LORNA CARAPULI

For a while now, I have found Quentin Tarantino to be one of the most dynamic and yet simultaneously frustrating filmmakers working today. Dynamic because he tells stories with such passion, directs with such panache, and makes immensely entertaining movies filled with wit, intelligence, charismatic characters and endless movie references (some would say rip-offs) for fellow film geeks.

His pictures drip with style and immensely enjoyable to watch (repeatedly). This was more than enough for me when I was a twenty-year-old in college first discovering a whole new world of film. Over the years, however, as I have become more discerning/sophisticated in my tastes and more demanding of my cinema, I’ve found Quentin Tarantino’s work, hugely entertaining but regrettably shallow. I grew up, but his movies didn’t.

A Quentin Tarantino joint never really says anything — outside of “isn’t this cool?”. When he did finally attempt to say something through his art (with his three most recent “historical” movies) it was incredibly trite and simplistic. He has an essentially adolescent worldview and his movies betray that. They may be very “adult,” in terms of content, but they lack maturity. I have long felt that if Quentin were to finally “grow up,” he might realize his full potential and produce something truly great.

Well, having just seen his latest opus Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019), I can report that Tarantino still hasn’t grown up… but something very interesting has happened. He has grown old.

Quentin Tarantino is not a young man anymore. Now in his mid-fifties, he has achieved a level of success, celebrity, and adulation afforded to very few filmmakers. He has said many times that he plans to retire after 10 films (referring to this one as his 9th… counting the two Kill Bill (2003) Vol 1/2 as one apparently) because he doesn’t want to become sad or pathetic trying to hold on to something long after it should have been let go – a theme that is central to this particular work.

Thus, while his films typically just reveal Quentin Tarantino the ‘film geek’, this latest film reveals more of the man. I would argue that Quentin Tarantino, in fact, reveals more of ‘him’ than any of his previous films. He is less reliant on his usual bag of tricks (his signature quick zooms, for example, are never used this time except in the “movies within the movie’).

Here his filmmaking is uncharacteristically restrained and subtle. Despite how colorful and joyous the film is, there is an elegiac tone. This is new for Tarantino. He has generally looked back in his films. Romanticized older formats, songs, genres and more. Every Tarantino film is infused with nostalgia, but this film bucks his trend. It carries a tinge of melancholy, a yearning, a longing to return to a time and place that he has known mostly through TV and motion pictures… and which, in fact, never really existed at all.

The time and place-Los Angeles 1969 and the level of detail here is stunning (if this movie doesn’t win the Oscar for art design, I’ll pull a Werner Herzog and eat my shoe), achieved presumably without any CGI. Tarantino recreates this era of Hollywood beautifully, right down to gorgeous posters for both real and imagined movies in the background. It is incredibly authentic (or at least it feels that way; I don’t know from personal experience as I was born in the ’90s) as are his simulations of old TV shows and B-movies… all of which star an actor named Rick Dalton(Leonardo DiCaprio).

Dalton isn’t a “has-been” so much as a “never-was”. A handsome but aging leading man-type who never quite got the big break he needed to become the A-list movie star he always wanted to be. He was the lead in a successful western, called Bounty Law, but now under duress, he plays walk-on villain roles in someone else’s show. At his side is his friend, driver and former stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who gets even less work than Rick but seems a lot more content with his lot in life.

The movie primarily focuses on Rick and Cliff over several days that prove to be seminal in their lives. This has been referred to as a “hang-out” movie and that’s because it doesn’t really have a plot. There is a sort of story, but it mostly just follows these two men as they struggle with their impending irrelevance in their changing world.

There is a laid-back, leisurely quality to all their scenes that is very intoxicating (although, it does, on occasion cross over to simple lethargy). The dialogue has the usual Tarantino-esque polish, but it is sharper and less indulgent than it has been lately.

Tarantino started his career writing memorable dialogue that just crackled with wit and intelligence. Who can forget the “Royale with cheese” or “I don’t tip” exchanges? Somewhere along the way, though, he seemed to become enamored with the sound of his own “voice” and his dialogue became unwieldy, redundant, tedious and forgettable (particularly in Death Proof 2007 and The Hateful Eight 2015). The dialogue here is something else entirely: it’s smart without being smug, it is concise without being taciturn, it is interesting and yet still believable. It’s the best dialogue Tarantino has written in a long time.

There may not be a plot, but there is, however, a ticking clock in the form of the film’s third major player, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). While Rick and Cliff are fictional creations (though inspired by real Hollywood figures), Rick’s new neighbors on Cielo Drive are the very real Roman Polanski and his pregnant wife Tate. The film frequently cuts from Rick and Cliff’s storyline to the Polanskis living the high life. While we watch the trappings of money, there is the audience’s knowledge of the real-life brutal murder of Tate, her unborn child and several friends of hers at the hands of the Manson “family”. It lends these scenes an uneasy, haunting quality that only grows more ominous and suspenseful as the movie goes on. We even catch glimpses of Manson himself and his gang of girls throughout the film, always on the margins, never really brought center-stage until the third act.

The movie builds to a climax that is… well, it’s a lot of things, most of which I can’t discuss without dropping huge spoilers, so I’ll say as little as possible. It is, not surprisingly given this is a Tarantino film, very violent and it threatens to undo the very delicate spell that the rest of the film manages to cast (whether it does, or not will no doubt prove divisive for audiences). It is shocking, it is arguably in bad taste and it is a bit out of character from the film. And yet, at the same time, I will admit that it does seem like a fitting conclusion to a movie that is about the end of a very specific era of entertainment (one that is affectionately looked on by its director as a time of more innocence) and the beginning of a new uncertain one. The film’s final shot is very poignant.

While I still have some issues with the film, it is possibly Quentin Tarantino’s best film. For me, it’s his most cohesive work since the tragic loss of his friend/editor Sally Menke. I think this is by far his most personal film yet. Yes, we get his usual obsessions and fetishes (still with the gratuitous shots of bare feet), but we also get some of his hopes, dreams, desires and, I think, regrets. Just as Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018) showed a director dealing with the complicated legacy of his creations, Once Upon A Time is Tarantino facing into the inevitability of his time passing. It is him (finally) allowing himself to be present in his work as more than just the “god” pulling the strings on everything and everyone else. This is Quentin Tarantino at his most vulnerable.

He may have taken the name of this film from Sergio Leone masterful epics like Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) but I think this movie is, in a sense, more like Tarantino’s Wild Bunch (1969). It’s a eulogy to a bygone era that never was, a fairy tale that mythologizes a land of princesses, knights, and dragons. One felt the sadness in Sam Peckinpah’s meditation on the vanishing ‘West’, and its code of honor. One can sense that wistfulness in every frame of Tarantino’s love letter to the city of Angels. The last gasp of the studio system-a place where dreams were made before the place itself turned into a waking nightmare.