Tarantino’s Hollywood

          As usual, the praise and prizes pour in for Quentin Tarantino’s new movie,  Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with most of the commenters describing it with the recurring term, “epic.”  If one strictly applies the word to the length of a work, then the movie certainly earns it—Once Upon a Time runs for almost three hours, not an uncommon length for a Tarantino film.  Probably the most overrated filmmaker around—though there is a lot of competition for that spot—he positively drools over excess, which somehow thrills the reviewers, and might explain the overused adjective; in his work, including the present one, epic too often simply means bloated.

          The movie’s once upon a time is 1969, a pivotal year for a number of reasons, ending a tumultuous decade and because of the notorious murders committed by the Manson family, which the director confronts and which in a sense end a particular era for Hollywood itself.  One of its stunning achievements is the director’s reproduction of that period and its setting in Southern California, which has rarely looked so attractive in a film and makes you wish you lived there.  Hollywood characters naturally populate the film: Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, an alcoholic TV star on the decline; Brad Pitt plays Cliff Booth, Dalton’s stunt double, best friend, chauffeur-gofer; Margot Robbie plays the doomed actress Sharon Tate.  Crowded with famous faces in smaller roles, the picture also exploits the presence of people like Al Pacino, Bruce Dern, and Kurt Russell, along with less well known performers impersonating some now departed actors.  Rafael Zawierucha plays Roman Polanski, for example, and Mike Moh does a turn as Bruce Lee in a fight scene with Cliff Booth.  (Damian Lewis, who plays Steve McQueen in a brief scene, incidentally, looks amazingly like the star). 

          The movie proceeds episodically, showing scenes and sequences from Rick Dalton’s career, both past and present, mingling the various moments in time.  Throughout the action it provides a kind of history of the popular culture of the late 1960s, with familiar titles on movie theater marquees, snippets of old black and white television shows, even a clever recreation of a scene from The Great Escape where Rick Dalton auditions for the Steve McQueen role, repeating the exact words and movements from the original.  The clothes, the cars, especially Rick Dalton’s immense Cadillac, a great yellow battleship of a car, and in contrast, Roman Polanski’s classic MG, recall a time when automotive styling achieved some distinctive and attractive shapes and looks.

          As usual, Tarantino includes overextended, sometimes quite unnecessary sequences, apparently to exploit the star power of his cast.  In one barely relevant moment Brad Pitt climbs up on the roof of Rick Dalton’s house to repair a TV antenna (remember them?), mostly so he can take off his shirt and display his trim, buff torso to the females in the audience.  Demonstrating a weakness in the narrative, he employs a voiceover by Kurt Russell to provide information about a series of spaghetti Westerns that Dalton, following in the footsteps of Clint Eastwood, makes in Italy to resurrect his career; the voiceover papers over an apparent need to abbreviate yet another long episode.

           In a long sequence Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, goes to a theater showing The Wrecking Crew so she can see herself in the movie as a member of the audience; for several long minutes the camera shows her repeatedly reacting and overacting with glee, looking around, virtually mugging to signify giddy enjoyment.  In one clever twist in an otherwise silly piece of film she watches actual scenes from the picture with Sharon Tate so that the woman playing the actress responds to the person she impersonates.

          With the invasion of the Manson family, whose members appear and reappear throughout the action in usually casual but increasingly ominous ways, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood reaches its perhaps logical climax, which the people and plot have been inexorably approaching throughout the movie.  The director, however, changes history by reimagining the crime, providing an alternative ending to the shocking event that in a sense ended the decade.  As a result, the movie concludes with a final sequence that begins in violence and ends in wishful thinking, perhaps appropriate for both Hollywood and Hollywood.