Tarantino’s take
Just another fairytale?
The year was 1969, the music was groovy, the bars swanky and Hollywood was… well, Hollywood! Although less plastic and more involved in the art of moviemaking, not everything was necessarily shiny or good. Lurking in the depths of society was cult leader Charles Manson, and his growing number of young and blind female followers, searching for a purpose in their downtrodden lives.
Quentin Tarantino captures the kaleidoscopic culture languorously for over two hours, immersing us in a distinct place and time. He offers a quick look at popular celebrities such as Bruce Lee and Sharon Tate, and references to some of the famous ideologies of the time. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is sparkly or perhaps even a little too stretched.
Dripping with nostalgia, it’s also a showcase for outsized old school stardom with Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio delivering solid performances. And it’s no surprise that the underrated Tate of the film is delivered superbly through facial expressions and gestures by the talented Margot Robbie.
However, with the names on the cast (Al Pacino makes a number of appearances) as huge as the funding for the production, the movie lacks an ineffable something that all of Tarantino’s movies possess. Where Pulp Fiction crystallised cinema’s revolution and Inglorious Bastards contorted its viewers’ belief of historical events, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is simply a melancholic fairytale of 1970s Hollywood.
Working as a dual narrative, the story follows Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) – who starred in a blackand-white Western TV series called Bounty Law in the late ’50s and early ’60s – whose career is now hitting the skids; and Cliff Booth (Pitt), Rick’s longtime stunt double and best friend. Both are drawling easygoing men who are seen as functional drunks; they’ve been kicked around but as in any typical old-fashioned friendship, have their ‘yin and yang thing’ going for them. In other words, the men are struggling with their careers in a fast-moving Hollywood, or thus the story goes.
In a completely irrelevant second storyline, we have Manson, his infamous group of female followers and the gruesome Tate murder. To a trained eye, it was like watching two utterly trivial storylines being crammed into a two hour movie with neither getting the attention it deserved. Some may even say that Tarantino simply couldn’t wait to create his 10th movie and decidedly jammed two storylines together.
Though Tarantino recreates the Hollywood of 50 years ago with a fantastically detailed and almost swoony time machine precision, if you don’t get the innumerable pop culture references then the spell isn’t as magical and emotional and the film doesn’t connect. In the end, I was left feeling rather sombre, questioning for the first time the work of one of my all-time favourite directors.