Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
Quentin Tarantino (2019)
The title is entirely fitting. ‘Once upon a time’ is the traditional introduction to an account of events that didn’t really happen. The ellipsis serves as a nod to Sergio Leone, who used the phrase for genre pictures relevant to this one – the Spaghetti Western, the (marathon) crime drama. Since movie conventions and conceits trump historical fact whenever it suits Quentin Tarantino’s purpose, Hollywood could be said to be his spiritual home and the place his work has always tended towards – not just his first trio of features, each set in Los Angeles, but also the most recent three, which take place in Europe (Inglourious Basterds), the Deep South (Django Unchained) and the American Northwest (The Hateful Eight). Besides, he does have a personal connection with the locale. Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee but moved with his mother to LA as a very young child and grew up in the South Bay area. He was six years old in August 1969, when members of the Charles Manson ‘Family’ murdered Sharon Tate and four other people at Tate’s home on Cielo Drive, Benedict Canyon.
Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), the fictional protagonist of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, lives next door, although he’s not been introduced to Sharon (Margot Robbie) or her husband Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha). Rick became a household name in the late 1950s/early 1960s as the star of hit television Western series ‘Bounty Law’ but failed to make the big-screen breakthrough he hankered after. His career was in the doldrums well before the changes in Hollywood culture and practice heralded by Easy Rider (which opened the month before the Tate killings). Nowadays – … in Hollywood starts in January 1969 – Rick keeps getting cast as the villain for one-off appearances in TV series or pilots. Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino), a casting agent, tells him his movie future lies on the other side of the Atlantic, in Spaghetti Westerns that Rick considers beneath him.
Personally as well as professionally isolated, he lives alone on Cielo Drive and appears to have only one friend – Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), his long-serving stunt double, chauffeur (Rick lost his licence, thanks to a series of drunk-driving offences) and factotum. War veteran Cliff seems easygoing but he’s notorious within the TV film industry: it’s alleged that, years ago, he murdered his wife but got away with it. He now shares a trailer with Brandy, his pit bull terrier. The evidence suggests (to put it mildly) that both Rick and Cliff are inspired by actual people, though neither is a real-life individual operating here under a pseudonym.
As always with a new film I’m going to see, I tried to avoid reading much in advance but I picked up somewhere that the story culminated not in a straightforward staging of the Tate murders but in a showdown between the fictional heroes and the real-life villains. Even if I’d not read this, it’s what I’d have expected after Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained – although the definitions of ‘real-life villains’ vary across the three films. The baddies in Inglourious Basterds include Hitler and Goebbels, as well as generic Nazis (singular though Christoph Waltz made SS Colonel Hans Landa). The plantation owner and his acolytes killed by the African-American avenger in Django Unchained are invented representatives of an abominable historical reality. In Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, the disciples of Charles Manson are specific real people. So are the people they arrive in Cielo Drive to slay.
Sight & Sound (September 2019) includes an engrossing interview that Kim Morgan conducted with Tarantino. (According to usual S&S practice, the interview transcript is reproduced seemingly verbatim. Some of Morgan’s contributions to the dialogue work hard to belie S&S‘s exclusive reputation – ‘That’s a great title’, ‘Oh my god, I love this!’, ‘Wow!’) One of Tarantino’s most striking comments is:
‘… most people buying a ticket are going to know Sharon Tate was killed … some people could say it’s in really bad taste, and I risked that – I don’t think I made a movie in bad taste but it’s very much open to the observer – is the fact that because you know Sharon is going to get murdered, that adds a drama to the piece that wouldn’t be there without that knowledge. …’
Tarantino is spot on: a main reason to accuse him of bad taste is not so much that he makes use of an appalling real-life crime in a largely fictionalised context but that he exploits audience knowledge of what happened to Sharon Tate to generate a tension that his film, for the most part, would otherwise lack. He doesn’t articulate so clearly why ‘I don’t think I made a movie in bad taste’ but it’s implicit in what he goes on to say about the ‘three acts’ of … in Hollywood and what he has perceived as the changing audience reaction to the film as it progresses:
‘… when we see Sharon at the airport, when we see Sharon at the Playboy Mansion, we’re just enjoying her. We don’t have this sense of dread, I don’t think … But … every scene with Sharon is getting her closer to the murder. … And the more we see of her, the more we like her, and the more that means something to us. … When I get to my ending, I have to earn it. The whole movie I’ve had to earn that ending.’
Leave aside that this viewer felt a sense of dread from Sharon Tate’s first appearance onwards: what’s important is the second half of the quote. Elsewhere in the interview, Tarantino talks admiringly, even sentimentally, about Tate (though he never refers to her by surname only). His ending rewrites history by allowing her (and the other victims) to avoid the attentions of the Manson Family, thanks to the interventions of Rick Dalton, Cliff Booth and his dog. And Tarantino seems to think that, by rescuing Sharon Tate from her real fate, he’s doing a chivalrous deed.
The S&S interview conveys, more strongly than ever (in my experience), his encyclopedic knowledge of, and passion for, American cinema and television of the period. At one level, it’s likeable that Tarantino, vastly successful as he is, remains so keen to communicate that passion. He was an avid screen viewer from a very young age but he can’t have been aware of what was happening around him in Hollywood in the late 1960s. Now, he’s in a position to be able to recreate it, and he does so in fanatical detail. That doesn’t mean every detail is literally or historically accurate but you wonder, when something’s wrong, if it’s knowingly wrong. Why is there a billboard advertising the war movie Tora! Tora! Tora!, which wasn’t released until autumn 1970? Perhaps because Tarantino has such a strong childhood memory of that film that he has to take this opportunity – an opportunity he may not give himself again – to reference it? The combination of recreation and invention is there too in domestic details. The enjoyable inventions include Wolf’s Tooth, the tinned dog food Cliff feeds Brandy – ‘Good food for mean dogs’ – which comes in flavours like rat and raccoon.
Even so, the engaging surface richness amounts to a gifted film-maker’s self-indulgence – and doesn’t disguise the fact that not enough is happening in the plot to justify … in Hollywood‘s length (161 minutes[1]). Episodes describing the ups and downs of Rick Dalton’s appearance in a pilot for the TV series Lancer are especially protracted: Tarantino isn’t able to make infectious either his quasi-nostalgic fascination with the mechanics of shooting such a show or his belief in Leonardo DiCaprio’s acting ability. Casting an A-lister as an actor on the skids doesn’t work so well as a joky irony if you’re blind to the A-lister’s talent and appeal. A primary inspiration for Rick Dalton is Steve McQueen who, along with Clint Eastwood, is the paradigm of the TV Western actor of the 1950s who became a huge movie star the following decade. ‘Bounty Law’ is evidently based on Wanted: Dead or Alive, the CBS series in which McQueen made his name. Although Rick denies that he auditioned for the part of Virgil Hilts in The Great Escape, Tarantino goes to the CGI trouble of inserting DiCaprio as Virgil into a clip from John Sturges’s film. The McQueen references – he also appears fleetingly (impersonated by Damian Lewis) as a guest at the Playboy Mansion party – have the effect of illustrating the gulf not just between him and Rick but also between McQueen and DiCaprio.
Steve McQueen wasn’t a great actor but he was a great screen persona: Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t either. His performance is characteristically effortful but, in effect, shallow. The latter quality might be thought appropriate for the star of a Tarantino picture but the former isn’t – and there’s no fun in DiCaprio’s shallowness. Preparing to shoot the Lancer pilot, Rick strikes up a conversation with his child co-star Trudi Fraser (Julia Butters), a precocious Daniel Day-Lewis type who promptly informs him that she has to stay in character the whole time she’s on set. After spectacularly cocking up his first scene, when he forgets his lines, Rick returns to his trailer and has an on-the-spot meltdown. He then returns to play a scene with Trudi that impresses both her and the director, Sam Wanamaker (Nicholas Hammond). ‘That’s the best acting I’ve ever seen,’ declares Trudi. Well, she is only eight. (Sam Wanamaker should know better but Tarantino, for some obscure reason, presents him as a ridiculous, gabbling fraud.) DiCaprio isn’t very convincing acting Rick acting – his style is too modern. Alone in his trailer, however, he works up such a head of dynamic steam that he loses himself in it. His playing briefly stops being strenuous and starts being truthful – the Tom-Cruise-in-Magnolia syndrome.
Even though he isn’t modelled on a particular individual but epitomises a mid-twentieth-century screen type, Tarantino’s heady fact-and-fiction cocktail makes it sometimes difficult to avoid connecting Rick Dalton to real movie and TV kin. That puts DiCaprio at a disadvantage beside his co-star. Even though the Wikipedia entry for Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood claims that Cliff Booth is based on more than actual stuntman (as well as the Tom Laughlin character in the Billy Jack films), an audience isn’t likely to see Cliff in these terms: a stunt double is, almost by definition, a faceless, forgotten person. Relaxed and humorous, Brad Pitt takes full advantage of this freedom. You believe in him as – in two senses – a man with a past. It’s talent, as well as age difference (eleven years), that enables Pitt to suggest in Cliff layers of life experience that are missing from DiCaprio’s Rick.
Scenes featuring Cliff are typically more successful, thanks to Pitt and because, by introducing the Manson Family, they move the story forward and prepare the ground for what’s to come. Cliff gives a lift to hitchhiker Pussycat (Margaret Qualley) and drives her to Spahn Ranch, the shooting location for a series of film and TV Westerns and where Manson and his followers, with the agreement of the elderly owner George Spahn, lived rent free, in exchange for doing jobs about the ranch. Cliff, who knows the place and George Spahn of old, is suspicious of the hippie squatters and insists on entering the ranch house to say hello to the owner. Although this sequence too is long, it’s variously effective. By the time Cliff goes into George’s room, after an exchange with Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme (an unnerving cameo from Dakota Fanning), we’re primed for a Norman-Bates’s-mother-type discovery. In the event, octogenarian, nearly blind George Spahn (Bruce Dern) confirms everything that Fromme has said and resents Cliff’s interrupting his siesta. Coming out of the shadowy ranch house into the outdoor light, Cliff is confronted by a row of Manson’s female disciples. The composition, a distaff Magnificent Seven, is one of the film’s wittiest uses of Western iconography.
Up to this point of … in Hollywood, the Family members are, with two exceptions, portrayed as more silly than sinister. (The exceptions are Fanning’s Fromme and Manson himself (Damon Herriman), who appears only once, when he calls at the Polanski-Tate mansion looking for its former occupant, the record producer Terry Melcher.) The shocking chasm between that silliness and the Family’s criminal acts (and cultural impact) is lost through Tarantino’s departure from what really happened. In the climax to the film, the would-be assassins – reduced to three when Linda Kasabian (Maya Hawke) defects at the last minute – are vanquished by Cliff, Brandy and, finally, Rick in a show (the mot juste, I think) of mayhem that is prolonged but cartoonishly exaggerated. It leaves the Manson threesome looking even sillier, as well as dead.
Shortly before reaching the fatal night in August 1969, Tarantino introduces a voiceover narrative (from Kurt Russell, who has also appeared briefly as a stunt co-ordinator). The narrative summarises Rick Dalton’s hectic, fruitful sojourn in Italy during the intervening months, as well as his and the other principals’ movements in the hours leading up to the arrival of the intruders in Cielo Drive. Having reluctantly accepted Marvin Schwarz’s advice, Rick comes back from Europe with several action movies under his belt and an Italian starlet wife (Lorenza Izzo). In spite of a presumably improved bank balance, Rick tells Cliff he can no longer afford to employ him. The two go out for farewell drinks, just as Sharon Tate and her friends – Hollywood hair stylist Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsh), the heiress Abigail Folger (Samantha Robinson) and screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski (Costa Ronin) – go to dine at Sharon’s favourite Mexican restaurant, before returning to her home. The advent of the voiceover narrative, accompanied by minute-precise timings on the screen, is a jarring shift of style, designed to give the impression that we’re watching a documentary account of what happened. As such, its larger purpose is to keep the viewer wondering, until the last possible moment, if that’s what Tarantino might finally deliver too.
When he and Rick get back from the bar, Cliff smokes an acid-laced cigarette that Pussycat gave him when she hitched a lift, and takes his dog for a walk. In the meantime, blind drunk Rick aggressively confronts the Family members who’ve driven up outside and angers them so much they decide to kill him instead of the occupants of house number 10050 next door. When Cliff returns, he’s confronted by Tex Watson (Austin Butler), Susan Atkins (Mikey Madison) and Patricia Krenwinkel (Madisen Beaty). Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood makes you keenly aware of how, watching an absorbing film, the feelings you’ve developed for people (and animals) in the course of it can override your thoughts and doubts about what the director’s up to. Once the final showdown was underway, I was chiefly anxious for Cliff and his pit bull to survive it. (I didn’t much care about Rick.) There was reason enough to fear that one or both would pay the ultimate price: Cliff because, as a stunt double, he does the dangerous things on behalf of a major partner; Brandy because loyal movie animals often have to be sacrificed for the greater human good. In the event, they both come through (Cliff with injuries that he’ll survive) – as does Rick. He’s the one who resurrects his screen past, as lethal hero, to destroy Atkins, once Cliff and Brandy have dispatched Watson and Krenwinkel.
Tarantino’s audience manipulation goes way beyond this. Even though Sally and I saw the film as members of a modest midweek afternoon turnout at Curzon Richmond, there was plenty of laughter coming from alongside and the row ahead of us during the climactic paroxysms. This didn’t sound like uneasy laughter. So what caused it? Relief, that Tarantino has sidestepped the truth, absolving viewers of guilty feelings at being ghoulish voyeurs. Relief also, perhaps, that, as he repeatedly claims, his violence is so spectacularly gory and dehumanising it can’t be taken seriously. But more than relief too: there’s a self-righteousness in his fictionalising bloodbaths – a film-fan self-righteousness in which he wants (and knows he’ll get) audience complicity. Wouldn’t it have been great if the Manson Family members – like Hitler and Goebbels – had been taken out by brave, resourceful movie people! It’s worth stressing that Tarantino not only saves the lives of Sharon Tate and her guests but extinguishes those of people still around today. (Tex Watson and Patricia Krenwinkel are now in their seventies. Susan Atkins died in her early sixties.)
When Cliff keeps pounding Krenwinkel’s head against a wall, perhaps his LSD trip is causing the hyper-violence. (Brad Pitt has already been gracefully funny acting out the effects of his acid cigarette when he opens Brandy’s midnight feast of Wolf’s Tooth.) When Rick looks out the flamethrower he’s kept from a long-ago film shoot in order to terminate Atkins, it picks up an earlier clip of the movie in question (where the character Rick played used the weapon to exterminate Nazis). In other words, the actions of both men articulate with seeds the script has sown: their brutality, to the extent that it’s explicable within a larger framework, isn’t gratuitous. Yet it’s very hard – though not, by the sounds of it, for some people in the audience – not to flinch from the misogynistic bias of the mayhem. Tarantino spends a lot more time describing the killing of each of the two women assassins than he devotes to that of Watson.
It makes matters worse that, as usual in his oeuvre, the female roles are weakly realised, Sharon Tate included. Compared with Margot Robbie, the real Tate had a distinctively fragile glamour. This isn’t just something you read onto her looks in the knowledge of what happened to her: it’s evident even in the clip from The Wrecking Crew, a spy-fi comedy Tate made with Dean Martin, that Tarantino includes. Robbie’s more robust presence eventually makes emotional sense within the context of the film: it almost anticipates Sharon’s survival. In the meantime, though, Tarantino shows Sharon as almost inanely egotistical and privileged – not, I think, intentionally but because he’s just not very good at bringing women to life. The most substantial female role in … in Hollywood is Brandy. Perhaps it’s because she behaves most like a male. Although pit bull bitch Sayuri won the Palm Dog at Cannes for her efforts, the film’s Wikipedia entry insists that ‘Brandy actually required three different pit bulls of varying temperaments. Including another female and a more aggressive male for the ending’!
Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is vividly photographed by Robert Richardson and expertly edited by Fred Raskin. Barbara Ling’s production design and Arianne Phillips’s costumes are superlative, the art work on faux-film posters and Tarantino’s simulations of contemporary TV shows technically scrupulous. Pop and rock songs playing on car radios are a trope verging on a cliché in his work but his frame of reference makes for a splendid soundtrack. The choice of songs is always apt, never obvious. If you come anywhere near to sharing his interest in actors, you’ll enjoy seeing now elderly screen faces of half a century ago among the huge cast – or be frustrated, as I was, by coming out of the film realising I’d missed the likes of Brenda Vaccaro (memorable in Midnight Cowboy, who appears briefly as Al Pacino’s wife) and Clu Gulager (from The Virginian, who turns up here as a bookshop owner).
Yet ‘the 9th film by Quentin Tarantino’ (as the publicity announces – according to his customary, self-important style) is, for all its strengths, much more problematic than it is engaging. One of John Huston’s lesser known and least admired pictures was The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, a 1972 Western (also deriving, incidentally, from a Western TV series of the 1950s), written by John Milius and starring Paul Newman. Judge Roy Bean really existed but Huston’s movie breezily eschewed historical fact: its tag line – ‘If this story ain’t true … it shoulda been’ – came to mind as I watched Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Tarantino’s approach to history is – at least, he appears to think it is – more serious-minded but the result is more irresponsible. This cultural time and place genuinely mean a great deal to him so he thinks he can do no wrong in realising them on the screen. He’s mistaken because, in his moral universe, there’s no difference between revising the Manson Family’s homicidal history and dreaming up a brand of dog food.
21 August 2019
[1] This has become more or less the standard running time for a Tarantino. Inglourious Basterds was 153 minutes and Django Unchained 165. The Hateful Eight was released in two versions, one of 168 and the other of 187 minutes.