Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood

Bruise Lee

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood
UK/USA/China 2019 Directed Quentin Tarantino
UK cinema release print

Warning: Even the presence of a spoiler warning for this movie would constitute a spoiler so you can see the kind of Catch 22 situation I am in with this... so let’s just say that, yes, there is a spoiler here.

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood is the... well, since I don’t seem to be as mathematically challenged as the Hollywood marketing machine, let’s just call it the ‘latest’ movie directed by Quentin Tarantino, who also wrote it. It’s a film I had been looking forward to for a while since, although I find the director a bit hit and miss, when he’s on form he does create absolute masterpieces of cinema (such as Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds) and a film doing the ‘Manson murders’ and set in Hollywood in 1969 seems like a match made in heaven.

And, as a film it’s kinda entertaining but it’s also somewhat less than I was expecting from it, although I do reserve the right to change my mind on this one because, like some of the best Marvel movies of recent years, it might be that my brain needs to have longer to process it and it’s quite possible that if I ever do see this one a second time, I might like it a lot better than I did before.

Saying that, I still had a fairly good time with this movie... after all, one of the chief pleasures of watching a movie by Tarantino is spotting all the visual and audio references to other peoples movies and, as you can imagine, this film is filled to the brim with them in a much more overt manner (if such a thing is possible when it comes to Mr. T) than any of his other works.

The film follows fictional movie star Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and his stuntman/driver/best friend Cliff Booth played by Brad Pitt. It also follows real life Sharon Tate played here by Margot Robbie, who was of course the most noted of the victims of the slaughter by the hippy followers of Charlie Manson on that grim August night in 1969.

Now, while I loved both all the references to various movies which the film is littered with and, frankly, loved the film and TV shows created to slot into this era by Tarantino for the Rick Dalton character (I especially loved the authenticity of his Italian secret agent movie although, on reflection, it maybe looked a little more like a ‘polizei’ movie than the specific strand of Italian spy movies it was emulating). However, it has to be said that there was practically no story on this one and its all over the place in terms of the way elements of the characters are revealed...

Now I’ve got no trouble with this usually, especially coming from Tarantino. As he’s demonstrated in a few of his movies, he can do this kind of slowly developing story image put together out of myriad scenes which tell something intrinsic about the characters very well and he usually does it in an effective manner which is a joy to watch. However, this particular hodge podge of scenes involving the various main characters and people such as Bruce Lee or Steve McQueen are... well, they’re all still a joy to watch individually but for some reason they never really forward the story that much. At least that’s how it seemed to me. The reason being, I think, is as I said in the paragraph above, there is no story, as such. And everyone knows the outcome of the Manson murders, right?

Okay... spoiler coming up.

I had a couple of conversations with different friends on the lead up to the release of this film about what I thought was going to happen because people keep telling people not to ‘spoil’ the movie and, frankly, it’s hard to spoil a movie when you know how historic events play out. So, this led me to believe that, just as he completely rewrote the end of World War Two in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino would change the outcome of events as they happened in real life and create a ‘new ending’ for Sharon Tate and Manson’s followers. Indeed, asides from the obvious tribute to Sergio Leone in the title, it would also suggest a certain fairy-tale quality to the narrative being presented here and suggests that there will be a certain amount of, shall we say, ‘deviation’ in terms of how things are left. And... yeah. I totally called it, this film left things exactly as I thought they would leave them when I heard about this project so... the film’s two main male protagonists are injected into history and, of course, change it in the way that very few people other than Tarantino would do without some kind of logical alternate to the ending, or lack of, of certain characters... such as in the movies From Hell or The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot (which I reviewed here).

And yes, it’s kind of a double edged sword in terms of the education of young movie goers everywhere when you present fiction as implied facts like this. I work at a college and know a lot of the kids think the war ended when Hitler was machine gunned down in a cinema and... I'm pretty sure that a lot of those same teenagers will be checking the IMDB after this to see what films Sharon Tate has been in recently too. It’s not fair that ignorance of history should block cinematic art like these Tarantino flicks and it’s no reason to censor the art in any way but... a disclaimer at the end might help clarify things to a certain section of the audience maybe. You know... like a statement saying that in real life Sharon Tate, her friends and unborn child were brutally slaughtered by the followers of Charlie Manson... something like that.

Anyway, other than this and despite the kind of directionless, almost spectator sport of 'picking out little details on the screen' kind of nature of the film, there are still some sequences which demonstrate Tarantino’s absolute mastery of the art. Two scenes spring to mind, both featuring Brad Pitt where, frankly, even though I’d worked out exactly how they were going to play out before they finished, were nevertheless almost excruciatingly suspenseful to watch and this is where the director really shows why we go and see his films time and time again. One is where Brad Pitt goes to check out an old friend on a ranch (I won’t say more) and the other is when a bunch of hippies invade a house towards the end of the picture. I’d liken them to the scenes with Alfred Molina in them from Boogie Nights in terms of just how insanely intense they are here and, as always, Tarantino has a way of taking things which we take for granted as fetishised instruments of death and reminding us that they are, truly, very dangerous.

And that’s me about done on this one. The common Tarantino needle-drop approach to the music was less appealing to me this time around (and it really shouldn’t have been since I love that period in music) and, although there is the obvious Manson reference to The Beatles White Album in the dialogue, you don’t actually get to hear any of it in the movie. Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood is probably not a film I would recommend to anyone but the most cine-literate of my friends, truth be told but I expect it will grow on me in time and might even be worth a Blu Ray purchase at some point in the next few years. Nothing more to say except... stay on for the end credits.