Tarantino's Act Wearing Thin

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Columbia, 160 minutes, R (language, graphic violence, drugs, sexual references)

★★

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was the final chapter of Oscar-nominated Best Picture nominees I saw. Confession: I’ve been bored with Quentin Tarantino’s hipster bad boy antics for quite some time. He has a devoted coterie who will watch anything he does in the mistaken view that by doing so they accrue cultural capital. It bears saying that Tarantino’s alleged satirical use of violence just isn’t funny in a society as sanguinary as that of the United States. Mainly, though, I think Tarantino is repeating himself.

He is redundant two times over in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. There is again violence, plus Once Upon a Time is another counterfactual movie along the lines of Inglorious Basterds [sic]. His latest follows Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a former TV Western star, and his longtime stunt man/personal gofer Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). The year is 1969, and it’s been a long time between gigs for both men­–Dalton because Westerns have gone out style and he’s sick of them anyhow, and Booth because of his hair-trigger temper, a DUI conviction, and rumors that he killed his wife. Cliff spends his days at Rick’s home assuaging the latter’s ego, watching old shows with him, and smoking dope; at night he returns to his trailer and his pit bull. Maybe if Rick could only meet his new neighbors, director Roman Polanski (Rafaeŧ Zawierucha) and his starlet wife Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), he could wrangle a movie role and help Cliff as well.

Rick isn’t the trendy kind of guy Polanski would deign to meet, though his fortune does shift. Rick is offered a part he’d rather not take, a guest appearance in a new Western series. He struggles at first, but it revives his career and even gets to make some “spaghetti Westerns” in Italy. In the interim, Cliff is ogled by and eventually gives a ride to a hippie chick calling herself “Pussycat” (Margaret Qually), who offers to fellate him, but even he knows jailbait when he sees it. Cliff delivers her to Spahn Ranch, whose owner George (Bruce Dern) was once a friend. Now the place is crawling with hippies giving him the hairy eyeball, and one named “Squeaky” (Dakota Fanning) goes ballistic when Rick insists on seeing George. For good measure, Cliff beats the crap out of the guy who flattened his tires and forces him to change them. Later we learn that the ranch is the crash pad of the Charles Manson family.

Cliff blows his Hollywood comeback with his wise-guy attitude and his beat-down of Bruce Lee, but he goes to Italy with Rick. After six months, Rick acquires a glamorous Italian wife who doesn’t want Cliff hanging around. So far, Tarantino’s film is, as they say, “loosely based” on a lot of things that actually happened. Tarantino based Dalton on Steve McQueen from an old Western titled Wanted Dead or Alive, though McQueen wasn’t exactly washed up at the time; Dalton is more properly viewed as a composite of numerous actors in 1950s’ Westerns. Booth is patterned on Bert Reynolds’ double Hal Needham. Most of the TV shows, movie titles, and people mentioned are also real.

At this point, Tarantino could have made a paean to Hollywood in the 1960s or, alternatively, a refocused update of The Day of the Locust. He also could have fashioned a better version of the disappointing Helter Skelter. Instead he opts for a counterfactual descent into “ultra-violence” in which Rick and Cliff turn Dirty Harry² and save Sharon Tate and her guests from Manson Family droogs. That’s it, folks—two and a half hours of filler so Tarantino can have us contemplate a world in which Sharon Tate lives and Squeaky Fromme gets blowtorched.

Don’t get me wrong. Charlie Manson was evil and his followers seriously deluded. I would rather they had perished instead of Tate. That’s not how it went down, and having her survive isn’t exactly in the category of “What if JFK had lived?” Robbie is very good as Tate, and plays her with airheaded starstruck wonderment. Pitt is strong (in several senses of the word) as Cliff, and DiCaprio is Leo—accomplished, but a bit like latter days Jack Nicholson in that we still see him and not his character. The film also feels like an excuse for Tarantino to reward his rat pack with role crumbs. The cast is way too big for secondary characters to have any depth, so we end up people watching to catch glimpses of Lena Dunham, Maya Hawke, James Marsden, Steve McQueen, Al Pacino, Luke Perry, Rumer Willis, and (literally) dozens of others.

The ending of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a big Nothing Burger. Is it supposed to be commentary on the ultimate vacuity of Hollywood? Or is it that Tarantino has everyone dressed up and provides no direction of where they are supposed to go? Allow me to call Tarantino’s meta references and up the ante with one of my own. If you want to see the ultimate in senseless violence that actually has a point, check out the aforementioned droogs in A Clockwork Orange.

Rob Weir