In his ninth feature film (he keeps count), Quentin Tarantino’s emphatic style is more comfortable in its own genre-soaked skin than it’s ever been. The camera doesn’t pan or tilt or dolly on its own so much as it seems to keep time with the late 1960s soundtrack. People kill each other to the bombastic harmonizing of Vanilla Fudge’s “You Keep Me Hanging On.” This is all to say that Tarantino, now 56, is never boring.
In the historical counter-factual fashion that is now characteristic of him, Tarantino imagines that Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and her husband, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), have a next-door neighbor named Rick Dalton (Leonardo Di Caprio). Now in his late 30s, Rick did well as a TV actor in a 50s western called “Bounty Law.” And he’s still trying to be That Guy in 1969. Tarantino relishes the many Family Guy-style flashbacks to Rick kicking ass as the no-nonsense bounty hunter. QT is a serious disciple of genre schlock who always highlights the levity inherent in it.
Rick is simultaneously looking to branch out and convinced he’s washed up. The culture is about done with guys like him. He’s even apprehensive about saying hello to his stylish next-door neighbors, the “hottest director in Hollywood” and his glamorous, free-spirited wife. But the camera glides like Superman up and over the fence, into the sky, and from one property to another. The bravura camera move early in the film asserts Tarantino’s conceit visually. Can you believe it, he seems to say, the guy lives right next door.
As much time as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood takes to establish Dalton as its flawed hero, it is Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth who steals the film. In what is, for me, Mr. Pitt’s career-best performance, Booth is a kind of hero character for cinephiles, an archetype from a bygone time when we needed archetypes. His world-weary nonchalance seems to be his main superpower. The “real” Steve McQueen (a perfectly cast Damian Lewis) sits by a pool and gossips like a Hollywood dirt sheet writer about who’s dated whom. (Granted, that scene contains the film’s best one-liner joke.) Meanwhile, Booth, who is Rick’s stuntman and all-purpose fixer, does the things the movie stars pretend to do.
In Inglorious Basterds, Pitt’s heavily southern accented military man feels like a cartoon character. You witness Pitt jumping into the animation cell and exaggerating his movements. In Cliff Booth, though, Pitt is at ease. The way he sits, walks, smokes — there’s no detectable performance. Booth is a “cool guy,” but not one who’s going to argue with you about it. We’ve seen this fella before in Tarantino’s universe. Think Max Cherry and Jules Winnfield.
In recent years, I’ve noticed that Mr. Pitt, now 55 years-old and twice divorced from equally famous spouses, is remarkably at ease in interviews. It’s almost as if he’s spent twenty-five years or more having his name be synonymous with “handsome” and knows there’s not much to be done about it. This breezy, affable demeanor is so consistent that it might make a character like Cliff a lobbed pitch for Pitt. The film belongs to Booth. His employer goes through every stage of existential angst, while the stuntman seems to have made his peace with angst long ago, or maybe even made it his bitch. When it’s revealed, early on, that Cliff had a pivotal domestic incident in his past, we feel as if we already knew that. He’d been wearing it on his sleeve all along.
Once Upon a Time takes a good long while to find it’s story. Tarantino is content to film the classic cars and billboards of Hollywood in 1969 and shuffle us through his roster of favorite actors, fading each one in and out of the film like a well-prepared principal at an elementary school Christmas pageant. And why not? He has unfailing good taste in actors. Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern, Scoot McNairy, and the late Luke Perry all get a moment. There they are, and there they go.
There are flubs, though. Al Pacino feels somewhat like a stretch. Also, you could cut out half of Di Caprio’s scenes and not lose a whole lot of what the film is trying to do. Moreover, Margot Robbie’s much discussed portrayal of Sharon Tate ends up being more of a grace note in the film. There’s not much to the character. In Tarantino’s vision, Tate is not even a symbol for anything. She’s just a pretty girl who was lucky until she wasn’t. It was proper for Tarantino to have been asked at Cannes about the short shrift he gave both the character and Robbie.
Eventually, Cliff finds his way to the Manson Family’s dilapidated ranch, and we’re treated to some impressively tense scenes. The three sets of main characters — Cliff and Rick, Sharon and her friends, and the Manson clan — sort of circle each other for most of the running time. And even when the plot reaches its crescendo, they still don’t get much time together.
Despite all the hullabaloo, Once Upon a Time is not about “What If x, y, or z had never happened?” The Tate-LaBianca murders are of little interest to Tarantino, or to us, really. What it is is a film about the where and when, not the how and the who. And the filmmaker’s affection for the setting and time period leaps off of the screen more than any murder would, real or imagined.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — FOUR STARS
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Rated R
Sony Pictures Releasing
Heyday Films
Columbia Pictures
Bona Film Group
Visiona Romatica
161 mins.
Lewis On Film 