Perfect period piece Tarantino lovingly, achingly crafts beautiful story in era of Manson murders
nce Upon a Time in Hollywood” is great in all the ways you would hope and expect a Quentin Tarantino film to be great. It pays stylistic 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 is something else going on here. This time, you get the feeling Tarantino loves the people he is 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. Tarantino knows he has our attention, because he knows that we know where the movie is heading, toward that murderous night in 1969.
He also knows we’re not exactly in a hurry to get there. So he takes the scenic route — at one point there is 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. 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 is music, radio commercials and kitsch from the era.
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 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 (portrayed by Margot Robbie) or the other victims of the tragedy.
On the contrary, as he did with “Inglorious Basterds,” Tarantino takes a terrible event that we’ve gotten used to, that’s part of history, whose impact has been routinized by movies 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 stunt man.
Dicaprio is heartbreaking without ever losing his panache for Tarantinio’s excesses. As for Pitt, this might be his best performance. At one point, Cliff finds himself at the Manson family hide-out, and the way Pitt clocks the situation — gradually perceiving that something that seemed eccentric is, in fact, evil — is a marvel.
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 that give them a dimension of spirit.
There is 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.