Review | ‘Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood’

His penchant for gruesome violence is to serve this purpose — to give us a satisfying and darkly humorous alternate ending to traumatic historical facts

A distraction of a cast. Hollywood A-listers Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Al Pacino star in Quentin Tarantino’s latest flick.

Dragging. This sums up Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. It’s almost three hours of a plodding, boring homage to 1960s Hollywood, with plenty of scenes of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio driving in a recreated L.A. in 1969. The 56-year-old director’s brand of violence is only seen in the last five or so minutes of the film.

Once Upon a Time, like Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012) — which are both narratively more superior — is fan fiction. If Disney tweaks its fairy tales for a “Happily Ever After” ending, Tarantino tweaks history to release our collective anger to real-life villains. His penchant for gruesome violence is to serve this purpose — to give us a satisfying and darkly humorous alternate ending to traumatic historical facts.

In Inglourious, we get to defeat the Nazis through Tarantino’s fantasy. In Django, the white slave-drivers. In Once Upon a Time, it’s the Manson Family. Here, he structures his fictional story around the true story of the brutal murder of Hollywood actress Sharon Tate and her unborn child in August 1969 (she was stabbed 16 times in her home). It’s also the period where television Westerns are beginning to fade in popularity.

Now, I wasn’t alive yet during this period. In fact, my mother was still a hippie-dressing teenager when Sharon Tate died. But Once Upon a Time failed to transport me back in time, and I could not enjoy Tarantino’s nostalgic trip to a bygone era.

PITT is Cliff Booth, Dalton’s former stunt double and now driver and gofer. DiCaprio plays washed-up alcoholic actor Rick Dalton.

I once worked as an editor of subtitles for TV shows for European broadcast, which included an ample amount of 1950s Spaghetti Westerns, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but this film’s references, and recreation of old Hollywood, made me disconnected and bored as hell.

The story focuses on best friends Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) who are close to being jobless. Dalton is a washed-up alcoholic actor, whose sparkling career as a famous TV star is already over, and he is now typecast as a villain in pilot episodes — a mere shadow of rising lead stars. His only friend, Booth, is his former stunt double and is now his personal driver and gofer.

Their connection to Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie)? She and husband Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) are Dalton’s next-door neighbors in Cielo Drive — the crime scene of Tate’s murder by the cult of Charles Manson.

Tarantino’s ninth film (this is emphasized, as the iconic director announced that he will quit after this 10th film) is preposterously self-indulgent and even narratively lazy. DiCaprio and Pitt, and even the hippie women in the commune, are merely faces — backdrops for Tarantino’s pleasure-seeking visuals. He marinates in obscene amounts of lengthy excerpts from Dalton’s old TV shows, plenty of women’s feet and tedious shots of production design.

Sure, we get glimpses of Dalton’s fear of irrelevancy, and it is touching and sad and sometimes funny — but not as raw and profound as Keaton’s similar crisis in Alejandro Inarritu’s Birdman (2014). Fortunately, DiCaprio hooks us with his masterful performance and ferries us through the rest of the dull proceedings.

Dalton and Booth lack buddy chemistry, but are mildly compelling on their own. Meanwhile, the audience is put merely as an outside observer of the beautiful Robbie as Sharon Tate, as if Tarantino doesn’t want to fictionalize Tate.

We are only given glimpses of her, but mostly her legs and, of course, her feet. She’s just a walking poster girl. And without giving her a voice, a story, or a personality, the audience does not develop attachment to her; therefore, we do not dread her imminent demise. Also, it is rather distracting that Tarantino used the real Tate in the footage of The Wrecking Crew, which further diminishes Robbie’s presence.

Only when the four killers arrive in Cielo Drive does the audience sit up with a sense of apprehension. In just a few minutes, Tarantino manages to make us hate the evil, crazy cult members enough so that when the slaughterfest happens, it’s satisfying.

But before we get to that long overdue colorful ending, you have to suffer through paper-thin characters and a flimsy script that includes an unwelcome narration.

It’s a tedious film luxuriating in the director’s obsessions. The gorgeous look of the period movie, the languishing, unnecessary details and a cast ensemble of famous Hollywood celebrities — it’s actually full of diversions. Once Upon a Time dilly-dallies and might appeal only to the fanboys and the Cult of Tarantino.