I can’t recall ever being so surprised by a film as I was upon viewing Tarantino’s latest, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. As with most of his films, each is an experience more than a film. Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, et cetera, these works of art stick with you, but he appears to have outdone himself with Hollywood. I can’t speak as a pinky-out critic of any caliber, merely someone who enjoys fun movies. And I sure-as-heck found it in this movie. Where to begin? The movie saunters through a beautiful, 1969 Los Angeles. Too beautiful, in fact. Every ad, every face, every car, every conversation, has an angelic quality. The love of films themselves is apparent is almost every shot. Margot Robbie is blindingly beautiful as the doomed Sharon Tate, and she exudes a high voltage joy in each scene. Yet the obvious, dark undercurrent weaving its way throughout is the inevitable Manson massacre that begins to feel palpable the farther you go into the film. It gets worse the more attached we get to the characters that we know won’t survive. Robbie’s Tate in particular. Her unearthly beauty and charm casts such a spell that you, audience goer, feel increasingly helpless as the film builds to the bloody climax, that you badly want to defend her from the inevitable but know that you can’t. You can’t rewrite history.
And here is were Tarantino uses the ace up his sleeve.
Ever heard a crowd of people cheer in a theater? You will if you see this movie. Perfect strangers were veritably sky-hooting in unison during the last ten minutes of the film as their secret fear did not come to pass.
So, Spoilers.
Manson’s killers descend on Cielo Drive at around midnight on August 8th, 1969, yes, but something quite unexpected occurs. All you could really say is that the catharsis of half a century, from an entire generation, was suddenly loosed in cinemas around the nation. Brad Pitt’s character, Cliff Booth, high as a kite from smoking an LSD-laced cigarette, is confronted by Rex, Susan, and Patricia. At this moment we, the audience, wholeheartedly believe that we will witness his death, along with DiCaprio’s character and that of his wife. And yet. Cliff’s lucidity returns in a flash while facing the hippie scum, and with the click of his tongue, he commands his beautiful beast of a pit bull to attack Rex. Suffice to say, Rex and one of the female killers is shredded by the dog. The third gets torched by an utterly sloshed Leonardo DiCaprio, wielding a flamethrower that had been used as a prop from a previous film. The audience laughing and cheering throughout.
It’s in this moment of revenge that the audience realizes how much they’ve despised Tate’s killers. We have always hated the pieces of human excrement that took the life of an 8-month pregnant Sharon Tate even if we didn’t realize it. And probably most of us have harbored the barbaric desire to see them get what’s coming to them. And, in this film at least, they do receive it.
There’s so much more to the film than just the build-up to the Manson murders. For instance, was Bruce Lee really as much of a jackass as he was portrayed to be in the film? Watching the film in the moment, you couldn’t care less, and the subsequent dressing-down he receives at the hands of Pitt’s character is fairly satisfying.
Was 1969 Hollywood, and its inhabits, really as beautiful as Tarantino’s portrayal?
The best parts, for me at least, are the various disembodied moments; a young Roman Polanski taking his french press coffee to a backyard table in the morning, An electric Tate taking in a matinee of one of her own films. Brad Pitt weaving in and out of traffic. The exquisite dialogue-heavy scenes that Tarantino is known for. It is the perfect summer movie.
