Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino’s “ninth” film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. At a meandering two hours forty-one minutes, you may often wonder where the movie is going, but once you get there, you’ll scream, clap and howl with laughter. If Tarantino was Chekhov, he wouldn’t use a gun, but what he does use will make the journey worth it.
Please please please don’t spoil Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood for yourself, and if you saw it, don’t even drop any out of context hints. I’m not even going to put spoilers in my review lest you get tempted and sneak a peak. You shouldn’t know what is going to be a crucial element of the story before it is time. The film takes places over the course of three days in 1969 and follows two actors and a stuntman during that time. One of those three people is based on the real life Sharon Tate, whom Manson family members brutally murdered so the movie carries a lot of tension, but you never know when the kettle is going to start whistling. I will give one hint: when Kurt Russell appears, tune your ears up because the movie is about to hone in on its ultimate trajectory.
Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood is one of those movies that Hollywood loves because it features a star studded cast, some instantly recognizable and others are complete chameleons (Dakota Fanning). It is about Hollywood so it can feed into the worst narcissistic impulses of the industry. I was a smidge skeptical whether or not all the praise was hype or merit based, but I’ve seen almost every Tarantino film (exception: his first feature film My Best Friend’s Birthday according to IMDb), and as problematic as he is (I’m going to let someone else write about the hero’s relationship with women in this film), he tells a good story so I wasn’t going to let my artsy fartsy distaste for the Hollywood machine turn me away from this movie. I also think that this film is the first time that he didn’t use the N word. I saw it opening night, no previews, 35 mm film.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m historically hard on Brad Pitt. I even knock his looks. I’ve only eased up recently because of his work behind the camera as he uses his privilege to support movies that otherwise would never see the light of day. Pitt is proving to be a good man behind the scenes, but I never expected that he would be able to bring it when on screen with the unquestionably solid acting talent of DiCaprio, but he does, and while I’ll never call him versatile or an actor with a lot of range, Pitt may have delivered his best acting performance to date in Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood. Also there is one scene that even I have to admit that he looked amazing. Don’t worry. You’ll know it when you see it. Damn.
My favorite and underutilized type of DiCaprio performance is comedic, and Tarantino must agree because Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood’s dark humor largely rests on his shoulders though Pitt as the deadpan, straight man carries his fair share of the laughs. DiCaprio has a really hard job. He is acting a role as an actor who then has to act in multiple roles throughout the film. He is the Matryoshka of actors. My favorite scene in the film is when he is in a trailer by himself preparing for his scenes.
Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood is shot in the style of the period that it was set, but the narrative structure is like the Internet of the mind. Tarantino sets flashbacks within flashbacks containing clips of fictional movies within the flashback. You never know when a simple comment will spark a dive into an unexpected rabbit hole, but what I love about Tarantino is that it never becomes confusing. I’m someone who prefers a chronological, linear explanation, but if a filmmaker can set up a complex narrative structure that jumps around and still be clear, I’ll happily sign a waiver.
I’m actually mad at the ever-loquacious Tarantino for revealing what I discerned while watching Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood: it is his Roma. Some of the digressions were clearly memory-induced nostalgia for an era that he considered as his golden age of Hollywood and wanted to insert himself into by creating it as how he saw it, not how it was. If some criticize these detailed tangents as extraneous and self-indulgent, you wouldn’t be wrong. Not everything is made for me—I’m a lifetime East Coaster, but as long as the overall story and the emotion behind the story resonates, I won’t complain. I am old enough to remember what watching television used to be like. You had to sit down and watch it when it was aired, and everyone would watch it at the same time. TV Guide!
My favorite aspect of Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood is how Tarantino’s imagination played within the various genres while never losing the character development of his two lead actors. These men’s bread and butter depend on Westerns. They also live in the West, and the film constantly compares and contrasts the superficial reality of their daily lives with the movies, but with the presence of the Manson family, the Western begins to seep into the real world of the movie then gets mashed up with slasher horror and transforms into one of my favorite types of genres.
Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood feels so personal because when one thinks of Tarantino’s previous films that utilize history, they focus on broader eras such as the antebellum period or World War II, but this movie focuses on a very specific moment in time that happened to a handful of people. On some level, Tarantino is doing the opposite of playing the oppression Olympics. He is accentuating the personal tragedies of a few individuals to show less how it not only impacted them, but the rest of the world, particularly the impact on the evolution of cinema and the blow that their murders inflicted on the future of film. His bittersweet musings on what could have been reminded me of Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour, which is Lee’s best film and the best film on American grief ever made to date. He transmogrifies the personal into the emblematic, which somewhat mitigates the criticism of what could feel like an oversimplified depiction of Tate, who becomes a symbol of hope, energy and lifeblood to an industry. Even though her husband, Roman Polanski, was the director, Tarantino clearly feels as if Tate was the next step for cinema as an action star and her loss leads him to meditate on the loss to the cinematic world and society.
If I was only allowed one criticism of Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, there was a sense of dissonance when DiCaprio gets inserted into old footage like Natalie Cole in Unforgettable, but Robbie doesn’t. I’m not saying that Robbie should have because the point of using Tate’s original footage is homage and respect to the original, but it did feel strange juxtaposed with DiCaprio so I think that Tarantino should have cut that one DiCaprio scene instead.
If you don’t like Tarantino films, brutal violence or long movies, then I would stay away from Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood otherwise it may be the dark comedic hit of the summer. I’m definitely going to watch it again when it is available for home viewing with the closed captioning on to catch what I missed the first time around when the packed theater was electric with audible delight.