I am no fan of Quentin Tarantino, having dubbed him "the Mantovani of mayhem" and endured the reactions of an outraged comments section that in turn dismissed me as a squaresville snob out of touch with flyover country (of which Mr Tarantino would seem an unlikely avatar). Still I do my best: My boys wanted to see The Hateful Eight, so I dutifully tagged along and fell asleep for a good forty minutes of its three-hour length. And in the four years since I have never felt the least inclined to see what I missed.
To be honest, I also dozed off during the similarly prolix Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. But this time I was interested to see what I'd missed, and, finding it on offer in my hotel room some weeks later, I clicked play and settled back. The film was released during Kathy Shaidle's summer sojourn as our Saturday-night movie queen, and so I thought I'd put in a belated word for it now. Unlike The Hateful Eight, on this picture Tarantino is not in his Mantovani-of-mayhem mode: There is none of his exquisitely choreographed violence until the final quarter-hour, by which point it is both cathartic and a jest on posterity. If his career has to date been a sustained double-act between blood-soaked carnage and pop-culture nostalgia, this is the picture in which, despite the title's hommage to Sergio Leone, the Dean Martin of nostalgia ditches the Jerry Lewis of carnage and goes solo.
Once Upon a Time... is set in Hollywood in 1969, the year a heavily pregnant Sharon Tate and four others were murdered by the Manson Family. But it's not really "about" her so much as her Cielo Drive neighbor, the fictional actor Rick Dalton. Once upon a time Dalton was the star of the hit horse opera "Bounty Law", but the TV series ended and what he calls his "rinky-dink movie career" never quite took off, though he enjoyed incinerating a bunch of Nazi generals and the studio let him keep the flamethrower. So now he lives off villain-of-the-week guest appearances, a fading star of a former hit getting beaten up by the rising stars of current hits, week after week after week. You can rarely identify the precise moment that your future passed, but you certainly know when it has, in a town that drops stars as casually as Charlie's acolytes drop acid. In Rick Dalton's case, New Hollywood - as in Roman Polanski, "the director of Rosemary's f**king Baby" - has literally moved in next door. Which means Rick is either "one pool party away from starring in a Polanski movie" - or just another schlub watching the director and his starlet getting chauffeured to the Oscars while he grabs a six-pack and catches it on TV.
In a film that's as much about doubles as Strangers on a Train, Rick's closest relationship is with his stuntman, Cliff Booth. If it's tough being a fading star, it's worse being a fading star's stunt double: the studio work has dried up, and Cliff is making ends meet by working as Rick's general factotum - shuttling his DWI-ed boss from guest shot to guest shot, fixing his antenna when it's on the fritz, drinking with him when no-one else will - and then driving home to a pitbull in a trailer next door to the Van Nuys drive-in theatre playing (as the director discloses in the course of a wonderfully adroit crane shot) Lady in Cement starring "Frank Sinatra. Racquel Welch." It is, in fact, Raquel Welch, but this is Tarantino, so the misspelling is of course intentional.
Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth are respectively Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, two actors of rare talent playing a couple of journeymen. They do it very well, as few others could: plot-wise, it is a lethargic and enervated tale, and few A-listers could conjure a D-lister with a Z-lister sidekick and forebear to condescend. Pitt ambles laconically through the picture, amiable, unambitious, semi-detached, good-humored. DiCaprio plays a man of limited skills sufficiently insecure that, after a long off-set conversation with a precocious eight-year-old method actress (Julia Button), he turns in a performance of such raw grittiness it stuns both her and him. More typical of his performance level is the clip of Rick singing "Green Door" on "Hullabaloo", a mid-Sixties variety show forgotten by everyone except Tarantino. He knows this stuff better than anyone: As Cliff potters about his trailer, Robert Goulet is on TV singing "MacArthur Park". "MacArthur Park" is an easy joke, and so is Robert Goulet, but putting them together demonstrates a lethal precision.
Sharon Tate, meanwhile, is also shadowing her double. She goes to a movie theatre playing Dean Martin's latest Matt Helm caper The Wrecking Crew and asks if you can see the film for free if you're in it. The box-office clerk has no idea who she is, so she explains she plays "the klutz" - and then sits back and watches the audience laughing it up at her pratfalls and shadow-boxes along with (the real) Sharon Tate in her big fight scene. Margot Robbie doesn't get a lot of lines in this role, and indeed "Sharon Tate" functions less as a character than as an idea - of a certain kind of harmless sweet-natured mini-celebrity.
Tarantino is positing the Manson Family's intrusion on Cielo Drive as a hinge moment in cultural history. Certainly something changed round about that precise date: Old Hollywood got bigger and fewer and eventually imploded - Hello, Dolly!... Doctor Dolittle... Star!... And suddenly it was Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy... The über-woke critics have decided Tarantino is arguing that the Golden Age studio system was preferable to what followed, and have extended the thought to excoriate him for wanting to go back to an era when Hollywood was a town for rugged white men who always got the girl. But that's almost too idiotic even for film criticism. For a start, this isn't any kind of Golden Age: this is Dino in The Wrecking Crew and Frank in Lady in Cement and Rick Dalton in "Bounty Crew"; the fag-end, if that, of Old Hollywood, as Tarantino well knows - as much as Joseph Roth's characters in Radetzky March (which I mention here) understand they're living in the twilight of the Habsburgs.
But the director is making a more basic point - not about the pop culture, but the broader culture; about the kind of society that sustains that kind of culture versus whatever it is we are now. Just as New Hollywood moves next door to Old on Cielo Drive, so Old Hollywood virtues are pitted against New when stuntman Cliff picks up a hippie chick and gives her a ride back to the Manson commune on the old Spahn ranch. Cliff used to shoot TV shows out there, and all these psychedelic types hanging around don't seem quite right to him. He knew George Spahn in the old days, and demands to know where he is now. And so a scene set on a set for westerns plays out like a western - an old-school dusty it's-quiet-out-there-too-quiet showdown between a washed-up stuntman and the shock troops of the new counterculture.
The counterculture became the culture - to the point that there's now no culture for a counterculture to counter. Tarantino, a man who can get more mileage out of an old Robert Goulet clip than poor old Goulet ever could, surely knows we've cannibalized everything and left nothing. He likes nothing better than to shoot, quite beautifully, his stars in cars listening to classic pop on the radio. Is there any simpler pleasure? Any more basic aide nostalgie than letting the hippie chick slide a little closer on the bench seat and cranking up KHJ?
Yet Tarantino programs not the Mamas and Papas' "California Dreamin'" but José Feliciano's version, darker and broodier and foreshadowing today's Los Angeles, where "all the leaves are brown and the sky is grey", and even that simplest pleasure of car rides with pop songs is denied, because the town's filthy and disease stalks the tent cities and it takes you three hours to get anywhere The pop paeans have outlived their subject.
The master picks his radio hits well:
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind...
Not so. When you go to a film "about" Sharon Tate, you assume you know the ending, coming toward you down the track like a slow freight train that can't be stopped. However Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood is not only an hommage to Sergio Leone, but also to the start of every fairy tale: A film-maker is no captive on the carousel of time - so he can return, and remake the future. Quentin Tarantino is, in pop culture terms, now old himself - old enough to be bored by X-Men 37 and Lego Hulk leavened by the occasional stiff-upper-Brit Oscar-bait. And old enough to remember that once upon a time it was different.
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Hooray for Hollywood. Great idea to show the audience the real person, so brutally murdered.
The bloke from Titanic, take a bow.
Early in the movie the car radio said : the beach 80 , somewhere 90 and the valley 105 . On February 9th , the San Fernando Valley isn't that bad. An Aussie, I had the humiliation of getting sun stroke there once , that Santa Ana.
A bit late from the Antipodes.
Saw the movie in the cinema when it came out. Don't really like Tarentino's stuff, but this one was ok. Found it to be really slow moving and perhaps too long as well. Having read Bugliosi's book many years ago I was familiar with the characters and events to some degree. After seeing the film I dug out the old book and read it again. It is quite detailed, and I had my memory refreshed on some of the more obscure details.
I do wonder how well people follow the details in this picture when they are not familiar with the historical aspects of it? Some of the old references go over my head (I've never seen "The Wrecking Crew," for instance), yet things like the scene from "The Great Escape" made me laugh. That was well done.
Someone somewhere in a review called attention to the fact that Cliff had more traditional morals, refusing to take advantage of the young girl who he finally took for a ride out to Spahn Ranch. An aspect of the character that I had not really thought about when I saw the film.
The ending was a happy one, which I suppose was the ultimate purpose of the film. If only the real story had ended that way, with Rick Dalton meeting some new friends who he also finds were fans of his work.
I liked watching the 50 year anniversary presentations for the Apollo 11 landing. So what's the next 50 year event? Happily the Woodstock update failed, from what I heard.
Mark- Thank you so much for this insightful review. I do not consider myself a Tarantino fan but I truly loved this movie, and it stayed with me for quite some time. I think it helped that I saw it in a theater in a rich 70mm print.
Your slow train metaphor for the impending doom is terrific, and helps make the ending that much more cathartic. As we watch the movie unfold subconsciously we're waiting for a tribe of marginal dirtbags to completely invert public consciousness.
I genuinely liked spending time with Rick, Cliff, and Sharon, following them through quotidian tasks. The shot-for-shot remake of Rick's FBI guest spot (it was Burt Reynolds in reality) and James Stacey riding off on his motorcycle after the Lancer shoot are just a few of the wonderful details creating verisimilitude. As you mentioned in your review, the soundtrack is terrific and not the usual obvious, idiotic selections.
The Spahn ranch scene with Cliff was tremendous. Here's a war hero who can clearly take care of himself yet we are fearful for him such an alien landscape.
One question - Do you think a younger audience without the shared references can find any meaning whatever in this picture?
Mark - I'm a big fan of your movie reviews. I don't always agree, but I always find them of great interest. Here, I do agree. You're right on target about this movie. It's a very surprising and artful work by Tarantino. You might even say there's something profound about it. One thing I would say. The first 45 minutes or so, while very enjoyable for people in our generation, are a bit plodding.
It's a superb movie. In style its nothing like recent Tarantino fare. Simple and straight forward but never dull. Fantastic production values and superb sound engineering. And its colorful, unlike so much recent stuff that is so washed out its distracting. Incidently Mark, that impressive drive-in scene was shot using miniatures and toy cars!
The Tate-LaBianca murders overlapped with the Zodiac Killer's death spree. I was 11. Is it any wonder I associate sunny California with Technicolorâ„¢, CinemaScopeâ„¢ gore? John Ford may once have been our national film portraitist, but Sam Peckinpah grabbed the camera from him and kicked the old man off one of the high mesas in Monument Valley.
Thanks for the " Mantovani of mayhem" link. Always enjoy the comments and well, there's some rich pickings in that lot. Was glad Jackie Brown came out of it alright.... I think it did.
Haven't seen the movie yet so can't comment , though it seems that needn't hold you back.
Margot Robbie looks gorgeous but I don't care for the two male leads. Still, there are some things you've got to rise above.
Thanks for a great site.
"Certainly something changed round about that precise date..."
Peter Thiel identifies that as the date when Americans went from outward-facing (interested in doing things in the world) to inward-facing. As he told Peter Robinson in a recent episode of "Uncommon Knowledge", in July 1969 man landed on the moon, and three weeks later Woodstock happened (one week after the Manson murders). "We've had this incredible shift to interiority in the decades since then and I would include things like the drug counterculture..."
Going back 200 more years, in his essay "The Straussian Moment" he was discussing with Robinson, Thiel had written, "The Enlightenment undertook a major strategic retreat. If the only way to stop people from killing each other over religious questions ... involved a world where nobody thought about it too much, then the intellectual cost of ceasing such thought seemed a small price to pay. The question of human nature was abandoned."
Thiel describes the result: "Instead of violent wars, there could be violent video games; instead of heroic feats, there could be thrilling amusement park rides; instead of serious thought, there could be 'intrigues of all sorts,' as in a soap opera. It is a world where people spend their lives amusing themselves to death."
As has been noted somewhere else, the shift from exteriority to interiority can be seen in the order of popular magazines introduced to America: Life, People, Us, and then Self. Life magazine ran from 1883 to 1972 in America, then ceased production. In 1974 People magazine debuted, followed by Us (1977) and Self (1979), by which time Life had thrown itself a ring with a second run from 1978-2000.
"The world of entertainment represents the shift away from politics...", Thiel says.
"...we've substituted the realities of politics for these sort of increasingly fictionalized worlds, and that's probably a very, very unhealthy thing."
Yet, dissatisfaction and emptiness with these fictionalized worlds not born of real life seems to have led back to ...politics, with potentially interesting stars becoming cause-pushers and lame-o plugsters - but not for the real world; for a fictionalized world laid atop the real world, smothering flyover country.
A better recipe is: stick with life, make movies, end of story.
A great insight of the film by Mark. I was surprised there was no mention of the scene between Bruce Lee and Cliff and their duel on the set. I know Bruce Lee's daughter did not like that scene!
I found Cliff's living arrangement of an old trailer behind a movie theater quite absurd. I thought it would have been much more realistic for him to be living in a simple tract home. The San Fernando Valley in the 1950's 1960's had tract houses being built an incredible rate and at that time were extremely affordable. The contrast of Rick Dalton's Hollywood Hills home and Cliff living in a tract home in the San Fernando Valley (compared to trailer appearing like a squatter) I think would have been much more realistic for 1969. Everyone owned a home back then. The average home price in Los Angeles was about same as Pittsburgh in 1970. By 1980, forget it!
To me the film seemed to baked in kind of nostalgia for that time period. Which did surprise me, we all know Tarantino is no conservative.
Funny mark ( or irony?) I was sitting on the verandah yesterday, while my wife was having a durry ( Australian for smoke) and laughing as I said to her you could have been in Hollywood when the Australian guitarist of the red hot chilli peppers was pleading ( begging?) for you to come and live with him in Hollywood in 1992! " He said I'll have a limo pick you up at the airport!" Haha. But now your stuck here with a cow farmer and a tractor driver.."Naaaah..not force me that Hollywood " she replied.
When she came back from watching that film, she said "God that was boring, i was waiting for something to happen! " And haven't seen it. So it was fascinating to read your review, and now with her feelings in my mind, I geddit. Paradoxically, in 1992, 7 full years before I met my wife, I had John schlesinger ( midnight cowboy), offering me the keys to Hollywood...haha. Dodged a bullet there I think! You were saying about the carousel?!
Margot Robbie seems usually to be the sort of actress of whom critics write, "Robbie is wonderful - shame about everything else in this car crash." When she finally appears in a critically acclaimed film, however, she is not much more than a footnote. Can't somebody match her up with a decent role in a decent film, just for once?
I am always skeptical about Tarantino films. As Mark points out they cannibalize popular culture to the point where you aren't sure if Quentin revers or despises the culture he uses as his raw materials. But I have to tip my hat to Mark's sublime observation that when the counterculture becomes "the culture" when the Hell is left? If an "anti-culture" political movement becomes "the culture" then how do they continue to justify their existence? I suppose we all wind up in a Tarantino world - Ugh!
Reminds me of the old biker counter-culture. The first irony was that in the original bikers' need to show how radically anti-social they were they all ended up dressing and acting alike to the point of becoming more of a cliche than the societal cliches they were rebelling against. Then, to add insult to injury, beginning somewhere around the '90s all of the affluent yuppie corporate types the original bikers were rebelling against began playing dress-up bad boy bikers on weekends cannibalizing the cliched fashion aspects of the bikers' culture and in doing so neutering the old biker culture and making what was left an acceptable part of mainstream culture.
Thanks - I don't need to watch it.
Not that I will ever watch a Tarantino movie again, nor a DiCaprio movie.
I was dragooned into watching the bear movie - Remnant - (just kidding) and I have to say it was dire.
Every time I read "DiCaprio", I am reminded of Malaysian corruption, climate corruption, and the fat pseud flying his eyebrow artiste around the world whilst he is banging young fillies on mega-yachts. Pitt reminds me of his dreadful ex-Jolie. Jolie reminds me of Jon Voight - he was great in Midnight Cowboy. So there is a win in it.
I am hoping that I don't hear or read of Keanu Reeves slagging of guns, Trump, etc - I have just bought John Wick #3 and want to watch it.
Perry, I've seen JW 3 and I should warn you, there is some violence in it.
Quite a bit, but [SPOILER ALERT] the dogs come out ok
Yes, it was a fight fest! 9/10. !0 but for the cliche desert scene.
The desert walk routine was a tad boring and the bedouin tent scene was a stre-e-e-e-tch (I was waiting for Bob Hope, Bing and Dorothy L'Amour to sneak in under a tent khazi). I think they must be trying to win a muslim audience.
Certainly, they want to nail the Japan market, where Keanu is big.
Some homages to Bruce Lee and James Bond, I thought - mirror fight scenes, for example. The mutts were very good.
Sylvie Krystal's ex stole the show, as always.
Waiting for 4 - I pray that Keanu keeps his trap shut on Trump, Climate, Deplorability, Guns and God.
With my post, I was trying to win the coveted Steyn's Biggest Understatement of the Year Award. However, I guess that will go to whomever says, "The Dems are acting a little crazy", won't it?
Hmmm.
3 months to go!
The film is a paean to what's now sadly known as toxic masculinity. Brad/Cliff is uncomplaining, stoic, gets the job done. He might have masculine darkness in his past but Tarantino leaves us to wonder about that, it is left inexplicit, a nice touch. What we see is a beautiful portrait of the type of masculinity that is now excoriated by the cultural Left. The film longs for that type of person to save the day. It is a wonderful example of conservative values and like all Tarantino films beautifully crafted. I left the cinema sad that real life wasn't like this film - that's a really old fashioned reaction to a modern film that has it's values in the right place.