Tarantino’s ode to Tinseltown
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (R16, 161 mins)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★1⁄2
Idon’t know if there’s ever been a debut that blew the roof off of an audience’s expectations quite like Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 film Reservoir Dogs. It was punkish, ruinously clever, unpredictable, bloody as a knife fight and – when it was over – we knew we had seen something new, smart and gorgeous. Someone – not me – said you’d have to go back to 1969 and Easy Rider to find a film that shook up the creative zeitgeist quite as brutally as Tarantino’s debut. Maybe they were right. Only trouble is, Reservoir Dogs, although it is a film I adore unreservedly, have watched dozens of times and will love till I die, wasn’t exactly an original. It was an homage, or several homages, packed into a shape that did witty justice to everything that had inspired it, but which still seemed fresh and young. And so it went for another dozen years, taking in Pulp Fiction,
Jackie Brown and Kill Bill (Volumes 1 and 2). Tarantino was the most flat-out entertaining and exhilarating writer and director working in Hollywood, no contest.
But, since 2004, I can’t be the only person who’s getting just a bit over Tarantino’s style now can I? Or who wonders just when Tarantino forgot how to write a narratively satisfying ending that didn’t revolve around a massacre? Don’t get me wrong, there are moments of absolute genius in Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, but a strong whiff of seen-it-before has been permeating Tarantino for a decade or more now. Or, maybe, it’s what-we-haven’t-seen-before that is the problem. If your greatest films are based on your love for other’s films, then where do you go when you run out of ideas to pay homage to? The answer, maybe, is
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. A film that, eventually, has nothing left to quote, except Tarantino’s own back-catalogue. Don’t get me wrong. This re-imagining of Los Angeles circa 1969 is still a hellaciously good time for many of it’s 161-long minutes. But it is also too indulgently paced, over stuffed with in-jokes and reeks of a brand of sexism we really could have hoped a film-maker of Tarantino’s age and experience might have found redundant by now. Once
Upon a Time is still Tarantino’s love letter to the films and the times he knew through a TV or a movie screen, while he was growing up in Tennessee and Los Angeles. And a lot of it is a delight. There are references to movies by the truckload, scenes mischievously based on Hollywood legend (the death of Natalie Wood gets a particularly nettlesome nod) and others that come off like very personal point-scoring set up only for Tarantino’s amusement.
As a recreation of the days leading up to the Tate-LaBianca slayings, told through the lives of a nearly washed-up action star and his equally washed-up stunt double, Once Upon a Time scores early and often; a unique and lovingly put together thriller/ comedy/farce and near-horror. It swings and connects far more than it misses. Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are perfect as the ageing duo at the film’s heart. DiCaprio’s layered portrayal of a fading actor is a thing of great wonder to excavate. While Pitt is at his Pittest, snorting, chewing and swaggering through the film like someone doing a pretty decent parody of Brad Pitt, which seemed about right to me. Margot Robbie, as the apparently doomed Sharon Tate, is picture perfect and quietly heart-breaking. But – Spoiler Alert – it has to end. We know there will be violence. And a sickening amount of violence at that. But Tarantino’s choice of an ending to this film, for me at least, was the ruination of it. Beyond the gratuitous cruelty, the slavering misogyny and the all-too-expected childish sadism of the final scenes of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, what really struck me, walking out as the credits rolled, was just how let down I felt. For a film-maker who spends so much time lionizing his alpha-male leads and their supposed old-school values, Tarantino sure does take a coward’s way out of his own story.
If your greatest films are based on your love for other’s films, then where do you go when you run out of ideas to pay homage to?