I managed to sneak out for a few hours on Saturday to see the new Quentin Tarantino movie, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. I’m a sucker for his movies in general, and this is one of the few big releases this year that seemed interesting enough to go see right away.
This is, of course still in theaters, but it’s also not really possible to say much beyond “I liked it” without spoiling the plot, so I’ll throw in some space in the unlikely event that anybody’s reading this and doesn’t want the movie spoiled.
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I’m totally on board with not wanting this spoiled, by the way– I made a point of avoiding spoilers for the plot before I saw it, which is important because it’s based on real events, but Tarantino has demonstrated a willingness to play fast and loose with actual reality. It was clearly going to diverge from reality at some point, but it wasn’t clear where, and I didn’t want to know.
This is regularly described as “wistful” and a “love letter to old Hollywood,” and that’s largely accurate. It’s mostly free of the ostentatious flourishes that usually mark a movie as “Tarantinoesque”– for most of the run time, it’s remarkably quiet.
The bulk of the movie follows a couple of specific days in the life of some marginal Hollywood figures, former TV star Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double and general gofer Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who happen to live next door to the house being rented by Roman Polanski and his new wife Sharon Tate. Interspersed with the day-in-the-life stuff about Dalton’s latest guest spot on a tv show and Booth’s day spent fixing Dalton’s TV and picking up a hitchhiker there are scenes of Tate running some errands and stopping into a theater to watch herself.
The Tate stuff is the obligatory meta controversy about the movie, because Margot Robbie as Tate doesn’t have much dialogue. She’s mostly there to embody the potential Tate had at the time, and to just exude niceness– when people call this the most sentimental of Tarantino’s movies, I think this is the part that’s most responsible for that feeling.
Given that role, and the weight that comes with playing a fictional version of a real person, I think it makes sense as a matter of craft for Robbie-as-Tate to say very little. She certainly couldn’t be turned into an ass-kicking figure like Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movies, and I’m really not sure how you could fit in a big flashy Tarantinoesque speech for her.
It would also be kind of incongruous for her to get that kind of big speech, because nobody else really gets one, either. The only really classically Tarantino scene is the bit where Marvin Schwarzs the producer lays out a theory of Dalton’s career trajectory to try to convince him to go to Rome and make spaghetti Westerns. (Schwarzs is played by Al Pacino; it’s a kind of broad performance, but then so is everything he’s done since about 1993…) The runner-up is probably the bit where an eight-year-old actress (played, I think, by Julia Butters) holds forth to Dalton on the set of the tv show where he’s playing the villain of the week.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a bunch of Tarantino’s signature meta commentary in here, it’s just a little more subtle than usual, largely showing up through things like the mix of real and fictional people who appear, and the way he cast those roles. (As an aside, watching that video and listening to the podcast linked above made me realize how decoupled from pop culture I’ve become– twenty years ago, I probably would’ve known who a lot of those actors are, but the names “Damian Lewis” and “Scoot McNairy” really don’t mean anything to me, though they clearly matter to the crew at the Ringer.) There are a few flashes of “aren’t I just the cleverest boy in the whole world“, like the Bruce Lee scene, but it’s not as in-your-face about that as in some of his showier movies.
Of course, one of his real strengths is the ability to build tension in a scene where nothing all that dramatic is actually happening, and he’s got that here in a couple of places. This is where not spoiling the plot really matters, because it’s not at all clear what’s going to happen in the interactions with the Manson Family. The Spahn Ranch scene was genuinely tense when Booth confronted Squeaky Fromme (and well defused by Bruce Dern’s appearance as George Spahn). (The trailer was good at setting this up, in quoting the “Charlie’s going to love you” line, leaving the implication that Booth and/or Dalton might get pulled into the Manson cult. That’s pretty quickly taken off the table, though, when Booth asks “Pussycat” for ID in the car.)
And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Tarantino movie without a bit of gratuitous violence. There are really only two violent scenes, one a bit of literal hippie-punching at the end of the Spahn Ranch sequence, and the other the climactic showdown. As is Tarantino’s wont, these are both bloody enough to be disturbing, though the ending then goes completely over-the-top to the point of becoming funny.
Anyway, while it shares the alternate-history aspect with Inglourious Basterds, in a lot of ways, this has more in common with Jackie Brown, being a quieter, more character-focused kind of film. DiCaprio does really great work, committing fully to the washed-up-star character of Dalton (“Why did I have to drink eight whiskey sours? Why couldn’t I have stopped at three or four?”). Pitt as Booth is a lot less showy, but also very good (though I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for that type of character, so salt to taste).
In addition to the alternate-history ending, though, this does have another common element with Basterds. That is, when Basterds came out, my immediate reaction was “This is Tarantino doing a Coen brothers movie,” and I have a bit of the same reaction here. This is much more No Country for Old Men than Fargo, though– much more contained and less showy, but with some similar preoccupations.
Anyway, while this wasn’t super flashy, I thought it was very good, maybe excellent. I see so few serious movies these days that it’s a little hard to rate things– the only movies I’ve seen in the theater in the last several months were Spiderman: Far From Home (with the kids) and John Wick 3: Parabellum (just me). This is easily of higher quality than either of those as a capital-F Film, though less overtly fun. It’s not as quotable or rewatchable as Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs, but it’s interesting, and I’m glad I saw it soon after release.