Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019)

[2020 review here]

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.

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)

I was pretty excited when I first heard that director and screenwriter Quentin Tarantino's next movie was going to be about the Charles Manson murders, and even more when I heard it was aligning itself as a "once upon a time" movie, which I believe started with Sergio Leone's "in the West" and "in America" and has since continued with settings in China, Mexico, Anatolia, London, Venice, and elsewhere (... leave it to Tarantino to go too far by throwing in an unnecessary ellipsis). But something shifted for me with the casting announcements and other promotion, and by the time the movie came out last summer I was all the way on the other side of the fence, expecting the worst and avoiding it. And, self-fulfilling prophecy or otherwise, that's what I found when I finally got here. What crystallized was that everything since Death Proof has been weak and getting weaker, as Tarantino has spent the last decade systematically and self-consciously trying to make his sadism and the whole elaborate Grand Guignol aesthetic / shtick more palatable by putting them in the service of things universally recognized as right and good. So he has been punching at Nazis, slavery, and mean people in the West, worthy targets all. The object of irritation supposedly producing one more Tarantino pearl this time is hippies from the '60s, which is all fun and games until the moment arrives when the hippie chick with the dirty bare feet is having her head bashed into every solid surface and object available, and the blood is flying. As Lou Reed put it (in a far more sensitive context), you just know that bitch will never fuck again. That scene alone, in the ludicrous finish, goes on for quite some time.

I thought the conceit of these once-upon movies is that the fairy tale title is juxtaposed ironically against the grim settings and actions, but Tarantino's entry is not only set in glamorous Hollywood but also has a fairy tale ending. The only thing missing is a quick bio title card so we can find out how Sharon Tate's life and career went after August 1969 (what did she name the baby? did she finally divorce Roman Polanski and marry Jay Sebring? inquiring minds want to know). Everything about this movie is flabby. Not one of the maximally male wall of stars is particularly good (Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Timothy Olyphant, Al Pacino, Bruce Dern, et fucking cetera, and don't forget Kurt Russell, who inexplicably turns into the voiceover narrator in the second half), nor is the phalanx of gorgeous but obviously second-tier as intended females much better (Margot Robbie, Margaret Qualley, Dakota Fanning, Lena Dunham [!], Dreama Walker). Wasted, all. The soundtrack registers only occasionally, and even Tarantino's trademark zingy dialogue is closer to flatulent. Wait, I take that back about the players. Mike Moh as Bruce Lee was very entertaining. And there's no denying Tarantino's skills as a filmmaker—a few scenes work pretty well. I went into this one with the lowest possible expectations, hoping that paradoxically it would surprise me. That's how it worked with Death Proof, which I avoided at first because of the reviews and then found one of his best when I finally got to it. But Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood is not one of Tarantino's best. It is merely better than The Hateful 8, which can be said about thousands of movies.

True Romance (1993)

USA / France, 120 minutes
Director: Tony Scott
Writers: Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary
Photography: Jeffrey L. Kimball
Music: Hans Zimmer
Editors: Michael Tronick, Christian Wagner
Cast: Patricia Arquette, Christian Slater, Gary Oldman, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, James Gandolfini, Bronson Pinchot, Saul Rubinek, Val Kilmer, Brad Pitt, Samuel L. Jackson, Conchata Ferrell, Michael Rapaport, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore

As a matter of pure coincidence, I happened to run across a listicle on the Internet this morning when I sat down to write, The 15 Best Movies About Lovers on the Run. It not only put True Romance at the tippy-toppest of the heap but also included most of the other titles I'd thought to jot down while looking at it again recently: Badlands, Bonnie and Clyde, Something Wild, Wild at Heart. The only one from my notes not on that writer's list was After Hours, which after all is not so much lovers on the run as man in over his head. A man in over his head is often a natural feature of lovers-on-the-run movies, including True Romance. A man in over his head, but in this case a man rising to the occasion, and in more than easy comical ways.

The listicle writer was also extremely positive about Quentin Tarantino's script, calling it "the purest, coolest, and most honest thing Tarantino has ever written." After Jackie Brown, which I think wins even just on those three specifics, I'm inclined to agree. True Romance is a beautiful underclass Elvis and Marilyn story about a girl from Tallahassee, Florida, and a comic book store clerk from Detroit whose faith in love carries the day. Already Tarantino's greatest strengths are on display, in the way the dialogue rolls, in the way the characters intermesh, and yes, in the way the violence explodes.

The Hateful Eight (2015)

I made it down to Portland during Christmas week for the "roadshow" version of this, at the refurbished Hollywood Theatre, which now qualifies officially, once again, as a Cinerama theater. Huzzah. I haven't seen the wide release version, which is not 70mm film but digital, and 20 minutes shorter, with no overture or intermission. The place was jammed, of course, but full of the polite and studiously disaffected—fans of indie film and/or Portland residents. There was a lot of jostling, and restrooms and refreshments were adventures with long lines, but holiday spirits prevailed, and it felt almost like a privilege to be there. In fact, Tarantino himself made a surprise appearance at the two shows following the 2 p.m. matinee I attended. As for the picture, I have to put it somewhere on the spectrum of disappointment. To me, now, it looks more than ever like Tarantino has been on a long slide since his best movie, Jackie Brown, though everything so far still has something memorably good going for it. I walked out of the Hollywood feeling like The Hateful Eight was the best I'd seen from him since the underrated Death Proof. But a few weeks of living with it in memory has not done it much good. Just my opinion, but the second half, where it turns willy-nilly into a British cozy mystery out of Agatha Christie (Tarantino style, which means among other things projectile vomiting of blood sprays), should just be ripped out—where are the Magnificent Ambersons molesters when you need them?—and something else done to salvage the first half, which has a lot of good going for it. It has the same kind of wonderful sense for what snow does to a Western landscape (and a person's interior) that's also seen in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and with Samuel L. Jackson decked out in a fancy Union uniform it ranges easily from its 19th-century Wyoming setting to simmering issues of race at play in the 21st century. The Jennifer Jason Leigh role is more problematic, invoking murky feminist issues but handling them in unpleasant ways that only seem to get worse as the picture goes along. She gets punched a lot and dies a memorably horrible death. Is it a nihilist's version of equal opportunity? I want to give Tarantino the benefit of the doubt here—surely the painfully obvious reference to Carrie is intended to signify something? I hope? I admit it's hard to see—the point, I mean, but the movie is hard to see too. The set-piece violence is too often grotesque and the action sequences are weak. The second half is a complete waste—wait for a guy under the floorboards. That's when you can leave. I've seen more than one reviewer dismiss The Hateful Eight as "talk talk talk" but I always thought "talk talk talk" was actually one of Tarantino's main strengths, especially when Jackson is his mouthpiece, who is excellent here, as usual. "Talk talk talk" is what I'm looking for in a Tarantino picture, not genre-bending or martial arts or ordnance, but just the art of the bullshit worked to a fine hilarious lather, propelling itself into explosive and ridiculous emotional states, just because the sound of the voice talking is itself so enjoyable. That's here, but not enough.

Pulp Fiction (1994)

USA, 154 minutes
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writers: Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary
Photography: Andrzej Sekula
Editor: Sally Menke
Cast: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Ving Rhames, Maria de Madeiros, Eric Stoltz, Rosanna Arquette, Christopher Walken, Bruce Willis, Quentin Tarantino, Steve Buscemi, Frank Whaley, Paul Calderon, Angela Jones, Julia Sweeney

Well, a lot of the people born the year Pulp Fiction came out will be voting in their first election this November, starting college and families, or, perhaps, the most mature of them, even beginning to give some thought to their retirement plans. They have lived only in the world created by this nervous-talking candy-colored pastiche of post-Scarface gangster cliché (Brian De Palma's Scarface, that is) and hard-boiled detective fiction tropes, with its sweeping reinvention of indie ethos and aesthetic, which turned everything in popular culture in its wake on its head. Its impact is felt to this day, for better and for worse.

I don't have a good sense of what those first-time voters make of it now, but speaking for myself it was a big deal, even when the ruckus itself got to be tiresome. I saw it the week it opened and several more times after that and have checked in on it regularly. It's just such a kick to take the ride. Even though I know well all that is to come* (brief list beyond the fold, spoilers, folks, spoilers), once begun I still don't want to turn away from this long, brash, vivid, dazzlingly confident, viscerally gripping mash of pulp fiction tales from straight out of the Black Lizard catalog, the various storylines coexisting and connecting across a series of time cross-currents that is nearly perfectly plotted.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

 

USA/Germany, 153 minutes

Director/writer: Quentin Tarantino

Photography: Robert Richardson

Cast: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, Gedeon Burkhard

I hear that Quentin Tarantino recently took to the lectern—one would like to imagine him pounding it with passion, red-faced and perspiring, but God probably doesn't love us that much—to make the case for himself as an official Auteur of the Cinema, as of approximately exactly the release of this outlandish World War II fantasy. OK, whatever. To me, that was obvious enough from Pulp Fiction (and fairly probable even with Reservoir Dogs), and I was ready to toss him up into the canon then and certainly am now. Maybe I have a lower bar. Or maybe the whole thing is a joke. But the point is that, at bottom, Tarantino operates at far more serious levels than just surface-gliding referential cinematics. Ironically, cynically, irreverently—yes, obviously. Even overbearingly. But undeniably tackling them. Consider, as just one example, the varying fates of the believer and non-believer characters in Pulp Fiction. Tarantino's movies are rich with narrative and character and human interaction, and always steeped (arguably too much, as with this one) in an encyclopedic embrace of film traditions. I was prepared for my first disappointment here, dubious about a translation of Sergio Leone's spaghetti-western revenge syntax for the Holocaust story that willfully, even merrily, sets itself to trampling widely agreed-on sacred territory, basically making shit up as it goes along even as it attempts to co-opt sympathies via blatant manipulation. He just about pulls off the whole thing too—his only mistake is almost an incidental one, which unfortunately compounds itself: casting the overly smug Brad Pitt, who steps all over himself and the story and everybody else too in a crassly hambone performance. I could also do without the elaborate plot points and heavy-handed referents of the narrative climax, which take up the last hour or so. But watching Tarantino's movies is so monumentally entertaining and satisfying that I found myself (as usual) forgiving even his ridiculous excesses. This is overall not one of his best, it may even be his least, but when it's good it's very, very good. And, yes, he's an auteur. Let's close the book on that one now.