A tarnished Golden State, and overripe fruit
Let’s face it, we all want another Pulp Fiction. We all remember, either on opening night (me!), a bit later, or maybe way later through a TV the way we felt during, and right after, living through that unique moment in American cinema. How did Quentin Tarantino get away with gangsters talking about the Royale with cheese? Is that really John Travolta? Can we like him again? Did we just see Christopher Walken pop off a two-minute monologue about hiding family heirlooms in anal cavities? And wait, how could the middle of the story happen at the end of the film? Yep, we all remember, and let’s also face it that we’ve been waiting, WANTING another Pulp Fiction ever since. We should just stop with all that, because Tarantino’s ninth film, the excellent Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood proves, finally and triumphantly, that all the peculiar elements of his films can come together gracefully to create a dissimilar but still profoundly satisfying cinematic experience.
Welcome to Hollywood, in 1969 at a moment of profound change. TV isn’t yet dominant, but the writing is on the wall. Films are still called pictures, and they arrive in droves in theaters, mostly doing their job of fleeting entertainment, but lately with less dominance. In this moment exists Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a former B-movie leading man slipping off his perch, and already sliding into irrelevance, forced into guest spots as villains on prime time TV dramas. Sidling up to Rick is Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Dalton’s sometime stunt double, and most of the time drinking buddy, gopher, driver, and all around yes man. Many nights in Dalton’s rented Hollywood hills home, the two sit around watching Dalton on TV, or just sitting around.
Next to them have just arrived, in multiple ways, the new prince of Hollywood Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), and his drop-dead gorgeous wife Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). While Dalton ponders taking roles in TV pilots and second-tier spaghetti westerns, Polanski dazzles the town with his Eastern European auteurist approach to filmmaking, and of course his wife.
In this Hollywood, there is barely a mention of the counterculture movement, the Vietnam War, or much else outside of daily battle of professional survival, and the nightly pull of poolside escape.
Hovering just outside their lives are the hated hippies, seen only as dumpster diving rodents, or stoned purveyors of half-understood psychedelic nonsense. They matter only insofar as they can be made general scapegoats for everyone’s frustrations and confusions. Of course these two worlds will collide, but it’s the journey there even more than the intersection that is so intensely satisfying.
Cinematographer Robert Richardson bathes his LA in soft yellow hues, not so much those of magic hour, more those of a smoggy summer afternoon, when everything’s at once ablaze with light, and dusty with grime. John Dexter’s phenomenal art direction spares no details. His sets reek of cigarettes and stale beer. He puts his actors in cars that are perfect period pieces. His costumes strike the perfect balance of work-a-day and exotic. His props are exquisite, down to labels on cans of dog food and the detail on a box of macaroni and cheese.
All this detail, of course, is to be expected in a Tarantino film, but here it’s brought to an astonishing level of completion, without being too self-conscious. There’s a Netflix documentary that should be made just on how much period detail made its way onto main sets.
Tarantino has said he wrote the film first as a novel, and I’m guessing it’s a novel that would have impressed John Cheever or John Updike with its realism. The film’s pacing and editing, by Fred Raskin, allows shots to run long, and long threads of dialogue to mature, was achieved with lots of help from Tarantino.
The story is structured like a three-tiered novel, the heart of which is the relationship between Dalton and Booth. Both men face imminent extinction, not physical so much as their livelihoods and their ways of living. Dalton, clearly a talented actor, cannot stay on the straight and narrow enough to get through the shooting of a doomed revisionist western TV pilot. Booth harbors a dark past, but keeps it well below a wry smile, a loping gait, and too much reliance on his charm. Dalton must borrow from his celebrity past against his uncertain future. Booth has built up a toolkit of survival mechanisms, both physical and psychological, but deep down knows he can’t rely on them much longer. The men have a relationship that’s something like a partnership, something like a brotherhood, something like a marriage, but not exactly any of those. At nearly three hours, the film gives us plenty of time to thoroughly explore the relationship. True the platonic male relationship has been well mined in cinema, but rarely with this much subtlety and unpredictability.
In parallel, around the same Hollywood streets and freeways frolics Sharon Tate. Her sunny disposition and open-faced manner carry more than a little naivety. She seems to dance or bounce or grin her way through most scenes, something that produces a keen and odd sense of doom, given the real Tate’s fate. Tarantino’s script purposefully minimizes her dialog, a choice that heightens the sense of her as not quite of this world.
Eventually those hated hippies, specifically the Charles Manson clan, begin to move their way into the center of the film. In one spectacular scene, Booth confronts a number of the Manson harem at Spahn Ranch after giving one a ride there from Fairfax in Hollywood. Tarantino knows that his audience knows the Manson story, and he uses this to steadily build tension in the scene, but not veer into horror film tropes.
Booth, Dalton, Tate, and the Manson clan eventually crash into one another in the film’s climax, which reveals to us that Tarantino’s ultimate goal was to hide a B-movie western inside an indie art film inside a piece of semi-historical fiction. It’s an ending for the ages!
Much has been written that this film is Tarantino’s ode to a lost Hollywood, or a commentary on male middle-agedness, and there are elements of those themes here. But viewed through the lens of a western (the film’s true structure), it’s a film about survival, diminishing hope, and dealing with both gradual and abrupt change.
And yet, as with any Tarantino film, it’s really more about how much fun he has taking us on a journey and finally getting us to the destination. In that respect, he’s utterly unmatched here. Scenes take their sweet time to develop, as do performances, dialog, expressions, even shots. The effect is that we slow down, relax and really absorb the many aspects and details that we’re given with the characters. Tarantino is also fascinated, rightly, by how much life is lived in the zone of the mundane.
Significant portions of the story require characters to drive across town, or out into the country, or back. Instead of jumping around to destinations, Tarantino chooses to give us long shots of characters driving around LA in their cars, listening to the radio, thinking, thinking, thinking. It’s a brilliant representation of the fact that much of life is lived getting to the stuff that’s supposed to be life.
Once Upon a Time is Tarantino’s most accomplished, most mature film, and re-establishes him as an artist who we know had great control, but who now we can admire as much for his artistic depth as for his stylistic flash. We don’t need another Pulp Fiction, because now we’ve got Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.
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Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood opens today in Bay Area theaters.
