A very young actress, with braids in her hair and a massive tome on her lap, is sat reading on set when the ageing cowboy movie star Rick Dalton strolls past. Rick is having a bad day. His management have made him wear his hair longer, after the style of those slubby hippies he hates, and they've put him in a casual tan jacket with tassels. He feels increasingly like he doesn't fit into the cultural environment anymore. His twee western approach isn't pulling in audiences. His star is fading, he's lonely, he's dejected, and (deep breath) a film producer recently suggested he move to Rome to make action films in Italian. When he asks the child actress shyly "if he'll bother her" by sitting down nearby, she lends him a withering look. “I don't know," she drawls. "Will you?"
Quentin Tarantino's ninth film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Wednesday 14th August) is a film about neurosis. Set in 1969, it documents a time when Hollywood was caught between the slick gloss of the established mainstream (see: Sean Connery's Bond, old-school westerns), and the rough-edged style of independent film-makers like Martin Scorsese and Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider was released in July that year). It's also set at a time when the breezy irresponsibility of the 60s was about to morph into something darker. On 8th-9th August 1969, the actress Sharon Tate and four other people were murdered at the house of Sharon's husband, Roman Polanski, by members of the Charles Manson cult. This was seen by many as the event which marked the end of the era.
In February 1969, Rick (Leonardo DiCaprio) is feeling the effects of these shifts. He lives next door to Polanski, hot-ticket director and toast of the town. But if Rick's professional life is crumbling then his social life has completely dissolved. He might yearn to hang out with Polanski, but the only person he spends significant time with is his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt): a chiselled WWII veteran who drives him around, picks fights with Bruce Lee, and who may or may not have killed his own wife. Interactions with other people fall by the wayside. When the child actress reluctantly agrees that he can sit by her, they strike up a conversation that he finds impossible to respond to normally. "Sounds like a good book," she deadpans, after a description of the novel he's reading. Rick's face crumples into desolation. "Yeah," he sobs. "Yeah it is."
It's clear from the get-go that Cliff and Rick's friendship is toxic; that the stunt man symbolises something poisonous and narcissistic which is preventing Rick from engaging with the outside world. (Cliff's name is no coincidence. In Hollywood, you're constantly peering over a precipice, waiting to fall or get pushed.) Rick is a man of fantasy and inaction; Cliff—who literally drives him around—is his diversion from decision-making. He's a sounding-board, the Horatio to Rick’s “evil sexy Hamlet.” To get on with his life and reintegrate into society, Rick has to get rid of Cliff. The basic narrative follows the ways in which this may or may not happen.
Ultimately though, Once Upon a Time is less a buddy movie than the study of an atmosphere. It blooms into an ambitious panorama of different characters and perspectives, from the dusty Manson cult headquarters (great performances from Dakota Fanning and Lena Dunham), to the luxury of the Playboy Mansion, to Cliff’s sloppy, trash-cluttered trailer, to the retro cinema duplex where Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) excitedly watches herself onscreen. The fact it's a massive canvas isn't unusual for Tarantino. What is surprising is how well it works.
“Hollywood is not the romantic place it used to be, if indeed it ever was that place”Part of the reason the film flies is down to the way Tarantino bottles the essence of Hollywood. Often depicted as a place of languid glamour, in reality, Tinseltown is defined by anxiety. At every turn, the film-making process is peppered with questions and self-doubt. How is the movie being funded? Will it make money? Who is attached to it? Will they draw in audiences? In years to come, will the film survive? Will Hollywood survive? What about Netflix? Or a recession? What about DVDs, piracy, Blu Ray, colour TV? Oh god! It doesn't matter how powerful or successful you are: in an industry that rotates on a continual clear-out, you're only ever as good as your last performance. Each step you take could be your last. Rick is acutely aware of this. So is Tarantino.
Rumour has it that Once Upon a Time might be Tarantino’s last film. (He’s said before he’ll make “no more than ten.”) If that’s so, it’s interesting to consider how it compares to the rest of the canon. First, and perhaps most importantly, the foot fetish is still in full swing. Feet here are squished up against a windscreen, dangled out of a window, flexed over one another on the back of a cinema seat, and flung up to indicate the direction of a dormant Bruce Dern. This is an appropriate motif, if not for the weird sexuality then for the snappy pacing of the film. Tarantino's digressive meanderings have often caused his films to drag. Even Pulp Fiction now feels too long, with its baggy chats and dreary build-up scenes (the less said about The Hateful Eight, the better). Once Upon a Time feels a hell of a lot shorter than its 2 hours and 45 minutes. It has all the gusto and freshness of early Tarantino but without the tedious baggage. Each foot-laden-frame whizzes by at the speed of Cliff's acid trip. A marathon that feels like a sprint.
The film is also notable for how explicitly it engages with death-anxiety. While there's still a large helping of trademark violence, capital-G gore doesn’t arrive until the very end of the film and even then it’s counterbalanced by a fairytale gloss. The overriding feeling of the film is an impending doom and sadness, almost a complicity in what we sense is about to happen—not the blood-spatted chaos of say, Reservoir Dogs. This might be out of respect for the fact it's based on a real-life murder. But it’s also surely because the real-life murder targeted “people like Tarantino.” Manson member Tex justifies the killing beforehand as a purge of "the people who taught us to kill"—that's to say, the people who fed the public appetite for violence by depicting it onscreen. Once Upon a Time therefore not only mourns and chastises the Hollywood of the past. It chastises and mourns the industry Tarantino is part of.
I watched this film in Hollywood, in a cinema several minutes away from Cielo Drive. It felt peculiar to be so close to where the Manson murders had occurred almost exactly 50 years earlier. Hollywood is not the romantic place it used to be, if indeed it ever was that place. Polanski, so decorated here, raped a child in 1977. He won an Oscar in 2002. The rightfully critical discussion around Tarantino’s depiction of non-white characters (problematic, to say the least) shows both how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.
For all their flaws, however, auteurs like Tarantino are increasingly rare and, as the recent Andrea Arnold scandal suggests, what matters now is the brand, not the approach. This was perhaps most apparent while watching the trailers before the film started. They were for: 1) The Goldfinch, an adaptation of Donna Tartt's novel; 2) The PlayMobil Movie, a film based around the selling of a toy; 3) Charlie's Angels, a remake of a remake of a spin-off, and 4) Little Women, a remake of a remake of a remake of a remake, etc, based on a book written in 1884. There was not one original screenplay, let alone anything genuinely contemporary and fresh. Tarantino is known for making references to adverts across a number of his films, but it's tempting to think that the constant references here—Once Upon a Time closes with a fictional ad for Red Apple Cigarettes—are a sly wink to how the artistic lung of the industry has been suffocated by financial incentive.
Throughout Rick's conversation with the child actress, she is patronising and disdainful. She tells him to call her by her character's name. She gives him a lecture about method acting. She stresses the necessity of aiming for unattainable perfection: "It's the pursuit which makes it meaningful," and declares Walt Disney to be a "one in a 50 to a hundred years genius." She is eight years old. For all her snooty precocity, however, after she sees him act she reverts to a childlike wonderment. "That," she whispers, "was the best acting I've ever seen." It's fanciful to take this at face value, and schmaltzy to draw parallels between Tarantino and Rick. But there is a sentimental quality to this film which makes it feel more personal, more human than his other projects. Perhaps it's to do with the comical self-loathing of the main character—like we’re getting a glimpse under Tarantino’s sarcastic exterior. Perhaps it’s to do with the redemptive undertone, or the indulgence of a fairytale ending. Whatever it is, it makes a very good film. And if this is Tarantino's swansong, it's a beautiful note to go out on.
