It starts with the title and lets face it, Quentin Tarantino has always had a knack for great movie titles. How a joke about a Louis Malle movie gave birth to the cryptic phrase Reservoir Dogs is as much a part of his origin story as working at a video store. The man singlehandedly reintroduced the word pulp back into the pop vernacular. Inglourious Basterds wasnt an original handle, but thematically, it was a beautifully borrowed, misspelled bingo! for his World War II story. You did not need to know who Bill was to understand he had to be killed. You did not need to know the long history of adding the name of the gunfighter character Django to sell random spaghetti Westerns to be assured that, in Tarantinos melding of horse opera and slave parable, he had to be unchained.
His new film, however, comes blessed with a simple, mythic moniker. You slap this preamble in front of any location the West, the U.K. midlands, Nazi-occupied France, Mexico, China, Anatolia, America and boom, you get an instant sense of gravitas and grandeur. No in-jokes or mangled pronunciations here. Its the way that epics and fairy tales begin. And for Tarantino, calling his ninth movie Once Upon a Timein Hollywood is a clear signal that you should settle in for something big, sprawling, majestic. For an artist whose work has been fueled by such an all-consuming obsession with movies, its surprising that it has taken him this long to write and direct something about the movies. You wouldnt say this was the film he was born to make. But the alpha king of the cinenerds has been leading up to this sort of meta industry-town ballad for a while.
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The Tinseltown Tarantino drops us into isnt the bustling Dream Factory 39 but Death Valley 69, a moment when a social upheaval is already in progress. The youthquake is still producing aftershocks; Easy Rider will play Cannes in May that year, several months after the first two of Hollywoods three main sections take place, and pound one more countercultural nail into the studio-system coffin come July. Television has already hijacked a chunk out of the silver screens audience, even as the two mediums occasionally trade or upgrade players. (See: McQueen, Steve.) And Rick Dalton, star of the TV show Bounty Law, is one of those guys whose time may be passing. He has a handful of violent shoot-em-ups to his name who could forget The 14 Fists of McClusky? But he missed out on getting The Great Escape, his days of hit singles and Hullabaloo appearances are long gone, and hes never really been able to transcend boob-tube big-shot status. The preference for a new breed of hippie-ish leading men has left him behind. The best Dalton can hope for are regular guest-spot roles as series heavies.
So this pompadoured dinosaur from another era takes a bad-guy gig while his best friend/former stunt double Cliff Booth hanging around for comfort and caretaking, a sort of buddy-comedy duo negotiating being strangers in a strange new peace-love-and-LSD land. Any resemblance to McQueen and James Bud Ekins, or Burt Reynolds and stuntman-turned-director Hal Needham, is not coincidental. The fact that Dalton and Booth are played Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, stars who successfully matured out of pretty-boy phases into serious actors without sacrificing their A-list status, adds one more layer. Both past Tarantino MVPs, theyve proven that they know how to sell his signature patter and play into the filmmakers constant genre subversions. They are card-carrying members of the Tarantinoverse, a world of smooth criminals and smoother talkers, one-woman killing machines and hit-men double acts, post-Civil War avenging angels and WWII howling commandos. These two know how to inhabit a movie world that takes place within the orbits of other movie worlds, in which endless halls of mirrors reflect one mans tastes, sensibilities, top 10 lists. They know how to harmonize with a distinct voice derived from countless hours spent in the dark.
Because thats the rap on Tarantino, right? That hes a master pastiche artist, the Grand Allusionist, the cinematic mixologist who knows why you have to borrow from this French gangster movie and that Hong Kong action flick and these Poverty Row gems andpoliziotteschi in order to make something unique. Occasionally, the maximalist approach meant the ingredients are simply piled one on top of the other, but still, isnt it all just one big tasty burger?
The way that he pulled that trick off with such panache how he made the art of geeking out about movies cool was what turned him from a struggling indie filmmaker to Sundance breakout to auteur superstar. Tarantino could write dialogue, frame a hell of a close-up, name-drop a forgotten director or disreputable genre, and suddenly people wanted to go dumpster-diving too. He had a backstory: raised by a single mother, left high school early, video-store clerk, voracious reader, fest-circuit acclaim, extended European stay and then zero-to-80 mph celebrity. He was the first-rate curator of trash cinema that transformed himself into a makeshift film historian. His ego was kaiju-size. But who was he?
My movies are painfully personal, he told critic Ella Taylor in 2009, but Im never trying to let you know how personal they are. Kill Bill is a very personal movie. On the surface, a film in which Uma Thurman dresses like Bruce Lee and a fight scene replicates a Lady Snowblood showdown and Daryl Hannah channels a Seventies Swedish revengesploitation heroine and Bernard Hermann deep cuts snuggle up next to the Ironside theme doesnt exactly scream roman clef. It suggests someone went on a late-night Amazon buying binge. Then you look at the father issues being hashed out, and remember a few things Tarantino has said about his dad, and suddenly the movie feels like more than just a Dagwood-style homage sandwich. During that same press tour, a journalist friend expressed his love of Jackie Brown and, per the possibly apocryphal anecdote, Tarantino mentioned that it was too much of a 34-year-old mans attempt to imagine the life of a fortysomething black woman. But theres a quiet dignity and grace to how Brown carries herself, and its hard not to think that theres a tribute to the resilience of the single mother who raised him embedded in the movies take-no-shit hero. Just because its not in plain sight does not mean its not there.
The writer-director has often rhapsodized about how much he genuinely loves his characters, and its Jackie Browns chatathons between Pam Griers rock-and-a-hard-place stewardess and Robert Forsters Delfonics-digging bail bondsman that act as an Exhibit A for the defense. (The best Tarantino movie and/or scene is a subjective notion to be debated between every viewer and their respective deity, but Id take Grier and Forster shooting the shit with each other over a million Royale with Cheese-style showstoppers.) There is something so remarkably human, and personal, and indelibly intimate that Tarantino is drawing out of this Elmore Leonard adaptation that proves hes not just the quotation jukebox his detractors often say he is.
And its that same affection for his characters that makes Once Upon a Timein Hollywood a close second in terms of showcasing his ability to let actors forge a connection onscreen. Its a big canvas with a lot of moving parts, real-life figures hovering on the periphery not just Sharon Tate and Bruce Lee, but also McQueen, Michelle Phillips, and the Manson Family, oh my! a scrupulously re-created L.A. circa 69 and more mondo grooviness then you can shake a rack of miniskirts at. Tarantino has, naturally, thrown a lot of specific references in here, from explicit shout-outs to the barely mentioned B-movie actors that served as Daltons inspiration. (For a mostly detailed account of the who, what, and why behind a lot of this, listen to this rollicking discussion on the New Beverly Cinemas podcast.) You want a too-cool-for-film-school soundtrack and fake movie posters that look like the real thing and faux-filmographies with in-the-know titles like Kill Me Quick, Ringo, Said the Gringo? Its only a ticket price away.
But the big sleight-of-hand trick at the heart of Hollywood is that, in so many ways, none of that matters. Or rather, it matters because all of it serves a larger point than hey-guys-check-me-out. It serves the simple pleasure of watching two actors invest everything in two meaty parts, with DiCaprio in prime strutting and fretting mode and Pitt sliding into Booths musky ruggedness like it was a snugly tailored denim jacket. It serves the way these guys need each other and how they both feel lost in an industry thats making them anachronisms. It serves the act of reclamation Tarantino wants to perform for Sharon Tate, the Sixties It girl whos now only remembered as a famous victim and who Margot Robbie turns into a walking, talking sunbeam here. More important, it serves a personal perspective that Tarantino himself has smuggled into the story.
You get this around the halfway point, when Dalton is on the set of a Western TV series and prepping for his Zapata mustache-twirling role. His co-star, an eight-year-old Method actor played by Julia Butters where the hell did he find this pint-size dynamo? is going off on professionalism and why you need to take the business of show seriously. Its the closest thing to Tarantino-esque verbosity the movie has. The kid nails it wonderfully. Then she notices Dalton is reading a paperback oater. She asks him what its about. Its about a cowboy, he tells her, who wont be riding the range much longer. He is coming to terms with what its like to be more useless every day. Rick weeps. She comforts him. There will always be room for artists who do what they can, the girl tells him. They just have to do it in the time they have to do it.
Theres a lot of Tarantinos love for the guys who didnt get the careers they wanted or deserved in that scene, and in the movie at large the almost-but-not-quite-Steve McQueens of Hollywoodland, the Edd Byrnes and Vince Edwards and Ty Hardins of the world. And in that exchange, theres a sense that his own anxiety about where his place is in todays world of intellectual property uber alles and digital streaming-a-go-go and an atrophying film culture. He could have just turned the subtext into text and named the girl Netflix. Tarantino is too famous not to get carte blanche for whatever project he wants; the question is whether he still wants to engage in the seventh arts equivalent of the shaker-ritual dance. The age of movies Dalton and Booth made their bones in, along with the Hollywood-Hills-to-San-Fernando-Valley class system, have passed. Maybe his age has passed too. He keeps talking 10 movies and a retirement plan. Were currently at Revolution No. 9.
But fuck it. For two and a quarter hours, hes going to pay tribute to these guys and their vintage Musso & Frank chic, aided and abetted by two of the last standing movie stars who dont need Marvels name to help sell their movies. (It should be noted that, while Pitt has the Oceans 11 series under his belt, DiCaprio has not done time in franchises. Neither have done superhero movies unless you count a certain cheeky Deadpool cameo, and we dont.) And for two and a quarter hours, Once Upon a Timein Hollywood is arguably the best thing Tarantino has ever done.
You might notice that the running time runs a little longer than that, clocking in around 2 hours and 41 minutes . . . which brings us to the ending. Weve been watching the freaks and hairies edge into the picture at every opportunity. One of them keeps flirting with Pitts he-man until he gives her a ride to her communal pad. Its the Spahn Ranch. Charlie Manson himself has stopped by Tates Cielo Drive mansion, coincidentally located next to Daltons house, looking for Terry Melcher. When the films last segment fast-forwards from early February to August 9th, we know what comes next. Fans of Inglourious Basterds climax probably wont take issue with the resulting third act. Folks who felt a little uncomfortable with the ending of The Hateful Eight are going to want to crawl out of their skin. You are reminded what the definition of Tarantino-esque is, for better or worse. You may also want to scream at the screen, or feel that the swerve, while executed with the mans signature verve, undermines a lot of what has come before it.
What you wont do is accuse Tarantino of not knowing what hes doing, because he accomplishes exactly what he sets out to accomplish. The question is whether you dig it, baby. It may be the most divisive move in a career full of them, but the movies allow those behind the camera to play God. Sometimes that means vengeance and furious anger, and sometimes that means a cinematic corrective. The world according to Tarantino can be harsh and unfair and homicidal. It can send you into downward spirals that no amount of hotshot actors giving you a late-career second or third chance can fix. But the world of Hollywood, according to Tarantino, can allow people to bestow benevolence when they want to. Once upon a time in Hollywood, a young man grew up in love with the movies. He got the chance to make them, and got the chance to do whatever he wanted with the worlds he created inside them. And then he, and some of his creations, lived happily ever after. The end.
A correction: The original article said that neither DiCaprio nor Pitt had acted in franchise movies. Its been updated to note that Pitt did the Oceans 11 movies.