Review: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

After walking out of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood a few months ago, I knew I needed to let the film simmer and eventually see it again to get a proper sense of where my thoughts on the film lay. While a well-acted and well made piece of Tarantino’s appreciation for the Golden Age of Hollywood I found that the narrative was lacking, not bad but flimsier than I expected. Having seen it again, knowing the overall arc of the full movie I’m feeling a little better on the whole thing, still not 100% but definitely seeing it in a stronger light.

It is February 1969, and Hollywood actor Rick Dalton – former star of hit TV show Bounty Law – has come to the horrifying realisation that he’s a has-been, fuelled by insecurity and alcoholism he tries to hold onto the little career he has by taking a villain role on the pilot for new show Lancer and realises that he might not be as bad as he thinks he is.

Rick’s best friend and stunt double Cliff Booth – a war veteran suspected of killing his wife – has little work to do thanks to Rick’s fading career and the fact that he pissed off an important stunt co-ordinator on The Green Hornet for kicking Bruce Lee’s ass, so he spends his days house-sitting at Rick’s and driving around Hollywood. It’s during these drives that Cliff has several meetings with hippie-girl ‘Pussycat’, part of a group living at an old farm ranch turned movie set, owned by the old and blind George Spahn, setting off Cliff’s suspicions about how they’re all allowed to stay there.

And actress Sharon Tate is enjoying her new married life in L.A. going to parties at the Playboy mansion, watching her movies with an audience and having a good time in the sun. But amongst the fun she remains unaware that her house is being scouted out by the leader of the ranch group, a man called Charles Manson.

While I still think that overall the film’s story isn’t the strongest, most of it seems to be small scenes with little connective tissue, I can see that Tarantino is using Rick and Cliff to examine this era of Hollywood and of L.A., through Rick we see the last embers of a movie career being reignited by the rise of villainous roles and through Cliff we see the final days of the hippy movement as the world unknowingly prepares for the rise of real life villains in the form of The Manson Family.

Now despite that, the Manson Family don’t factor too heavily into the film, in fact Charles Manson only has one scene in the whole film, but their inclusion is important because the death of Sharon Tate is seen as the death of the Free Love era, changing the social climate and indeed changing Hollywood. Tarantino centring the film around not only this time period, but this particular moment of this time period allows him to showcase the final moments of an era and reminisce on what use to be. Looking back my only complaint is that there’s a time jump about 2 hours in and it feels like an iffy move, missing out on great chunks of time but the pay-off for the finale with Tarantino’s tried and true blend of history and ultra-violence is worth it.

The film’s cast is immense but the majority of people have only one or two scenes, stand outs among them are Mike Moh as Bruce Lee, giving an oddly asshole performance that feels out of place for Bruce’s character. Margaret Qualley’s role as Pussycat starts off as flirtatious and adventurous but once you start piecing together her connections to the Manson Family she loses a lot of her appeal. And child star Julia Butters as Rick’s co-star on Lancer shows up as easily the most mature person in the entire film and gives Rick some strong advice for his acting.

I’ve seen some reviewers complain about Margot Robbie’s role as Sharon Tate but seeing the film as a whole I understand her a little better. Aside from the historical significance, Sharon is this bright ray of happiness, she’s friendly, charming, excitable, just a genuinely good person who the film sadly reminds us is most famous for being murdered instead of her job as an actress. It’s a simple role but Tarantino uses this film to give Sharon Tate the remembrance she deserves and Robbie’s sunny disposition does her justice.

At the film’s heart though is the relationship between two men and their relationship with the world around them, Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton plays almost the exact opposite to his turn in Django Unchained, playing Rick as a guy who’s constantly questioning himself, too afraid to save his career but too stubborn to follow his agent’s advice and do some Spaghetti Westerns to make some bank. What’s clear is that Rick is his own worst enemy, between his tendency to over-drink and his possibly undiagnosed bipolar disorder there is an actor who wants to do good and can do good as evidence by his supporting role on Lancer but he’s too at war with himself to recognise that. DiCaprio manages to toe a thin line between humorous and sympathetic, never making Rick too much of a sad-sack that he’s seen as pathetic but not overdoing his freakouts so that he’s a joke, there are moments where Rick is allowed to relax and be comfortable, usually when he’s with Cliff, and it humanises him, even without being an actor the drive to better yourself is something you can recognise and DiCaprio sells it well.

MVP of the film has to go to Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth though, I’ve said before that Pitt is at his best when playing characters on the knife’s edge of sanity, but Cliff proves that Brad Pitt can do great things just by being Brad Pitt. Booth is laid-back, relaxed, simple man with a simple life and he’s more than happy to live it, he takes Hollywood in its stride, he makes no deal of the rumours he killed his wife, he doesn’t fight the fact that nobody will hire him because he pissed off the wrong people, he doesn’t even bat an eye-lid at the hippie commune at Spahn ranch because so long as his old friend George is fine it’s not his problem. But none of that is to say he’s a pushover, far from it, where Rick is a nervous wreck because he doesn’t know how good he is, Cliff takes it easy BECAUSE he knows how good he is and when it comes to knocking folks on their ass he’s really fucking good. Pitt has that quiet storm about him, you think nothing of Cliff until he’s pummelling some poor bastard into the ground, and it’s kinda awesome to watch, this is a role that could only really be played by Pitt, effortlessly cool but immensely bad-ass and always a joy to watch onscreen.

When it comes to directing I can’t tell if this is the most Tarantino film ever made or one of the least, one the one hand his trademarks are there, killer soundtrack, ultra-violence, reference to old cinema but they’re not as prevalent as before, the soundtrack is there with some great songs on there but it never feels like it takes over a scene the way that Stuck In The Middle With You or You Never Can Tell or even the surprise shootout rap Unchained from Django does and the ultra-violence is basically limited to the final 20 minutes (though what a 20 minutes they are).

The cinema reference you can argue are actually more on show than ever because these characters are actually living in old Hollywood so there’s no need for them to reference their own lives, and I’d say that works because Tarantino utilises cut-and-paste technology to put Rick Dalton into real-life old movies, in one scene he replaces Steve McQueen for an audition in The Great Escape and in another he replaces Burt Reynolds for an episode of F.B.I., firmly planting these fictional characters within our real world. Interestingly though, for the scene where Sharon Tate goes to watch her movie The Wrecking Crew Tarantino doesn’t replace the real Tate with Robbie, instead leaving the movie as is, possibly because Tate is a real person and didn’t need replacing but more likely given her role in the rest of the film, this was Tarantino’s homage to the real Sharon Tate, letting her reintroduce herself to a whole new generation who sadly only know her for her murder.

I think overall this is the most meta Tarantino has been with a large part of the film dedicated to Rick trying to salvage her career on Lancer, there’s a very Inside Hollywood style to this film, it’s good but maybe a little too slow-paced, Rick’s arrival signals meetings with Make-Up, practising his lines, preparation, then actually getting to filming and forgetting his lines and getting more and more frustrated with himself. Realistically this is something that only someone like Tarantino can pull off, using an appreciation for the filming techniques of old to bring 1969 Hollywood into 2019 reality. By contrast, Cliff facing off against a then-unknown Manson Family and not giving a shit is the perfect Fuck You that Tarantino can give to those shit-stains. I said earlier that the use of The Manson Family was more symbolic to the death of the Free Love movement than to the actions of the plot and I stand by that but having Cliff be the one to come into contact with them is a stroke of genius because in those final 20 minutes where things gets insanely violent, Tarantino pulls something similar to what he did in Inglorious Bastards, turning a real life tragedy into one of the most shockingly funny moments of the year, the dog food can alone had me buckled.

Having gotten my thoughts out for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood I am feeling slightly better about it, I still think that it’s a little too slow for it’s own good and the story a little too flimsy by going for an appreciation of old Hollywood instead of a stronger narrative. But it’s still a very good film, the thematic approach of dying Hollywood contrasted against the dying career of Rick Dalton has a lot going for it, DiCaprio and Pitt do fantastic work both as a pair and separately, DiCaprio making Rick nervously hilarious and Pitt just having a grand old fucking time as Cliff and Tarantino crafts a feature that highlights a period of time for cinema, and for the world, that we lost at its height and uses this modern world to take it back for just a little while.

8/10