TARANTINO TIME WARP
Latest flick heavy on nostalgia
The first thing you need to know about Quentin Tarantino’s latest wild ride is that it is all about the Tate murders in August 1969.
The second thing to know is that it is not about the Tate murders at all. As confusing as that sounds, it’s the best way I can think to express the beautiful and deliberate inconsistencies in this love letter to a lost era of Hollywood without giving away the whole game.
Leonardo Dicaprio stars as Rick Dalton, a fading television star whose big hit was playing bounty hunter Jake Cahill on a late ’50s show called Bounty Law. He’s now reduced to guest spots as “the heavy,” getting beaten up by a different show’s hero every week. It pays the bills — including maintenance of his one-man entourage/driver/ houseboy and best friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) — but it’s left him feeling inadequate and unappreciated.
In fact, if there’s a single theme to this sinuous, languorous tale, it’s the fragile egos of actors. Rick is frequently in tears or nearly so, especially after producer Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino) tells him to get himself to Rome and make his name in spaghetti westerns or risk obsolescence.
And he rides an emotional roller-coaster while filming an episode of TV’S Lancer. Early morning, hung over and jittery (Rick stutters when not acting), he fears audiences won’t recognize him under all the hair and makeup. Lunchtime, he beats himself up for forgetting his lines, then meets a fellow actor (Julia Butters) who is essentially Daniel Day-lewis in the body of an eight-year-old girl. Afternoon, he nails his director’s desire for an “evil Hamlet” performance and even manages a bit of improvisational alliteration. He’s on Cloud 9 — but clouds are notoriously fleeting.
Or check out Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate in the film’s other strand, which will tragically collide with Rick and Cliff’s story in the final act. A rising star but hardly a household name — she was a Golden Globe nominee for best newcomer (female) in 1968 — Tate is shopping for a present for new husband Roman Polanski when she notices a cinema showing The Wrecking Crew, a Dean Martin action-comedy
in which she played “the klutz.” Settling in to watch — after talking her way out of paying the 75-cent admission — Sharon kicks off her boots, slips on her glasses and lets the audience’s laughter envelope her like a warm bath. It’s how I’ve long imagined Hollywood types watch themselves on screen, even after so many have told me they can’t bear to do it at all.
Tarantino has long been the film lover’s filmmaker, and Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood is packed with references to his own movies, as well as others. Rick’s flamethrower-wielding turn in The 14 Fists of Mccluskey — “Anybody order fried sauerkraut?” — looks like an outtake from Inglourious Basterds, while another scene digitally inserts him into The Great Escape. Cliff’s humble home is tucked behind the Van Nuys Drive-in, demolished in 1998 but in 1969 showing Lady in Cement with Frank Sinatra, Raquel Welch and Dan (Bonanza) Blocker.
And there are “cameos” by the likes of Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), Steve Mcqueen (Damian Lewis) and Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), not to mention Bruce Dern as the owner of Spahn Ranch, headquarters of Charles Manson (Damon Herriman) and his murderous “family.”
But the director also pivots his movie-geek sensibilities just enough to give us a sense of the larger time period, as well. Every time one of his characters starts a car, the radio is on, providing an eclectic mix of the era’s pop — Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, Paul Revere & the Raiders, the Rolling Stones and a melancholy cover of California Dreamin’ by José Feliciano — along with a potpourri of current events, weather reports and a startling number of cosmetics ads. (And if you like those, stick around for two of the weirdest post-credit sequences since Ferris Bueller.)
But it’s the do-nothing, go-nowhere moments that make Once Upon a Time such a treat, watching Rick and Cliff tool around Hollywood in their cream-coloured Cadillac Coupe deville.
Rick may fear the maw of time and the uncertainty of the actor’s life — hate to think what he’d do if he knew home video, Pay TV, DVD and Netflix were coming — but Cliff provides a kind of Zen counterbalance to that existential angst, shrugging off both the literal highs and lows of his ultimately forgettable place in filmdom’s food chain.
And without getting too didactic, Tarantino even goes so far as to suggest we all need someone like Cliff, with a kind of rugged innocence to act as a bulwark to whatever we deem to have killed the golden age — of anything, really, but in this case of Hollywood.
“Bring bagels!” he shouts cheerily as he makes his exit from the picture. It’s not a final line for the ages, but I think this is the continuation of a beautiful friendship, and one I’m keen to prolong. Sign me up for a repeat viewing.
It was a quiet Cannes festival this year at the start — no shortage of great films, but the critical response had mirrored the unseasonably cool, dull weather. That all changed with the world première of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s rip-roaring tribute to old Hollywood, which inserts two fictional characters — Leonardo Dicaprio as a past-his-prime actor, best known for a TV western; and Brad Pitt as his stunt double, best friend and driver — into the very real story of the loss of innocence that was the Manson murders. Five people died on the night of Aug. 8, 1969, at the hands of killers under the sway of cult leader Charles Manson.
Critics fought to get into the first screening. The next morning, they fought again for a place in the press conference room to meet Tarantino, Dicaprio, Pitt and co-star Margot Robbie, who plays murder victim Sharon Tate in the film. (Only at Cannes would you find these three stars outshone by their writer-director, who took most of the questions.)
Tarantino was at times combative, even brusque. Did he talk to Roman Polanski, then-husband of Sharon Tate, who appears briefly in the movie, played by Polish actor Rafal Zawierucha? “No I didn’t.” Well, did he ever hesitate about bringing a real story about real people to the screen? “No.” And to a journalist who suggested that Robbie didn’t get enough lines of dialogue for an actor of her stature: “I reject your hypothesis.” (Robbie backed him up with a more loquacious answer that amounted to the same thing.)
But the Tate murders almost function as a subplot to the main story of the friendship between Dicaprio’s Rick Dalton and Pitt’s Cliff Booth as they ramble around Hollywood in Dalton’s cream-coloured Cadillac, brushing up against other celebrities (played by lookalike actors) — Steve Mcqueen makes a cameo appearance, as does a feisty Bruce Lee.
“It really comes down to acceptance,” said Pitt, suggested the characters are almost like two facets of the same person. “Acceptance of your place, your life, your surroundings, your challenges, your troubles.”
Cliff (Pitt) is a man at peace with his minor role as a fading star’s one-man entourage, while Dalton (Dicaprio) is looking for acceptance from anyone who’ll give it to him, “with some of the greatest breakdown scenes I’ve ever seen,” Pitt said.
Dicaprio called Once Upon a Time “a love letter to this industry that we’re so fortunate to work in. All of us at this table at one time felt like outsiders to the industry.” And he praised Tarantino’s famously encyclopedic knowledge, which results in the film being stocked with references to movies, TV shows, radio hits and even cosmetics commercials from the time.
“There are few people in this world who have the collected knowledge of not only cinematic history but music and television. It’s almost like tapping into a computer database, and the wealth of knowledge is unfathomable.”
Tarantino’s films are often a bit self-referential, and Once Upon a Time, his ninth as director, is no exception. “There is a bit of summing up,” he said, adding that one of the first people to read the screenplay was his longtime assistant director, Bill Clark. He remembers the man’s response: “Damn! Number 9 is like all eight of them put together!”
As to why we remain so gripped today by the Manson murders — books, movies, documentaries and podcasts have all explored the events of that August — “We’re fascinated by it because at the end of the day it almost seems unfathomable,” the director said.
“The more you learn about ... it doesn’t make it any clearer. It actually makes it more obscure the more you know. And the impossibility of being able to truly understand I think is what causes this fascination.”
When it was suggested that Once Up on a Time represented a kind of rage against the perpetrators, Pitt grew philosophical.
“I don’t see it as a rage against individuals,” he said. “I see it as a rage against the loss of innocence. That time, 1969, when the Manson murders occurred, was a time ... when there the free love movement, there was a lot of hope, there were these new ideas floating out there, cinema was new, it was being recalibrated. And when that event happened, the tragic loss of Sharon and others, what scared people and why it lasts so much today is because it was a sobering, dark look at the dark side of human nature.”
From its pop-culture references to its gorgeous period automobiles and L.A. landmarks, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood also lets viewers steep themselves in a bygone world, one that even Tarantino knows only at one remove. He was six when the murders took place.
Asked what time period he preferred, producer David Heyman said the answer had to be today. “We live today,” he said. “One of the fundamental themes (of the movie) is acceptance.”
Tarantino disagreed, leaning into his microphone: “I prefer any time before cellphones.”