DiCaprio shines in Tarantino’s salute to lost Hollywood era.
DiCaprio, Pitt shine in meticulously crafted depiction of Mansonera L.A. in film made with humor, warmth
“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is great in all the ways you’d hope and expect a Quentin Tarantino film to be great. It pays homage to other genres and eras with the precision of a stylist and the obsession of a collector. And despite the dark subject matter — Los Angeles in the era of the Charles Manson murders — it’s funny. But there’s something else going on here, something beyond that. This time, you get the feeling Tarantino loves the people he’s showing us. It’s a movie about friendship, about beautiful real things that live in the midst of beautiful phony things. It’s less an action movie than a meditation on things lost. And the result is, without question, Tarantino’s warmest film to date. His new movie is not, like “Inglourious Basterds,” a succession of great scenes. It is
rather a deluge of good and very good scenes, involving people we come to care about. It’s amazingly discursive. Tarantino knows he has our attention, because he knows that we know where the movie is heading, toward that fateful night in Bel Air. He also knows we’re not exactly in a hurry to get there. So he takes the scenic route — at one point there’s a flashback within a flashback — demonstrating dazzling invention as he tells the story of a cowboy actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt man and best friend (Brad Pitt).
In terms of visual style, the movie could have been filmed in 1969. The street signs and storefronts have been meticulously recreated; some shots look straight out of the 1960s, and even the film stock, the color saturation and the relationship between light and dark make it look like 50 years ago.
And then there’s the sound, a wall of it: There’s music, radio commercials and kitsch from the era (Robert Goulet singing “MacArthur Park” from a blackandwhite TV set), much of it sounding raw, not smoothed out and arranged not so one sound glides into the other, but rather interrupts the other. The effect is harsh, and, for anyone who was alive at that time, it’s like living through a flashback.
But more important than the fact of the verisimilitude is the ultimate effect of it. You don’t resurrect an era this completely without caring. Collectively, these details become an act of reverence. Tarantino is taking us to the time and place of an American disaster, and getting the era right is his way of respecting the world that real people lived in and the horror they went through. Nothing about “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is emotionally cheap, nothing remotely disrespectful to Sharon Tate or the other victims of the tragedy.
On the contrary, as he did with “Inglourious Basterds,” Tarantino takes a terrible event that we’ve gotten used to, that’s part of history, whose impact has become routine by movie adaptations good and bad, and he makes us feel it again — or feel it, really, for the first time. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is a gesture of remembrance, not exploitation.
He comes at the story from an oblique angle, with these two guys, Rick (DiCaprio) and Cliff (Pitt), whose heyday was 10 years earlier. Rick used to do TV westerns, which means his time and meaning as a star is just about up, and these days Cliff is working more as Rick’s chauffeur than a stuntman. In these men, Tarantino has a humaninterest core that is complete and complex, about the pain that’s felt when the magic of careers, even those marginally and idiotically made, begin to fade.
DiCaprio is heartbreaking, without ever losing his panache for Tarantino’s excesses. After a bad day on the set, when he has been drinking and can’t remember his lines, his anguish and selfconfrontation, as he shouts at his face in the mirror, is intimate and uncovered. The acting is big, but not empty.
As for Pitt, this might be his best performance. At one point, Cliff finds himself at the Manson family hideout, and the way Pitt clocks the situation, gradually perceiving that something that seemed eccentric is, in fact, evil — is riveting. Throughout the film, Pitt exudes charm and a philosophical nature, but also the possibility of explosiveness. He doesn’t show you everything. What do you say about a performance like this? Scene by scene, Pitt seems to know what to do, all the time — and he never makes it look like work.
Most people who make movies about Hollywood always tell you how empty it all is. Tarantino does something else here. He says, yes, this is empty, and without meaning — intrinsically. But these empty things have beauty and take on meaning as emblems of human aspiration, and it’s the love and hope surrounding these Hollywood artifacts — bad movies, bad shows, bad roles — that give them a dimension of spirit.
The latter comes through movingly, in a simple sequence in which Tate (Margot Robbie) goes to see one of her films — a lightweight Matt Helm picture starring Dean Martin. (Tarantino uses footage of the real Sharon Tate in this scene.) As she leaves the theater, Robbie gives us a woman thrilled at this moment in her life and full of joy to be part of this collective Hollywood fantasy.
There’s a lot more to say, about Tarantino’s parodies of TV Westerns, about Al Pacino and other actors who make brief appearances. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is a great film, grander than perhaps even Tarantino knows, and people will be writing about it forever.
But one more point must be made: This is the third film in an unintended trilogy — “Inglourious Basterds,” “Django Unchained” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” — that is about the impotence of movies, that is inspired by the wish that movies could make a difference, that they could make things better. Is this why Tarantino is thinking about retiring, that he’s taken things as far as they can go, and lo and behold, the world still hasn’t changed?
But four good films in a row. Three masterpieces out of four. Forget the public — Tarantino owes it to himself to see how far he can keep this string going.