BEST OF 2019: The Surprising Emotion of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
For as long as he’s been making movies, I’ve burst out of screenings of Quentin Tarantino’s films thoroughly energized; high — manic, even — and hungry to pounce. I dig my claws in and rip apart my victims — those poor souls who in their sweet innocence simply tagged along for a good time at the theater. Even if they’ve known me for years, they are never quite prepared for what they’re in for as I pontificate over Tarantino’s filmmaking prowess, his brilliant casting decisions, his blocking, his ear for dialogue. The painful look on my victims’ faces that I only momentarily recognize before I tripwire my ego — self-defense systems suddenly kicking into high-gear, torpedoing self-delusion enzymes into my neural circuitry. Safe and oblivious from their judgments and mental anguish, I brutalize otherwise memorable quotes and recreate scenes for an audience of one, scenes that typically call for actual talents such as Samuel L. Jackson, Christoph Waltz, Uma Thurman or Brad Pitt.
In my exuberance, I don’t know any better. I am deaf, dumb and blind but for the visions replaying in my head. Tarantino’s movies are a narcotic that actually affect my behavior; negative in the short term, but I believe (once I’ve calmed the fuck down) positive in the long. Scratch the narcotic comparison… it’s more like a vaccine.
This auteur almost always makes movies that invigorate me, send me into this sad, manic state because of how completely the films speak to me (or speak for me) and how eloquent his audio-visual feats communicate my love for a medium that I often have a hard time expressing in written words. With each film, I somehow love cinema just a little bit more because he invites me into a tiny and often underappreciated corner of the celluloid world, his affection contagious.
It’s a little surprising then, that two nights ago I went to see Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and I left the theater not really wanting to talk to anyone at all. I didn’t want to pounce or quote or compare. My wife was spared a bad version of the Bruce Lee monologue about his lethal weapon hands. For one thing, I was processing what I saw, juxtaposing that against what my expectations were and then returning to what the film actually is in the end. In other words, my thoughts and feelings about those thoughts were scattered. But there was something else that made me feel less-invigorated, less-social and more sane. It wasn’t disappointment. It was emotion. It was melancholy.
LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is, at times, invigorating and thrilling. It’s also a shockingly bittersweet film with an ending that really shook me because of how goddamn moving it is. And it’s stayed with me days later. This movie and it’s ending lingers. Before it fades to black, our cast of characters are all granted a Happy Ending, but there’s no purity to it.It’s also stained with an undercurrent of a deep sadness. It is, in fact, a haunting ending, but one with such beautiful intent. It’s all of those things — happy, sad, haunting and beautiful — all at once. I truly have never experienced one quite like it.
We live in the film, this place where dreams are made, and our temporary lives there in the dream are not unlike the real world — both have a running time. When the celluloid hallucination ends, you can’t help but contrast it against darker realities… when you think about what may have happened to guys like Cliff Booth and Rick Dalton in the real world; when you consider what happened to Sharon Tate… it is all more than a dream, more than entertainment; more than a love letter… it feels like a gift not only to you the viewer, but those names above to whom you grow to care so much about.
As moving as it is, this is still a Tarantino film. There will be blood, it just isn’t as consistently violent as you might expect… because this is a love letter (or Tarantino’s version of a love letter). It’s his way of saying goodbye to a Hollywood whose sun has long since set, whose players no longer exist or are no longer players at all. It’s gentle, and I just didn’t see that coming.
I have my issues with the film. It took me a second viewing to reconcile with the pacing. There is plenty of story in OUATIH, but there seems to be very little plot. Without the usual plot points, it takes a while before the film actually feels like its gearing up towards something else. As a result, the first hour felt a bit longer than it should upon my first viewing. At the same time, this is Tarantino working in a mode he hasn’t really worked in before. It’s essentially an arthouse film and a buddy comedy, but it’s a Tarantino arthouse buddy comedy. So there are colorful characters, long stretches of engaging dialogue and, oh, yes, there is violence. But for a good chunk of the running time, we are passive observers of a day in a life (really a day and a half in a life) of its two primary characters.
Yes, the film is a love letter to Hollywood, but a specific Hollywood that — the film argues — changed the night Manson’s cult and Sharon Tate crossed paths. The name “Manson” is never uttered in the film far as I can tell and the film isn’t about the Manson murders per se, but it’s about this time and place where the entire culture changed and unfortunately, history — and happenstance — cast Tate to play a sad, exceedingly unfair role in the horrifying events that led to some of these changes. Because of what we know of Tate, the film briefly (comparatively) tags us along with her too, so that we may capture some of her light before We-Know-What happens. She isn’t a primary character (which may bother some folks) and we follow her on what turns out to be a rather mundane day, but Monica Castillo captures perhaps better than anyone else I’ve read on the subject of what works about Tarantino’s handling of Tate as a player in the overall work.
…rather than going deeper into the film’s historical fan-fiction, he gives us “a day in the life” of the character. As the guys encounter famous faces on set, Tate runs errands: she packs for a trip, listens to records, drives, goes out to dinner with friends, shops for her husband, and goes to a movie (her own, of course)…Robbie’s sympathetic portrayal serves as a bittersweet reminder that even Tate’s most mundane hours on earth were cut short in real life.
The real meat of the story involves Rick Dalton, an actor whose star power is fading, and Cliff Booth, Dalton’s long-time stunt double and best pal. Dalton is one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s greatest performances. DiCaprio should have won an Oscar years ago for The Wolf of Wall Street, but some of the gifted comedic chops he exhibited in Scorsese’s masterpiece is once again on display here. He is a bit of a self-pitying buffoon, but he’s an undeniably gifted actor (Dalton, I mean) and his inner pain, his fears, his fragility… is real. He has a stammer in real life that all but disappears when he’s really keyed into a role. It would have been easy for Tarantino to make a complete joke of him, to show that guys like him disappeared because they were simply limited as performers. But much of the film is about the fragility of fate and how much luck plays into how a life is lived and remembered. Dalton could have been Steve McQueen. He was this close to becoming McQueen. He had the chops to be McQueen. But it didn’t happen and you get the feeling he’s spent too much time feeling sorry for himself and not enough time appreciating the career he had or the talent that allows him to do it so effectively.
In one of the film’s best scenes, Dalton is artistically inspired by a young 8-year-old thespian (and a major showcase for Julia Butters who goes toe-to-toe with DiCaprio), even if he doesn’t really know it. The next time he’s on set for the television show he’s guest appearing on… well, let’s just say I expect Leo to be nominated once again next year.
Contrast the career-in-twilight that Dalton, at times, takes for the granted with Sharon Tate’s wide-eyed wonder as she reveals to a box-office attendant that she’s in the movie they are screening, hoping to score what (we could guess) is her first free movie ticket — one step closer to being an official member of the “community”. Margot Robbie’s beautiful performance is one of exuberance, kindness and curiosity. Tarantino never makes a character of her, doesn’t try to make her “cool”, he never exploits her. She is given the dignity of being a regular person.
The more you know about what becomes of her, the more bittersweet it is watching Robbie’s Tate sneak on a pair of giant lenses to watch her performance in the Dean Martin vehicle, The Wrecking Crew. She’s absolutely beaming as the audience responds enthusiastically. Tarantino chooses to cut to the real film with the real Shannon Tate’s actual performance so that we — along with Robbie’s Tate and the audience surrounding her — can enjoy her line delivery, cheer her on when her character lands a Bruce Lee-styled kick on co-star Nancy Kwan and get a real taste of her legitimate talent for physical comedy. There is an underlying sadness for us, who have the benefit of history, witnessing this young woman in one of her happiest moments, but Robbie is so full of sunshine watching “herself”, you will find yourself positively beaming as well. It’s another one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
And then there’s Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth. Booth owns a beautiful pit bull named Brandy. She is well-trained, dangerous, loyal, disciplined and reliable. And this pretty much describes Booth as well. He is beautiful, well-trained, dangerous and a loyal friend to Rick. He’s Rick’s stuntman, but he’s getting older and Rick’s career is slowing down. Whereas Rick is an emotional wreck, Cliff is as laid back and worry-free as they come. He might be, quite literally, the coolest motherfucker in Hollywood (though this comes with an asterisk, as he may or may not have a darker past than we realize). He’s content with being content. He’s also content with fighting the most dangerous man in Hollywood, Bruce Lee, when challenged. Pitt is so effortlessly good in a role like this, I can’t exactly call his casting “inspired”.
Pitt’s performance really takes off in the second half of the film (particularly in the last act where we are treated to some true comedic highs). There’s a wonderfully eerie sequence (the film’s best) that brings Cliff to the Spahn Movie Ranch (an old, ghost town of a movie set where many old television westerns used to be shot). The Manson cult seem to slither out of old saloons and barber shops, stationing themselves on porches, gaunt and ghost-like. We’ve seen some of these girls sprinkled throughout the movie. The first time they appear — in the early frames of the film — they do so ominously; like bitter, cold gust on an otherwise bright summer day. If you know what awaits their violent futures, it sends a chill down your spine. Tarantino’s sound design during the Spahn Movie Ranch sequence is masterful. Cliff wants to make sure the caretaker is okay, but the Manson girls are suspicious, hesitant and appear to be making up stories about his whereabouts. Cliff is too confident and (we some to learn) too compassionate to be stopped from checking in on an old friend. It says a lot about the filmmaker’s tonal command that we are actually a little worried for Cliff Booth given everything we’ve come to know about him. And here Castillo once again succinctly expresses the role Manson and his cult play in the film:
The Manson clan only appears briefly; they loom ominously over the movie’s two stories like storm clouds ready to burst.
“…like storm clouds”, that’s exactly how Tarantino uses the Manson girls. They loom over old Hollywood and new Hollywood, over 1969 flower power culture, over Kennedy, Nixon and Gerald Ford, over the old school of leading men like Tab Hunter and a new school of talent like Dustin Hoffman, over Roman Polanski, over Abigail Folgers, over Sharon Tate, over fate…
What if it was Rick Dalton and not Steve McQueen who landed the part in The Great Escape? What if Terry Melcher believed in Charles Manson’s musical talents? What if Polanski had never moved into Melcher’s old home with his new bride?
There’s a truly beautiful montage that kicks off the film’s last act, set to the tune of Jose Feliciano’s version of “California Dreamin’”. The sun sets and the neon lights atop the boldly-lit marquees of cinema houses splash across the Hollywood landscape.
A friend of mine said it reminded him of the lighting of the torches sequence in Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. I didn’t really understand the comparison. The lighting of the torches is one of my favorite scenes in cinema history, a sequence of inspiration and burgeoning excitement because it signals that the cavalry is fucking coming. Meanwhile, Feliciano’s melancholic take on the song portends something sadder, something that can’t be helped. A day later, I reconsidered the lyrics…
All the leaves are brown
And the sky is grey
I’ve been for a walk
On a winter’s day
I’d be safe and warm
If I was in L.A.
….
All the leaves are brown
And the sky is grey
I’ve been for a walk
On a winter’s day
If I didn’t tell her
I could leave today
I never really considered these lyrics before, from a song I’ve heard a thousand times. They are sung from the perspective of someone dreaming of California from a place that is decidedly not like California. They long for somewhere warm, somewhere where the leaves aren’t brown and the sky isn’t gray; a place where a message to a girl can be delivered.
Finally, it came to me. My friend was right. The neon lights are the torches. The cavalry is coming. It’s too late to save Sharon Tate, but Tarantino can spare us. After the sun sets and the lights turn on in somewhere like California — that’s where dreams are made.
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