Tarantino reaches front ranks again in latest film
“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” the ninth film by Quentin Tarantino, has been described as “American Graffiti meets Ragtime in Chinatown.”
I have not seen either of the first two movies mentioned but know that both trade heavily in nostalgia and with the latter featuring historical characters. “Chinatown,” the first movie I ever rented and which I have seen numerous times, may be the best
American film of the 1970s not directed by Francis Ford Coppola; a line from “Chinatown” hammers home what Tarantino is all about in “Once Upon a Time
… in Hollywood.”
“You may think you know what’s going on,” an evil Noah
Cross (played by director John Huston) tells naive detective J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson), “but believe me, you don’t.”
Roman Polanski directed “Chinatown,” his first American movie since the murder of wife Sharon Tate by members of the Charles Manson “family.” Polanski, the Oscar-winning director of “The Pianist,” and Tate are peripheral characters in Tarantino’s latest film, set in 1969. Tate’s character is shown in a movie house watching the real-life actress play opposite Dean Martin (as Matt Helm) in “The Wrecking Crew.” She and Polanski, wearing a ruffled shirt straight out of “Austin Powers,” attend a party at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion West. That Tarantino pays homage to the 85-year-old director, who since 1978 has been a fugitive from the U.S. criminal justice system, is commendable even if the Polanski scenes could have been left on the cutting-room floor.
Tarantino, who also produced the movie and wrote the screenplay, is more concerned with developing two fictitious main characters. Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt basically reprise roles played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” male bonding between two film superstars circa
1969, the latter made when Tarantino was 6. Tarantino’s male leads are swingers, to be sure, but in an establishment town, Hollywood, DiCaprio playing a fading TV star who revives his career on the screen and Pitt his stunt double. They became favorites at next year’s Academy Awards although risk canceling each other out in the voting if both are nominated as Best Actor. The Oscar-winning DiCaprio gets top billing over Pitt, although I left the theater thinking Pitt gave the stronger performance.
Tarantino cribs the title for his movie from “Once Upon a Time in the West,” a Spaghetti Western from 1969 directed by Sergio Leone and starring Henry Fonda as a villain. DiCaprio, upon the advice of his producer-agent, played by Al Pacino, goes overseas to make Leone-type movies and returns home with his stardom intact. Rick Dalton arrives in California on a PanAm flight sitting in first class with his Italian wife, who is pictured sleeping here and at a more critical moment in the film. Pitt, who chauffeurs for DiCaprio in an expository first act centered around a Hollywood weekend six months earlier, sits in coach drinking a cocktail, ever the star’s best friend and understudy.
Their homecoming sets the stage for an over-the-top finish sure to astonish persons of a certain age or with a keen sense of history. I dare not reveal more, other than to say that you may think you know what’s going to happen, but believe me, you don’t.
Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate, whom a movie ticket taker remembers as “that girl from ‘Valley of the Dolls.”’ That Tate would have been considered a serious actress had she lived is open to debate. Here, she is portrayed as a sexpot without real depth. Tate is an historical figure because of the gruesome nature of her death and her marriage to Polanski, not by any movie she made.
The Manson character receives less screen time than a character at Hefner’s party portraying actor Steve McQueen. Pitt’s character takes a female hitchhiker, a Manson follower, to an old movie ranch outside Hollywood, where the “family” is headquartered. This leads to a reunion with a grizzled Bruce Dern, who plays an
80-year-old nearly blind man who rented the ranch as a location for Westerns and lives on the property with Manson’s blessing. Pitt’s Cliff Booth confronts Mansonite Charles “Tex” Watson, whom he convinces by force to change a flat tire on DiCaprio’s Cadillac.
Look closely for Kurt Russell, the film’s narrator, as a stunt coordinator and the late Luke Perry as Wayne Maunder, a Canadian-born star of three TV series (one of them is “Lancer,” in which DiCaprio’s Dalton, whose fictitious series “Bounty Law” was canceled, is portrayed. The Dalton character also appears in an episode of “The FBI.”).
Tarantino reportedly based Dalton’s relationship with Booth on that of Burt Reynolds and longtime stunt double Hal Needham, who directed Reynolds’ 1977 star-making “Smokey and the Bandit.” Tarantino eschewed digital projection for 35-millimeter film and a look of authenticity to go with the period’s street music, cars, billboards and covers of “TV Guide” and “Mad” magazine.
Only a movie lover could have made “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” with such understanding, if not tenderness. Rated R, it’s primarily written in F-sharp, Tarantino’s primary key, and contains graphic violence.
Tarantino, though born in Knoxville, Tenn., moved with his mother to Los Angeles at age 3. Named for Quint Asper, Reynolds’ character in the CBS series “Gunsmoke,” he worked five years at a video store in Manhattan Beach, Calif., his own private film school. Filmmaker and historian Peter Bogdanovich has called QT “the single most influential director of his generation.” The man who made “Pulp Fiction” is at the front ranks of American cinema again.
“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” may be the best American movie of the decade. In its own way, it’s also the best picture of 1969.