United States, 2019
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
With Leonardo DiCaprio (Rick Dalton), Brad Pitt (Cliff Booth), Margot Robbie (Sharon Tate), Margaret Qualley (Pussycat)
Rick Dalton has long been viewed as a great and bankable television star, thanks to his lead role in a popular western series, playing a self-confident and ruthless bounty hunter. But now his career is floundering and he realizes his success could be something of the past. Nevertheless, he refuses an offer to go to Italy and take advantage of the rise of the so-called spaghetti western – his story takes place in 1969 – and so he gets stuck in a routine of bad guys roles.
A bachelor partial to whiskey and other liquors, he depends on the stunt double who worked closely with him on his television success, Cliff Booth, for moral support and getting things done in his house and in his life as well. Cliff Booth stands as the perfect buddy who, however, cannot do much to calm down Rick Dalton’s angst or to convince him to shake up his ways.
Both men are astonished to find out the house next to Rick’s mansion has new owners who are none other than a rising and flamboyant star in world cinema, Polish director Roman Polanski, and his gorgeous wife, American actress Sharon Tate. Both men are also riveted by the growing crowd of hippies cavorting on the streets of Los Angeles; for the actor they are a nuisance but the stunt double is attracted to very young brunette, Pussycat, who eventually introduces him to her gang, a large and strange collection of young people that worship a leader called Charles.
Rick eventually makes the trip to Italy. His career gets a new lease of life and he gets married. He chooses to move back to Los Angeles and to put an end to his intimate friendship with Cliff. But the night when they bid farewell with endless toasts is also the time chosen by Charles’s followers to kill some of those artists whose images have shaped a violent and unfair world.
Here is a fresh example of Hollywood having a look at its history and its mores, taking the viewpoint of an artist struggling to keep his or her career going on (an old trick). However, the troubles of Rick Dalton deal mainly with the part of Hollywood churning out television programs; the better-known and better-loved part creating movies looks more like a sideshow – tellingly, it is only by crossing the Atlantic that Rick can relaunch his career as a thrilling film star. Even more tellingly, and surprisingly, this voyage and the transformations it induced barely feature in the film which, on the other hand, dwells on the thankless and exhausting chores Rick must perform to take part successfully in the shooting a TV movie or a series episode. It does it fine, relishing in reconstructing the sets and routines of the era, observing tenderly the work of the staff, scrutinizing carefully the lead character first as he was oozing confidence, bordering on arrogance, and then as he desperately tries to stay relevant. The montage also features excerpts of the fictions Rick leads: his artistic persona segues into his real character constantly, and with brilliancy.
His narrative arc ends in an ambiguous and bizarre way. He is not satisfied with the fame, money, and love he acquired in Italy and he simply cannot imagine what next move he could make in Hollywood. Then he becomes the victim of cult-following hippies who first reckoned to kill his neighbors; but they got massacred instead and he becomes a survivor who at long last can meet Sharon Tate. To be a target at her place and then to get hugged by her seem the ultimate proof he turned things around and is still bankable. This survival (as an actor and as a victim) seems to be the fairy tale promised by the title, altough it has clearly a derisory, parodic quality.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s great versatility and his commitment to work out his role as seriously as possible work (once again plain to see and genuinely impressive) help to convey the idiosyncrasies and nuances of this interesting character of a hapless, unlucky, narrow-minded but sincere actor, and his skill at expressing in a sudden, powerful, flash a deep-felt sentiment (these wet eyes when he is told by his partner, a prickly and highfalutin kid, that he was real good) make Rick a palatable, even endearing character. But the sense and purpose of the character remain murky, actually feel out of touch. After all, his story happens at a critical juncture, when changes in the audience’s tastes and values challenge the producers while styles are shaken up by novelties brought by foreign cinemas and a new breed of directors (think of Arthur Penn or Sam Peckinpah, la Nouvelle Vague from France or Japan and, yes, these Italian westerns). These changes unfold against the background of a rising counter-culture upending ideas on individual freedom, sex and society’s role.
This is only in part reflected by the film which more and more looks like an impish, self-indulgent effort to recreate moments of a television-influenced popular culture. It never alludes to big creative changes but it harps on the pet obsessions of the director as a moviegoer, like Bruce Lee or Sergio Corbucci (who has the good idea to employ Rick and who has been deemed by Quentin Tarantino as possibly the greatest Italian filmmaker, an assessment which is incredibly silly in his arrogance). It also devotes precious time to Sharon Tate – her husband is just portrayed in a few, spoofy, shots, but it is hard to understand why: she comes across as a consistently silly and vain woman while her own, tragic history gets an alternate and delirious version that may offer a great kinetic sequence, which moreover comes as a complete, thrilling surprise, but still feels like a cartoonish and arbitrary contraption hard to relate to. Moreover, her pathetic attackers stand as the sole reference to the hippie movement made by the film, which is an outrageous choice, even in a tongue-in-cheek mode.
“Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” is also a buddy movie, and the chemistry between DiCaprio and Brad Pitt is mind-blowing. Cliff Booth casts another light on the mechanics of the shooting and the fragility of the actors. Never taking himself too seriously, he remains far more practical and astute than his partner. This kind of contrast is an inevitable and welcome part of the genre. But however shrewd and charming the interpretation is, there is still the feeling that the role was more for fun than for depth. Actually, the whole business is just a relaxed entertainment made by a popular culture buff eager to play with a reconstruction of what he felt great or funny in the late 1960s Hollywood (but people are not obliged to share his tastes). The effort to painstakingly and carefully reconstructing the place and time down to the minutest details is awesome, as much as the fluidity of the mise en scène. The film reminds us Tarantino’s gift for parody but here, his narration tends to be rambling, long-winded. It ends up being a shallow, if entertaining, take on the people who make movies and on the nature of movies.