Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)

Directed by: Quentin Tarantino | 161 minutes | comedy, drama, | Actors: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Julia Butters, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Mike Moh, Luke Perry, Damian Lewis, Al Pacino, Nicholas Hammond, Samantha Robinson, Rafal Zawierucha, Lorenza Izzo, Costa Ronin, Damon Herriman, Lena Dunham, Harley Quinn Smith, Scoot McNairy, Clifton Collins Jr., Rumer Willis, Kurt Russell, Zoë Bell, Michael Madsen, James Remar

“It’s official old buddy, I’m a has been.” Writing in the late 1960s, we meet (fictional) television actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman-cum-driver and best friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Dalton sees his career slowly waning and has to make do with villain roles in cheap TV pilots (a tailspin confronted by a fine Al Pacino as the ultimate Hollywood agent). His attempts to break through in the film world have ended in a fiasco.

Next to Dalton, on the other hand, is the new “king and queen” of Hollywood, in the characters of Roman Polanski (the director who just made “Rosemary’s Baby”) and Sharon Tate (the actress on the verge of her big break, here portrayed by Margot Robbie). And when you think of 1969 Hollywood, you quickly think of Charles Manson and his cult, who then sowed a trail of blood and destruction in Los Angeles.

When Quentin Tarantino’s “ninth” project was announced, there was a slight wave of outrage across the internet. Especially because the Manson ‘family’ was responsible for a wave of violence in Los Angeles, in which Sharon Tate, among others, was gruesomely killed. The main question was how Tarantino would approach this: would he use Tate’s murder as a shameless exploitation, or perhaps give history a revisionist twist, as he did before in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ and ‘Django Unchained’?

Without giving away anything about the ending, at least we can state that Tarantino is in no way guilty of exploiting the Tate murders. In fact, Tarantino is doing everything he can to crush the myth surrounding Manson. ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ can therefore be read much more like ‘a day in the life’ of the has beens. We follow Cliff who leisurely drives to his secluded house to feed his dog; we see Rick wrestling with himself on the set of a western and Sharon Tate watching her own movie at a local movie theater. Much more than a tale of murder and manslaughter, this is a series of encounters, dialogues and calm car rides. A hangout film at its best, which in Tarantino’s oeuvre finds its equal in ‘Jackie Brown’.

But anyone who thinks Tarantino has become a melancholy softie in his old age will be disappointed. Until the last twenty minutes there is hardly any blood flowing – but make no mistake: Tarantino already proved with the opening scene and the sequence in the pub in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ that he does not need violence at all to build tension, and that Hitchcock -like suspense he equals here with a scene in which Cliff visits the infamous Manson ranch. Pure horror involving hardly a drop of blood.

But ‘Once Upon a Time…’ is above all a beautiful portrait of a time gone by. The production design is therefore fabulous; rarely has a Tarantino film been so beautiful: you imagine yourself in the Hollywood of that time every second, not counting the unparalleled soundtrack. And then the acting: with DiCaprio, Pitt, and Robbie, Tarantino tied three of the greatest stars of our time, and the actors are great. DiCaprio shows his most sensitive side, as a highly uncertain time that feels deep inside that it is over, so that he can hardly suppress his inner insecurity. Pitt is the superlative of cool (and hasn’t been this good in years), but also threatens to dazzle the public on a regular basis. Because his Cliff Booth seems like a much more complex character than his stuntman-with-great-body actually suggests.

But the portrayal that caused the most controversy is that of Sharon Tate. Tarantino, for example, received careful criticism in Cannes for the small amount of text by Margot Robbie. Completely unjustified: ‘Once Upon a Time…’ is an ode to the forgotten actors, a melancholic love letter to Hollywood and the inevitable transience, but above all a film about perpetuating myths against your better judgement. It is a film about an illusion, with Sharon Tate as a symbolic beacon. The illusion of what was, is and could have been is masterfully maintained by Tarantino. It is an easy reflex to measure the impact of a role by the amount of dialogue, and in this case completely misplaced.

The very decision to bring Tate out of the shadows of her own misery turns out beautifully (especially in a magnificent cinema scene where Robbies Tate looks at footage of the real Tate from the (forgotten) movie The Wrecking Crew, no doubt. the most beautiful scene in the film). She is no longer frozen in her own tragedy, but is given a second life by Tarantino. It was not for nothing that after the release of ‘Once Upon a Time…’ there was extra demand for old films by Tate: by honoring her legacy and giving a twist to her history, she may be remembered a bit more for who she was, not what the monsters made of her.

‘Once Upon a Time…’ is above all a melancholy what if story with which Tarantino pays tribute to the forgotten and muzzled names of Hollywood. A straightforward love letter, packaged as a melancholy meander about a bygone time, and perhaps also about Tarantino’s own career (‘Once Upon a Time…’ would be his penultimate film). If Tarantino does indeed go into space for ‘Star Trek’ for his latest project, it could just be his farewell letter to classic cinema.

But who knows, maybe television will beckon in the future. Fifty years after the great turnaround in Hollywood, the film world is at the same crossroads, but the roles have been reversed: big names are increasingly opting for prestigious television productions and the film world is overrun by creative poverty. But looking at the countless discussions that ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ has already sparked and the unsurpassed face that his films still have twenty-seven years after ‘Reservoir Dogs’, the film world can hardly do without Quentin Tarantino.