Film Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

It is difficult to imagine anything that could better illustrate the wretchedness of today’s Hollywood than the status currently enjoyed by Quentin Tarantino. Not that Tarantino has any particular reason to complain about it. On the contrary, he represents one of the few contemporary American filmmakers who can boast fame beyond the circles of critics and ardent cinephiles, as well as the fact that his works attract attention even from the ordinary “rabble” who couldn’t care less about anything not delivered by social media algorithms. Along with that, of course, comes a generally more than solid box‑office result, which looks even more impressive when you consider that Tarantino’s films are neither remakes, nor sequels, nor adaptations of Marvel comics. The problem, therefore, is not that Tarantino is a bad or particularly unsuccessful filmmaker. The problem is that apart from him, there are no longer such filmmakers in Hollywood. And that is especially sad when you consider that a quarter of a century ago he was celebrated as an icon of the new “independent” Hollywood film, that is, the leader of a generation of young, talented and fresh talents who were supposed to bring to Hollywood and world cinema exactly what Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and company brought in the 1970s. Today, however, Tarantino, with all his triumphs, appears as the last of the Mohicans of auteur cinema and a kind of foreign body in a world dominated by impersonal formula, masked superheroes and Oscar‑bait “arthouse” snobbery. Tarantino himself seems aware of this, and in that awareness one can find a kind of inspiration for his latest film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The plot of the film takes place more than half a century ago in Hollywood, at a time when, thanks to turbulent social, economic and cultural changes in the world then, many of Tarantino’s colleagues also felt like the last of the Mohicans. This applies above all to actors and filmmakers who had begun their careers in classical Hollywood and ultimately had to adapt to the new medium of television and the values promoted by long‑haired, LSD‑tripping youth. One of these Mohicans is the relatively young Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), an actor who enjoyed fame in the 1950s and early 1960s as the star of a black‑and‑white Western television series. By the beginning of 1969 many things had changed, television had begun broadcasting only in colour, Westerns were no longer so popular, and the same thing had happened to Dalton, who was reduced to guest roles and pilot episodes of never‑produced series. Dalton takes this extremely badly and finds solace in drink, often getting into trouble from which he is rescued by his best friend and former stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who because of this often has to come to Dalton’s home, in whose neighbourhood the Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and his wife, the young and beautiful actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) have recently moved in. Booth, a war veteran, also has career problems, mostly related to the death of his wife in shady circumstances, which many in Hollywood interpret as a murder for which he got away with it. While Dalton tries to scrape together a fresh start to his career, Booth accidentally meets a pretty hippie girl (Margaret Qualley) on the street who turns out to live on the ranch where Booth used to film movies. Booth decides to visit its old owner Charlie Spahn (Bruce Dern), but it soon turns out that a group of hippies calling themselves “the Family” lives on the ranch, and they may not have the best intentions.

It could be said that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of the most atypical films in Tarantino’s career, and that is because what was considered his greatest asset – screenwriting skill – is least in evidence here. In this film there is no real solid story or plot, not even “cool” dialogue or lines that, as in the case of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction, could be quoted for decades. The film is characterised by an extremely slow tempo, as well as the fact that it boils down to several episodes that are only loosely tied together into a whole by a few not very original or profound narrative tricks. Yet, Tarantino more than successfully compensates for the lack of form with the quality of the content, making it clear that his goal is to show the modern viewer in the most detailed and exhaustive way what Hollywood used to be like – a Hollywood that from today’s perspective is sometimes hard to believe ever existed.

This applies above all to the American film industry at a time when men were men in the traditional and most positive sense of the word. The big and small screens were inhabited by actors who were expected to know how to ride, drive, and also handle weapons, especially because they had undergone compulsory military service or maybe even smelt gunpowder in a real war. That does not mean they were perfect, as best exemplified by Dalton’s alcoholism, but they were also expected to earn success the hard way, starting their careers from the very bottom, and to endure any failures like real men. In this respect Cliff Booth is the best example, stoically enduring his place on the unofficial blacklist and the fact that, unlike his relatively well-off friend, he is forced to live in a trailer instead of a luxury villa. Both Dalton and Booth are aware of the rules of the game, as well as the fact that they are neither the first nor the last who will not achieve success in Hollywood despite having physical appearance, talent and gruelling hard work ethic on their side.

In contrast to the two protagonists who have lost their fame, Tarantino sets the character of Sharon Tate, an actress whose own husband admitted she was no great acting talent, but who, thanks to a tragic twist of fate, remains part of popular culture half a century later. She is portrayed as a not particularly talented or bright girl, for whom it is clear that she won Polanski less with her beauty and more with an unrestrained and infectious hedonism that made life one big party not only for her but for everyone around her. Tarantino further exploited the motif of undeserved fame bestowed by fate with a sense of black humour in perhaps the most controversial part of his film, where he cites Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), the legendary master of Eastern martial arts, as an example of the same phenomenon, and who is portrayed in a as an arrogant poseur clashing with Booth. In all this Tarantino deliberately went for an iconoclastic shattering of everything that today’s politically correct Hollywood holds sacred, but he nevertheless had to protect himself in advance from the outrage of SJW moral guardians and their accusations of sexism and racism by giving Dalton an eight‑year‑old girl actress (excellently played by Julia Butters) as inspiration, who during a conversation voices views about the senselessness of divisions between sexes and genders that were unusual at the time but are unquestionable these days.

In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, however, Tarantino portrays Tate and Lee merely as symptoms, not the cause of the disease that destroyed old Hollywood. For him the main culprit is the counterculture, that is, the baby‑boomer generation whose ideals of a new, better, more beautiful world of peace, brotherhood, free love and flowers in their hair turned out to be merely a pretext for all manner of charismatic, smooth‑talking villains to unleash new bloodshed. The movement found its ultimate expression in the notorious Manson Family, which in this film is portrayed as a bunch of young, at moments beautiful, but essentially bloodthirsty villains. Tarantino expresses exactly the same kind of opinion he expressed toward the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds, or toward white slave‑owners in Django Unchained. And in the end he does it in exactly the same way, in an extremely bloody finale where, much as in the case of Basterds, he doesn’t allow himself to be constrained by historical facts.

In almost everything else, however, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood represents an exceptionally authentic portrayal of Hollywood at the end of the 1960s. Tarantino put the slowness of pace to work in numerous scenes in which the protagonists drive through Los Angeles, reconstructed in detail, with almost no CGI. Connoisseurs of film history will appreciate the many posters and references to popular films and TV series of the era (and there is even room for the Yugoslav film Hell River a.k.a. Partizani a.k.a. The Battle of the Eagles with Tarantino’s favourite actor Rod Taylor in the lead role, who here appears anachronistically, straying in from 1974), as well as authentic costumes and props. The authenticity also extends to the protagonists who, though fictional, are largely inspired by real people. Thus Dalton is based on Steve McQueen, who before his film fame enjoyed the status of a star of black‑and‑white television Westerns (and McQueen himself briefly appears as one of the characters in the film, excellently portrayed by Scottish actor Damian Lewis). The character of Cliff Booth, on the other hand, is based on Hal Needham, a stuntman, double and best friend of Burt Reynolds who used his friend’s star status in the 1970s to launch a successful career as a director.

Even those who are bothered by Tarantino’s conservatism of content, slow pace or not exactly polished screenplay will have to admit that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is an excellently directed film. Tarantino, today one of the few filmmakers who uses classic film stock, also shows that he has learned all the best from the old masters of the seventh art. The scenes, from the opening that draws us into Dalton’s and Booth’s world, right through to the furious finale, display exceptional skill and help Tarantino deftly balance between nostalgic drama and black comedy. Yet Tarantino would not have succeeded in this if he did not have behind him an excellent and quite diverse cast, which includes both forgotten veterans and former stars, as well as fresh talent. The best and most impressive work was done by Pitt and DiCaprio, perhaps the finest star tandem since the time of Robert Redford and Paul Newman in the legendary Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which, coincidentally and deliberately, was filmed exactly at the time when this film’s story takes place. In the meantime much has happened, and such tandems, like talents such as Tarantino’s, have become ever more precious rarities.

RATING: 8/10 (+++)

(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)

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