Quentin Tarantino's long and affectionate tribute to 1969 Hollywood is mostly gentle and understated. In fact, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) is mostly an idyll that avoids the over-the-top provocation in most of the director's other pictures. It has a gory climax, about five minutes of ultra-brutal mayhem, but, since the people getting mutilated are bad guys, indeed, even loathsome, your sympathies are with the people inflicting injury: you're rooting for the good guys to exterminate the villains. If you close your eyes for that sequence, the rest of the two hour and forty-eight movie is pleasantly engaging, nicely acted, and, notwithstanding the picture's length, trots along at at a nice pace -- it's never boring even though some of Tarantino's eccentricities are a wee bit annoying. The film involves the tenuous intersection between a TV western star (Rick Dalton played by Leonardo di Caprio) and his sidekick, his stuntman Cliff (Brad Pitt) and members of the Manson family. If you think through Tarantino's past films, particularly Inglourious Basterds, and deliberate on that material, I wager that you will be able to figure out how the movie ends even before the first shot -- I had no difficulty guessing what would ultimately happen in the film on the short drive from my office to the theater.
The picture doesn't have much of a plot and is mostly bucolic, a sort of pastoral. Rick Dalton was famous for his role as a bounty hunter in a TV show in the late fifties, Bounty Law. When the movie begins, he's been playing the roles of "heavies" -- that is, villains -- for several years. (Bounty Law has been canceled.) A talent agent, played by Al Pacino, meets him in a bar and advises the cowboy star that he is being eased out of his career -- playing villains is a one-way ticket to nowhere. The agent urges Dalton to go to Italy and star in spaghetti Westerns. Dalton resists the idea and even bursts into tears at the notion that he's washed-up. He's been drinking too much and is having trouble reciting his lines on-camera. Dalton's best friend is his long-time stunt man. Cliff has to drive Dalton around Hollywood because the actor has too many drunk driving convictions to be allowed behind the wheel. Cliff is a good ole boy loner, a man with a bad reputation who is said to have murdered his wife (and gotten away with it.) Dalton tries to get Cliff assigned to the TV shows on which he's working, but the stunt man is too volatile --in one scene, he beats up an Asian kung fu master who is playing Cato on The Green Hornet. (Of course, this gets him fired.) Intercut with the buddy-story of Rick and Cliff are a series of vignettes involving Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. We see Polanski and Tate at a Hollywood party where the Mamas and Papas are performing -- and Steve McQueen muses sadly about the fact that he never had a chance to seduce the beautiful Sharon. The scenes with Polanski, Tate, and Jay Sebring are inconsequential and really don't go anywhere. But, clearly, Tarantino is much taken with Sharon Tate (or, at least, his image of her) and his camera tracks her with something approaching chivalrous love. In an extended sequence, she picks up a hitchhiker (to no effect at all) and, then, wanders around Beverly Hills alone before going to a matinee of The Wrecking Ball, a Dean Martin quasi-James Bond picture in which Tate appeared as something like comic relief. We see Tate watching the movie and deliriously happy, not with vanity at seeing her image on the big screen, but with something much more engaging and charming: she's delighted that other people in the audience seem to enjoy her acting and are laughing at her antics on-screen. Polanski is cipher in the film -- we seem him dressed as an Edwardian dandy in the party scene, but he's really not on-screen for more than a few minutes. (Rick longs to be cast in one of Polanski's films and hopes that living next door to the director will benefit him in this regard.) One of Tarantino's conceits is that the characters have traits that rhyme with one another. For instance, Sharon Tate takes off her shoes and puts up her bare feet on the seat ahead of her at the movie. The hippie girl who lures Cliff out to the Manson ranch puts her bare feet and toes on the windshield of the car Cliff is driving (of course, it's owned by his buddy Rick Dalton). In one sequence, we see Sharon Tate sleeping and the camera lovingly tracks along her body, all the time the soundtrack records her snoring loudly. Similarly, Rick's new Italian wife is shown snoring when she returns jet-lagged to Hollywood and falls asleep immediately in the bed at her big new American house. Tarantino's plotting and narrative is as loose as can be, in fact, almost non-existent for long periods in the film -- this is not to say that the incidental details aren't fascinating and, often, very engaging. But this is not the kind of movie that inexorably builds to a carefully devised climax -- instead, the film is more about accident, happenstance, and serendipity. There's a showy sequence in which Brad Pitt climbs up on top of Rick Dalton's house to fix the cowboy star's TV antenna -- the scene lets Cliff remove his shirt and expose his fabulously handsome torso. The sequence establishes the relationship between Rick's mansion and the home where Sharon Tate is living -- and, in fact, there are two showy crane shots in which the camera rides up over the house to look down on the home rented by Polanski (the film ends with this shot). But we expect something to occur in this sequence, the images to have some kind of connection to the rest of the film, and, in fact, there is no real relationship to the rest of the movie -- it's as if Tarantino wants to be fair about supplying "eye-candy": he's shown Sharon Tate in a number of loving posed shots and, so, now he wants to give the ladies in his audience something to see and so he unveils Brad Pitt atop Rick's house. It's a generous gesture, and, in fact, the film is very generous in providing the viewers with things that they want to see, but it is awfully loose and most of the scenes in the first two-thirds of the movie don't go anywhere. There's a lovable mutt whose role in the film's climax is obvious from the moment the beast waddles into view --it's Cliff's pit bull mix. (Cliff supposedly cherishes the dog but also seems to abandon the pit bull for six months at a pet kennel -- this seems cruel: it's a minor plot point, but one that Tarantino obviously hasn't thought through.) Many sequences seem constructed to signal importance but end with anti-climax. The hero, Rick Dalton clearly takes the affection and loyalty of Cliff for granted: the movie shows Rick enjoying all sorts of privileges denied his stunt man (he flies first class while Cliff sits drunk in coach) and one waits for Cliff to show some sort of anger or, even, mild irritation about his status as a perennial "second banana" -- but the scene never occurs. (In fact, Rick even humiliates Cliff -- he makes him push a huge stack of his luggage through the airport when the two men, with Rick's new Italian wife in tow, return from Europe.) Furthermore, the film's bloody climax occurs after Rick has told Cliff that he no longer needs his services -- Rick is now like Clint Eastwood, a powerful Hollywood star; Clint lives alone in what looks like an Airstream trailer next to a shabby San Bernadino drive-in movie theater. Cliff is the man who has made Rick's derring-do possible -- but, in the end, he is abandoned: Rick doesn't even go to the hospital with the badly wounded Cliff but instead parties with his Euro-trash neighbors next door. The unfairness of the situation is manifest -- the loyal friend whose qualities never really secure him the advantages to which he is entitled, but, oddly, enough Tarantino doesn't develop this theme. The strange thing is that he doesn't look away from it either -- he emphasizes the unfair dynamic between the two men but seems to accept it as simply the way things are. Ultimately, Rick Dalton takes the agent's advice and goes to Rome where he makes movies with Sergio Corbucci -- a particular hero of Tarantino. Rick's career gets a jolt and he comes back to Hollywood on the night that Manson's family makes it raid on Hollywood, armed to the teeth and giggling with bloodlust about killing "piggies." The events of that night are carefully detailed, more or less in accord with actual facts (up to a certain point) and we see Sharon Tate, now heavily pregnant, with Abigail Folger and Jay Sebring (as well as a Polish friend of Polanski's) at their home. It's a hot night and, of course, murder is afoot.
Several scenes stand out as particularly effective, although all of the movie is very well done, if a bit aimless. In one sequence, already mentioned the rough and ready, stunt man Cliff tangles with Cato -- Cato is like a two-bit Bruce Lee and he has boasted that if he fought Cassius Clay, he would end up "crippling him." Therefore, it's a lot of fun to see the karate champ get his comeuppance. Several scenes in which Rick Dalton interacts with a preternaturally alert and brilliant child actor (not "actress" as she reminds us) are very touching and show a sentimental streak in Tarantino that is unanticipated but welcome. A scene set at the Spahn Ranch where the Manson family is holed-up is extremely suspenseful and brilliantly staged -- and we get to see Bruce Dern chewing the scenery in this sequence. (In fact, the scene at the Spahn Ranch is probably the best sequence in the movie -- and it's about forty-five minutes or more before the bloody climax.) A hippie girl that Cliff picks up and, then, refuses her blunt sexual overtures is indelible -- I don't know what actor (not "actress") plays this part but she is wonderfully sexy and, then, menacing. The Spahn ranch scene, however, also illustrates a peculiarity of the film that is annoying and hard to justify: as Cliff is beating up one of the Manson gangsters, one of the girl's rides up into the country where another Manson devotee, Tex, is leading a trail ride with three tourists. Tex is summoned to ride down to the confrontation occurring Wild West style at the Spahn movie ranch (it was used as set for Hollywood Westerns for many years). Tex rides hell-for-leather to the ranch -- we get six or seven montage shots of him spurring his horse down steep slopes into the canyon where the ranch is located. But when he gets to the ranch, Cliff has driven away -- the whole wild horse chase was for nothing: the sequence ends with an anti-climax that is curiously disappointing. Tarantino has gone to great lengths to characterize the tourists on their rented horses (one of them looks like Connie Stevens) and stages an impressive series of shots with the galloping horse, but to what end -- it goes nowhere. We are supposed to feel menace, I suppose, when Sharon Tate picks up a ragged-looking girl hitchhiker but that scene goes nowhere either -- it's not suspenseful, not developed for suspense, it's just a throwaway. Similarly, the film is full of what I call "showdown walks" -- these are the iconic moments in Hollywood Westerns when a gun fighter walks the empty streets to a duel with the bad guy. We constantly see people's shoes and boots as they portentously walk various places. But the film doesn't have any real show-downs and so these lovingly detailed sequences, some of which are quite long, don't have any point at all. Tarantino almost never edits the film as one would expect in a classical Hollywood picture -- and the rest of the film with respect to camera angles, camera placement and general mise-en-scene is very classically Hollywood "invisible style" (most of the film could have been directed by an unobtrusive movie maker like Howard Hawks). He never cuts away from people walking or traveling from one place or another -- about a fifth of the movie consists of freeway shots, cars motoring here and there while music plays (these scenes do give Tarantino a chance to install plenty of late sixties pop hits in the movie); another fifth of the movie consists of people portentously walking from one room to another. Clearly, Tarantino admires the Hollywood (and spaghetti Westerns) from the period and wants to invoke them in the way the movie is made -- but I don't recall as those films, many of which were cheaply made, being as wildly profligate with, more or less, pointless images of people and vehicles going from one place to another. Despite these flaws, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is an excellent film and, even, a bit inspirational, but it seems very oddly muted -- Tarantino uses the world "hippie" as an expletive and term of abuse (it's similar to his use of the word "nigger" in his other films). He takes an oddly sadistic pleasure in detailed shots showing brawny men inflicting vicious and disfiguring injuries on women -- this is an element of his sensibility that is on display during the film's climax and similar to the endless abuse heaped on the prisoner and sole woman, Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in The Hateful Eight -- it's distasteful but with Quentin Tarantino you have to take the good with the bad. There's even a bit of substance in one scene in the film -- one of Manson's brainwashed soldiers, a young woman, points out that she is the child of TV and that every single TV show "except I love Lucy is about murdering people". So the killer meditates, I've been raised to be a murderer and, of course, I will murder people. A lot of Tarantino's movies strike me as gratuitously mean-spirited and nasty -- this was view of Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight, and Inglourious Basterds. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood isn't like this at all -- I think it's rather sweet, optimistic, and gentle.
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