Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Golden-Hued Comic Drama | 161 Minutes | 2019 | United States
(3/4)
Director: Quentin Tarantino | Producers: David Heyman, Shannon McIntosh, Quentin Tarantino | Writer: Quentin Tarantino | Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Julia Butters, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Al Pacino | Narrator: Kurt Russell | Cinematography: Robert Richardson | Editor: Fred Raskin
In February 1969 in Hollywood, fading television star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) frequents familiar bars and gets ferried around by his old stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Booth lives in a trailer with his pit bull Brandy, in an empty lot behind the drive-in in Van Nuys, but Dalton keeps up appearances with a luxury home in Beverly Crest overlooking Beverly Hills. The actress Sharon Tate and her husband, the director Roman Polanski, have just moved in next door, and through its blending of fact and fiction, its admixture of real people and composites, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood plays with alternative histories: what of the spectre of Cliff Booth’s wife, who he is rumoured to have killed, the movie suggests in a boating incident; what if Rick Dalton’s career, rooted in the television Western Bounty Law, had taken a sharper turn; might an encounter with his new neighbours prove the path to movie stardom; what if the Manson Family murderers had stopped off one door down?
Rick Dalton, Cliff Booth, and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) are all feeling fragile. Dalton meets with an agent who suggests Spaghetti Westerns, but he fears that his career is over and he’s increasingly turning to drink. Tate gyrates between parties at the Playboy Mansion, a full house, and her reputation as the beautiful half of Hollywood’s freshest couple, but when she finds time to pause she worries about audience acceptance and her capacity to act. Booth is more cocksure and settled – he realises that his stint as a stunt double is all but over and done – but the routines and responsibilities of life alongside Rick and Brandy leave him acting recklessly in the downtime, chasing some sort of thrill.
What we really get in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is three snapshots, three epiphanies, quiet character studies which stretch at the fabric of time. Dalton’s comes when he’s cast as the tough in the pilot of a new Western series, Lancer. He strikes up a relationship with a precocious child actress, Trudi Fraser (Julia Butters), who he will have to hold hostage in his role as the villain. On set he struggles with his dialogue, back in his trailer he almost breaks down, raging at his drunkenness and laying bare all of his flaws, but he pulls himself together and in the climactic hostage scene, he delivers with aplomb, bringing lavish praise from both Trudi and the director. It’s as if he’s settled old scores and proven something to himself: he heads off for a sojourn in Italy, but he’s okay with whatever comes.
Tate poses for a photograph to get free access to the Bruin Theatre, where she watches herself in the Dean Martin vehicle The Wrecking Crew. From the side of the theatre she watches intently and gauges the reaction of the audience, finding enough solace in their laughter to sustain her sunny disposition. Cliff Booth’s mini odyssey feels like the core of the film. Between Burbank and the strip he keeps bumping into a fraying young hippie, the alluring ‘Pussycat’ (Margaret Qualley) who pops her eyes and lolls her tongue. Eventually he follows her out to one of his old stomping grounds, Spahn Ranch, where he and Dalton used to film Bounty Law. Pussycat stays there now with her fellow hippies and hangers-on: it’s the Manson Family gathering, and the man himself is absent, but Cliff pushes through the detritus to make sure they’re not exploiting George Spahn. It turns out that the old man – blind and grumpy but at least sexually fulfilled – isn’t in want of saving, and he cannot remember Cliff whether by voice or name. So Cliff’s right of passage is strangely forestalled.
Much of the critical controversy around Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has already beset the film’s ending, a characteristically prolonged sequence of violent excess, chaos and gore. If it subverts history it meets modern expectations: here the violence is almost beatific while tending towards the slapstick. When I watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at the cinema, the audience hooted and hollered and laughed. Was this the logical or visceral conclusion of what we’d seen over the previous two-and-a-bit hours, or was it simply the payoff the audience expected from Tarantino – perhaps the only director other than Christopher Nolan embraced by the mainstream as a cinematic auteur – after enduring an already overlong film? If we can laugh while watching the blood spatter, was it all worth it? Is tonight the night for an acid-dipped cigarette?
Otherwise Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feels imbued with a thematic richness which flickers out at the edge of the screen. The film surely impresses itself upon you less the less you know about the Manson Family and Sharon Tate. Recent films like The Nice Guys and Inherent Vice have managed to better conjure both buddy dynamics and a woozily intoxicating period atmosphere; when it comes to the depiction of the Manson Family, something like Spring Breakers better captured the frisson of the languid pack. Tarantino does at least nail the setting: this vision of 1969, Hollywood, the fidelity and congruence of everything from strip fronts to restaurant interiors, Cielo Drive to movie sets and even fictional brands of dog food, feels flawless even if the film’s abundant references are sometimes too on the nose.
DiCaprio and Pitt make the most of their time apart, but together their chemistry finds the right contour for the relationship between Rick and Cliff, where professional imbalances and the routines of their friendship prevent them from embracing the stakes. Robbie gives a subtle performance as Tate, whose presence is pointedly ephemeral. Qualley, Butters, and Timothy Olyphant, who plays one of the stars of Lancer, provide full-bodied portrayals, and together with Al Pacino who hams it up as Hollywood agent Marvin Schwarz, they really flesh out the script. There are passable resemblances of Charles Manson and Bruce Lee, less so of Steve McQueen and Polanski, but some of this stuff is unnecessary: Booth’s Hollywood-lot brawl with Lee in particular is gratuitous comedy. In fact Once Upon a Time in Hollywood could do without its flashbacks, cinematic or otherwise, which stretch the length and provide spurious variety but slip us out of the casual ambiance.
In the end we enjoy lingering in the world of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but long for more of a taste. The film doesn’t really work as an elegy to old Hollywood because by the end of the 1960s, the studio system was dead and Hollywood pictures themselves were in a period of transition that was already well underway: emphasised by a string of psychedelic comedies, revisionist Westerns and urban escapades, and a new wave in auteur filmmaking with Roman Polanski briefly at its head. At the same time Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is too Hollywood-centric to serve as an elegy for the late-sixties counterculture. We’re not witnessing or extolling the end of anything here, but fingering the embers as they slip through our hands.
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