spy spoof THE WRECKING CREW. But it’s a passive scene, for all its grindhouse lyricism, and it doesn’t let us know Tate as a character. Like Tarantino, she’s a voyeur of her own iconic beauty.
Tate is in a sense Quentin’s ideal female: frozen by tragedy into a procession of images, her plateau in the collective unconscious hemisphered by a studio publicity shot on one end and an autopsy photo on the other. As a flesh and blood woman, she never once comes alive for him.
A child actress named Trudi Fraser (Julia Butters) befriends Dalton on set, and Tarantino has had the shamelessness to claim she’s based on Meryl Streep. Trudi is eight years old and a proselytizing feminist who will only allow you to call her by her character name, which is presented as a form of artistic seriousness. She’s meant to be a harbinger of the forces sweeping the self-pitying masculinity of Dalton and Booth off the scene, but she plays like a mockery of the #MeToo movement as something infantile and powerless, and when Dalton improvises a moment of abuse while playing opposite her, he’s praised for it, even by Trudi herself.
I’ve spent all this time grappling with the meanings behind the shadow show because you can bet your life the manically self-curating Tarantino did when he created it. But that’s all subtext, and the primary text–at least until ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD reaches an “audacious” counterfactual climax I for one predicted on the day the premise of the movie was announced–has a lot to recommend it.
This movie is at its best when it’s a kind of Tinseltown RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY about useless men–a small scale tragedy about people rather than social forces in collision. DiCaprio is superb as Dalton, his own fertile energy subsumed utterly into the imperatives of a lost man of limited capacity who manages an occasional taste of something larger. He has layered Dalton with detail and subtlety–how many people will get through this entire movie without noticing Dalton’s a stutterer?–and he’s a capable performer of mediocrity, which makes Dalton’s momentary connection to the font of bigger things something glorious (in a wry touch, Dalton is under the direction of Sam Wannamaker, an actor/director who both made 60s TV Westerns and also almost singlehandedly re-established Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London).
Pitt’s the closest thing the movie has to the Western genre’s heroic “man of few words.” His task is trickier because he’s working with a limited palette, but he rises to it effortlessly. In a scene at the Manson compound (deliciously and as in life, an abandoned old Western set called Spahn Ranch) where Cliff starts to suspect something amiss, Pitt manages to carry a quarter of an hour of screen time on charisma alone, while the Manson zombies congregate and babble like something out of A Film By George Romero.
A failed actor himself, Tarantino still has a deep empathy for the losers and the dreamers in the medium he was ultimately such a runaway success at. When he inhabits that empathy, rather than the juvenile fantasies of giddy vindictive violence populating ONCE UPON A TIME…’s final half hour, he is capable of true nobility and real grace. Too bad he still wants us all to leave the theatre humming the blood-spattered scenery. At the end of the day, how much space does an artist deserve to criticize even the palpably heinous violence of others when his own art is so bound up in the idea that there is such a thing as a good atrocity?