Movie Reaction: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Formula: Hail, Caesar! ^ Burn After Reading

I admit that I've got a lot of "film bro" tendencies. I'll see any Christopher Nolan movie opening weekend argue that the wooden characters and questionable sound mixing were a feature, not a bug. I'll insist that Martin Scorsese hasn't lost his fast ball, 40 years into his career and 2.5 hours into the inert Silence. I'll talk about how you can't just watch a Paul Thomas Anderson or Coen Brothers movie once to fully appreciate what they're doing. However, one "film bro" trait I don't have is an unyielding love for Quentin Tarantino. I appreciate his strengths - the unique rhythm of his dialogue, his control over every scene, the way that his love of film bleeds into every frame. I really like Reservoir Dogs and I enjoyed The Hateful Eight more than most. Overall though, I'm pretty indifferent about his work. I've never understood why Pulp Fiction is so highly regarded*. I had a hard time even finishing Kill Bill. And, Inglourious Basterds went significantly downhill after a great opening scene. I don't have anything against Tarantino though. I don't think he's washed up either. My second favorite movie of is was his most recent one before this year. So, I came into Once Upon A Time in Hollywood excited for what it could be, rather than preparing to have it confirm all my prior issues with Tarantino.

*My best assessment is that it's credited for starting a movement that it was really just a part of.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (OUATIH, for short) continues Tarantino's trend of writing alternate (or extended) histories. It follows Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a washed up Western star trying to keep his star from fading for as long as her can. He spends most of his time with his personal stuntman and friend, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). The movie is set in 1969 and Rick lives next door to Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha). You know, the place when the most infamous Manson family murders occurred. The majority of the movie takes place over a single day, several months before the murders and follows Rick, Cliff, and to a lesser extent Sharon as they live their lives. Rick works a gig as a guest heavy on a new Western show and tries not to sabotage himself. Cliff meets a young woman (Margarey Qualley) who leads him to a run in with the Manson family. Sharon is just enjoying her life as a rising star. I won't say where things go by the end, but you can guess pretty easily, given Tarantino's last decade of movies.

It's sort of a "slice of life" or "hang out" movie, similar to Hail, Caesar!, only set a decade later and less manic. There is no excuse for this being 2h41m long, although it didn't feel that long when I watched it. I'm a sucker for old Hollywood stories, so I was happy with most of the detours, whether it was Rick discussing method acting with a little girl, Cliff getting in a fight with Bruce Lee, or Sharon showing up at an old timey (for us now, not her) movie theater that's playing one of her movies. The setting and style of the movie leaves a lot of room for familiar actors to show up in small parts. I won't even try to name them all.

DiCaprio, working for the first time since winning an Oscar for The Revenant (2015) and Pitt are a great duo. DiCaprio plays Rick very big. He's silly and sympathetic without moving into caricature. Pitt balances that out by playing Cliff with the ease and movie-star charisma that he often tries to tamp down. By design, Robbie doesn't do much as Sharon Tate. Tarantino isn't interested in rewriting her story. She's mostly in the movie as a tease for the events we know are coming. Margaret Qualley is probably the biggest scene-stealer. I've liked her since The Leftovers, but between this and Fosse/Verdon in the last year, I'm starting to think she has star potential.

This is a strange kind of comedy. There are some laughs as things are happening, but it's more of a comedy in the Burn After Reading sense. There's a lot of escalating story. The audience (in my theater, at least) mostly held back from laughing because they were trying to figure out where things were going. Then, the biggest laughs came at the end as different setups got paid off and a couple characters matter-of-factly summarized the events.

It's hard for me to talk about my issues with the movie without spoiling the end, so I'll stop here. OUATIH isn't Tarantino's best by any measure. I'd argue it has the least to say of any of his movies. That's not an indictment of it. I like plenty of movie without a lot of purpose, but it does make the long run time harder to excuse. The pair of movie star lead performances keep it moving at a good pace and never lets it get boring. Oh, and - no surprise here - the music is great. It avoids most of the obvious needle drops.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

After the Credits

This movie suffers some from being a Quentin Tarantino movie in 2019. We know his tricks. Because of Inglourious Basterds and to a lesser extent Django Unchained, I spent most of the movie knowing how the end would play out. I always assumed that Rick and/or Cliff would stop the Manson family from murdering Sharon Tate somehow. So, I was never nervous. Had I not known that, then seeing poor, unsuspecting smiling Sharon Tate throughout the movie would've made me queasy and worried. So, when the Manson family decides to target Rick's house instead, it all felt perfunctory. The Manson family went from genuinely intimidating when Cliff visited Spawn Ranch to silly lunatics at the end. When it devolved into the over-the-top violence, that just felt like Tarantino including it because that's what people expect from him. There wasn't really anything bold in the movie. Cutting off before the murders happened or not preventing them would've been a way to zig when everyone expected him to zag. Instead, Tarantino's fingerprints were all over this to the point of smudging it.