Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Tarantino’s Masterpiece?
Quentin Tarantino is a master of homage, but it’s usually restricted to movie history: here’s it’s more like he’s homaging real life to reaffirm its illusion in the movies. He wants us breathless, in a state where we can’t tell the difference anymore. The spirited fantasy of movie life in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood represents what he’s been trying to do his entire career: he brings us up to the level of the movies. Brad Pitt is the raw, stable persona at the center of a lot of excess, but if DiCaprio is always playing a form of himself (isn’t he usually just Jay Gatsby in a different outfit?), here that over-emphasis on self is absolutely on purpose. He plays a guy struggling with the crisis of trying to be someone other than DiCaprio, in a world where that’s an outdated thing to be.
The two of them almost play in a buddy comedy where they barely interact in a recreation of Hollywood that blurs the fossil record: big fake streets named for ranches in the movies play against real seedy communes built in the wreckage of old studio sets. They contrast like eras of cinema, leading us to the ultimate showdown between reality and its illusion in the movies, where a stuntman confronts the Manson family in a brutal explosion of catharsis. It captures violence as Tarantino has always pictured it: as the way we make bad things seem hilarious.
All his devices hinge on Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, since she’s the real element among all this excessive era interpretation. A ticket teller doesn’t recognize her as that Tate, the one that plays in the sexy comedy pictures, and you wonder if Sharon is pleased or disappointed that she’s not the person she pretends to be in the movies. She sits with her dirty feet propped up in the theater and listens for people to laugh at her on the screen; Tarantino puts the real Sharon up there in the movie to remind us that someone died for this fantasy. In the recreation of her, he hopes to make it alright.
Maybe the feet weird you out? The movie is full of them. But they’re assembled to give us back a reality that only the movies can give us: of a girl who had real legs who died because she was sexy in the movies, now returned to us with just enough fetishization to remind us why it’s relieving to finally save her. This is QT’s ultimate fantasy, his godlike power to change the real world with light and shadow. We watch real movies being filmed because he wants us to remember what that reality is: an edited form of a thousand hours, the work of a thousand machines, turned to a fantasy that makes the whole world seem alright, even when it’s about the bad stuff. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of those.
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Image is a screenshot from the film.
