USA / UK / China, 161 minutes
Director/writer: Quentin Tarantino
Photography: Robert Richardson
Music: Quentin Tarantino’s streaming playlists
Editor: Fred Raskin
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Margaret Qualley, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Mike Moh, Al Pacino, Lena Dunham, Sydney Sweeney, Kurt Russell, Julia Butters, Rafal Zawierucha, Damian Lewis, Emile Hirsch
I admit I was hard on Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood a few years ago, director and writer Quentin Tarantino’s last feature to date. That’s now going on seven years, his longest gap between features. Previously it was the six years between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. He turned 60 in 2023 and the drift seems to be that he’s thinking of hanging it up, with possibly one more big one to go. Something about movie critics, the way I’ve heard it. Meanwhile, my write-up did nothing to warn people away. I have since seen Hollywood as high as #2 (after Pulp Fiction) on ranked lists of Tarantino’s pictures. For me, with perspective, the last picture he made that was close to exceeding its flaws was Death Proof. Everything from Inglourious Basterds on has represented increasingly diminishing rewards.
I suspect these are unpopular opinions, but I do think Death Proof is underrated. And that Hollywood is one of his worst, which was unfortunately confirmed for me with a recent second look. It’s better than I gave it credit for in 2020, sure—I was notably in a bad mood then for some reason—but that’s not saying much. It belongs with the second-half messes of Basterds, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight, as good, admittedly, as some of their parts can be. Hollywood wallows in a place familiar to Tarantino buffs, nostalgia for the bad movies pumped out then, circa 1969, which showed at B-movie palaces, drive-in theaters, and on TV. Hollywood is so full of clips it sometimes feels like we’re sitting around watching TV and mocking it in some dimly lit stoned haze with Tarantino himself.
I admit I was hard on Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood a few years ago, director and writer Quentin Tarantino’s last feature to date. That’s now going on seven years, his longest gap between features. Previously it was the six years between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. He turned 60 in 2023 and the drift seems to be that he’s thinking of hanging it up, with possibly one more big one to go. Something about movie critics, the way I’ve heard it. Meanwhile, my write-up did nothing to warn people away. I have since seen Hollywood as high as #2 (after Pulp Fiction) on ranked lists of Tarantino’s pictures. For me, with perspective, the last picture he made that was close to exceeding its flaws was Death Proof. Everything from Inglourious Basterds on has represented increasingly diminishing rewards.
I suspect these are unpopular opinions, but I do think Death Proof is underrated. And that Hollywood is one of his worst, which was unfortunately confirmed for me with a recent second look. It’s better than I gave it credit for in 2020, sure—I was notably in a bad mood then for some reason—but that’s not saying much. It belongs with the second-half messes of Basterds, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight, as good, admittedly, as some of their parts can be. Hollywood wallows in a place familiar to Tarantino buffs, nostalgia for the bad movies pumped out then, circa 1969, which showed at B-movie palaces, drive-in theaters, and on TV. Hollywood is so full of clips it sometimes feels like we’re sitting around watching TV and mocking it in some dimly lit stoned haze with Tarantino himself.
It’s what many of us were doing in 1969, when Mannix was a certain model of sophisticated TV entertainment. Leonardo DiCaprio is Rick Dalton, a TV star with a hit Western in the early ‘60s. The show had been canceled by 1969, replaced by a career on TV as a guest star bad guy and then a foray into spaghetti westerns. Brad Pitt is Cliff Booth, Dalton’s stuntman, driver, and all-around paid-for carousing buddy. Margot Robbie is Sharon Tate, who lives next door to Dalton and, in this sentimental but pointless fairy tale, is not murdered by crazed hippies under influence of Charles Manson. Spoiler: they live happily ever after, presumably even Roman Polanski. Samantha Geimer suffers no assault. Presumably. The possibilities stretch to the horizons.
All that mucking around with Hollywood lore still annoys me about this picture, it just feels so cheap. I’ve made my arguments there. I did find it easier to appreciate Tarantino’s skill as a filmmaker the second time around. He has reached the point, like Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, and Martin Scorsese before him (with Paul Thomas Anderson well on the way too), where he can summon superior casts. All the players want to work with them (doubtless an “all the critics love u in new york” kind of thing). But there is a certain and increasing dependency on the charisma of these stars to carry the pictures. The charisma is real, but too easily the action can tilt toward crafty and hollow, the feel of a lot of playacting by children.
So the chemistry between Pitt and DiCaprio is carried off effortlessly, like riding a good wave. A kind of zen koan is wrapped into Rick Dalton here. Playing a bad actor—is that easier or harder? We know DiCaprio is a good actor, even from his kid pictures like This Boy’s Life, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and The Basketball Diaries. Here he seems bad. Even Dalton off-camera feels wooden and inert. Is that purposeful or is that something in my own perception? Pitt feels more like the natural player here. Much of the rest of the cast feel like stunts of costume design as well as performance, such as Robbie, Rafal Zawierucha as Roman Polanski, Emile Hirsch as Jay Sebring, and the hippie chicks at the Spahn movie ranch such as Margaret Qualley. They’re all kind of the West Coast version of an Andy Warhol tribe. Mike Moh delivers a scabrous and hilarious lampoon of Bruce Lee.
I also liked the soundtrack more this time around. Even the hits here feel like deep cuts, riffing on the often maddeningly casual pace of the picture and thus providing relief from Tarantino’s prolongations for the sake of various extremes: Roy Head’s “Treat Her Right,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” in a witty cameo, Billy Stewart’s “Summertime,” Deep Purple’s “Hush,” the Stones’ “Out of Time,” and more, are well placed and memorable.
It’s also interesting how the mode of the picture itself can change, from a TV episode style to affable buddy picture to something more sinister in the unlikely events at the Spahn movie ranch. It often feels like a Western, spaghetti or otherwise, with horses and a character named Tex and such. At one point it becomes a true-crime tick-tock with a voiceover narrator. I’m still not sure who the voiceover guy is supposed to be, but he eventually disappears anyway as things go along.
Hollywood is too long at over two and a half hours. My first and obvious suggestion to shorten it would start with cutting out the extreme violence of the scenes with Rick and Cliff defending the hippie attack. But you’re not going to get extreme violence out of a Tarantino picture any more than hot women’s bare feet. You simply go into his pictures expecting extreme violence and bare feet.
Tarantino remains a darling of a certain set of critics. I’m writing this because Hollywood has already cracked the top 100 of the list of 21st-century pictures at the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? roundup—#78, to be specific. I would also say, given the affable nature of most of it and the length, that it’s probably a good candidate for something to put on at family holiday gatherings. It seems strange that a picture with this level of violence in its finale would fit the bill for holiday fare, but here we are. We’ve all seen the Godfather and spaghetti westerns enough by now. Time to work new titles into the repertoire: Boogie Nights and, accordingly, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s cynically knowing fairy tale. Or, nah, make it Once Upon a Time in America. That at least has an immigrant story to tell.
All that mucking around with Hollywood lore still annoys me about this picture, it just feels so cheap. I’ve made my arguments there. I did find it easier to appreciate Tarantino’s skill as a filmmaker the second time around. He has reached the point, like Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, and Martin Scorsese before him (with Paul Thomas Anderson well on the way too), where he can summon superior casts. All the players want to work with them (doubtless an “all the critics love u in new york” kind of thing). But there is a certain and increasing dependency on the charisma of these stars to carry the pictures. The charisma is real, but too easily the action can tilt toward crafty and hollow, the feel of a lot of playacting by children.
So the chemistry between Pitt and DiCaprio is carried off effortlessly, like riding a good wave. A kind of zen koan is wrapped into Rick Dalton here. Playing a bad actor—is that easier or harder? We know DiCaprio is a good actor, even from his kid pictures like This Boy’s Life, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and The Basketball Diaries. Here he seems bad. Even Dalton off-camera feels wooden and inert. Is that purposeful or is that something in my own perception? Pitt feels more like the natural player here. Much of the rest of the cast feel like stunts of costume design as well as performance, such as Robbie, Rafal Zawierucha as Roman Polanski, Emile Hirsch as Jay Sebring, and the hippie chicks at the Spahn movie ranch such as Margaret Qualley. They’re all kind of the West Coast version of an Andy Warhol tribe. Mike Moh delivers a scabrous and hilarious lampoon of Bruce Lee.
I also liked the soundtrack more this time around. Even the hits here feel like deep cuts, riffing on the often maddeningly casual pace of the picture and thus providing relief from Tarantino’s prolongations for the sake of various extremes: Roy Head’s “Treat Her Right,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” in a witty cameo, Billy Stewart’s “Summertime,” Deep Purple’s “Hush,” the Stones’ “Out of Time,” and more, are well placed and memorable.
It’s also interesting how the mode of the picture itself can change, from a TV episode style to affable buddy picture to something more sinister in the unlikely events at the Spahn movie ranch. It often feels like a Western, spaghetti or otherwise, with horses and a character named Tex and such. At one point it becomes a true-crime tick-tock with a voiceover narrator. I’m still not sure who the voiceover guy is supposed to be, but he eventually disappears anyway as things go along.
Hollywood is too long at over two and a half hours. My first and obvious suggestion to shorten it would start with cutting out the extreme violence of the scenes with Rick and Cliff defending the hippie attack. But you’re not going to get extreme violence out of a Tarantino picture any more than hot women’s bare feet. You simply go into his pictures expecting extreme violence and bare feet.
Tarantino remains a darling of a certain set of critics. I’m writing this because Hollywood has already cracked the top 100 of the list of 21st-century pictures at the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? roundup—#78, to be specific. I would also say, given the affable nature of most of it and the length, that it’s probably a good candidate for something to put on at family holiday gatherings. It seems strange that a picture with this level of violence in its finale would fit the bill for holiday fare, but here we are. We’ve all seen the Godfather and spaghetti westerns enough by now. Time to work new titles into the repertoire: Boogie Nights and, accordingly, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s cynically knowing fairy tale. Or, nah, make it Once Upon a Time in America. That at least has an immigrant story to tell.
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