As a filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino has built an entire career on his ability to mine unexpected depths from archetypal b-movie characters. The conversation between the two hitmen in Pulp Fiction about all the “little differences” between French and American McDonalds wasn’t just funny, it was revolutionary. The types of characters who previously existed only to serve a plot function now had complete inner lives, filled with serious emotions and pointless inanities. They were, more so than ever before, “real.”
But if Tarantino’s greatest skill is adding depth to fictional characters, it stands to reason that doing the opposite might be a problem. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood takes real people, and the slightly fictionalized people who live right next door to them, and fetishizes them until they lose their humanity. It’s a story about the motion picture industry in the 1960s but it has little to say about the era or the people within it. It’s a self-serving, self-insert fan fiction where men like Tarantino are unbelievably awesome, women are exactly the women Tarantino wants them to be (or is afraid that they are), and actual history is nothing more than a setup and a punchline.
The year is 1969, and wild west TV star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is at a career crossroads. His show was canceled and now all he can get are guest spots on other shows as the bad guy of the week. His agent, Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino), wants Rick to move to Rome, where a celebrity of his calibre could become a major box office draw in the spaghetti western genre. But to Rick that’s just admitting defeat. He’s a Hollywood star. Anything less is failure.
Rick’s longtime stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) has an even worse career, thanks to a violent scandal that makes all the women in the industry hate his guts – and with good cause. Even so, he’s a hunky acrobat who can (as we saw in the trailer) beat the crap out of Bruce Lee, played by Mike Moh. And he’s kind of the movie’s hero. He enjoys celebrity lifestyles but he doesn’t want to be a celebrity. He’s just super cool.
Except for that horrifying backstory which makes him anything but. You’d think it would be relevant or that at least more nuance would be revealed later, but instead Tarantino tries to use this uncomfortable knowledge to create sympathy for Cliff. We see Cliff lose work because the women who don’t feel safe around him protest, as loudly and shrilly as possible, as though their concerns are somehow unreasonable. Every scene in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood with Cliff in it seems desperate to let a guy who, intentionally or otherwise, caused grievous injury to a woman off the hook.
It’s hard not to draw immediate parallels between the world of Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood and the current Hollywood environment, where men are finally being taken to task for all manner of inappropriate behavior. And it’s hard not to see Cliff, who freely admits he’d sleep with underage teenagers if he wouldn’t go to jail for it, but gets photographed like a sex icon anyway, as an ill-conceived and disturbing stand-in for all the guys who think they’re heroes when all the evidence suggests otherwise.
The frustratingly superficial depiction of Cliff is mirrored, strangely, by Tarantino’s treatment of Rick. DiCaprio plays the struggling actor as a ball of alcoholic insecurity, stammering whenever he’s off camera, in between his many emphysematic coughs. In a scene played largely for laughs he has a nervous breakdown in his trailer and threatens to kill himself. He is vulnerable and he feels it.
But when Rick is acting he’s a powerhouse. Tarantino lets the film linger on the fictional cowboy show Rick is shooting, giving the fictional actor every opportunity to shine. His greatness is undeniable, apparently, to Tarantino. His failings are all treated as inconsequential. Even when Rick jeopardizes the safety of his female co-star just because he thinks it would make for a good scene, she doesn’t complain or get angry or tell the press how irresponsible he was. Instead, she gets up, completely unharmed, and says she’d do anything to make the movie better and in fact she always wears pads just in case and actually she does stunts just for fun because of course she does, so it’s totally okay, you Hollywood professional who endangers women. It was her responsibility to be ready for it, not his responsibility to be responsible. (Okay, okay, if you don’t know what I’m alluding to just read the article; and if Tarantino didn’t want us to think about that then he shouldn’t have made so many obvious parallels.)
Quentin Tarantino has been indulgent before. One might even say it’s one of the defining characteristics of his films. He puts every damned thing about every damned movie he loves on the screen, and like the best curators he places them in intriguing context. He’s been paying homage to gangster pictures and kung fu films and car chase movies and spaghetti westerns for over twenty years, and it’s hard to argue that he hasn’t done an extremely good job of it.
But Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood doesn’t play like an ode to Quentin Tarantino’s movie collection, or to Sharon Tate, or even the history of the industry. It plays like an ode to Tarantino himself, with protagonists who – despite the deftness of the dialogue or the talent of the actors – play like idealized or sentimentalized versions of the director. He’s not taking the people in this time period seriously. He’s more interested, and if anything he’s hyperfocused, on recreating the city streets of Los Angeles in 1969, full of products and billboards and movie theater marquees that no longer exist. And apparently he wishes they still did.
Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood eventually gets back around to the Manson Family thing and there’s no sense in spoiling it. Suffice it to say, Tarantino isn’t interested in contextualizing the relatively meaningless foibles of a mediocre actor and stuntman with a real, horrifying loss of life. He’s dedicated to telling Rick and Cliff’s story and nobody else’s. Anyone who dies as a result of the Manson Family is only important because Rick and Cliff existed. Sharon Tate, as played by Margot Robbie, is built up throughout the entire movie and never pays off. She’s become a meaningless footnote in a movie that wouldn’t exist without her, released on the 50th anniversary of her murder, and the murder of her unborn child.
Quentin Tarantino isn’t terribly interested in actual history, of course. But in films like Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds his exaggerations gave catharsis to the victimized. Actual injustices that didn’t have happy Hollywood endings finally got them, and in a satisfyingly violent fashion. But he doesn’t demonstrate any understanding about the victims of the Manson Family and he doesn’t seem interested in respecting their real lives or even giving them any heroic victory laps. All that matters is that Rick and Cliff are lovable badasses, even though they do things that make them extremely difficult to love.
Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood challenges the idea that we should separate art from artists. Tarantino invites his audience, in practically every scene, to actively consider the inner turmoil within even the most average filmmakers and to view their work through an empathetic, humane lens. And yet the same meta narrative he’s advocating makes Once Upon a Time almost completely insufferable, because he only seems to have genuine sympathy for people like himself. Everyone else is either presented like a superficial ideal or a sexual conquest or an unforgiving monster or a willing and/or deserving victim.
It’s not fun, it’s not smart, it’s not challenging. It just comes across as self-serving and self-indulgent to a hitherto unseen degree. And a few great shots, solid performances and (as always) a stellar soundtrack can’t save it. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is Tarantino’s least satisfying motion picture, a fantasy that got completely out of hand, which spends more time wallowing in fetishistic nostalgia and being unconvincingly defensive than offering anything of genuine value.
