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Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood
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Works Like a Dream
It’s a fairy tale, and a cruise liner. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood drifts
for a long time, two hours or so, until the end is at last in sight – a fantasy
ending, in the strongest possible sense: one that never happened in historical reality.
Sharon Tate and her friends weren’t murdered that night in August 1969; they
weren’t even visited by those deranged members of Charles Manson’s cult-like
Family. Instead, that mob bursts in next door, where they find Tarantino’s fictional
characters: in particular, actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his
ever-faithful stunt double and best buddy, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt, who in many
respects steals the picture). Now it’s violence time, Tarantino-style: he’s
really kept us waiting and praying for this gruesome set-piece.
Justice is swiftly served upon these leering, hippie
villains by our movieland heroes, and with an accelerating level of sadism: a
face is smashed into hard surfaces over and over, a dog mauls another’s limbs
mercilessly, and the last-standing avenger is burned to a crisp by Rick’s
flamethrower – the same device that, much earlier in the film, served (in one
of many mock film-within-the-film clips) both as a parodic gag about
Tarantino’s own Inglourious Basterds (2009), and as a set-up
that will allow Rick to master one actual action-skill of his own – and get to
use it in reality. That reality which (to loop back) is really a fantasy …
Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is a film that may have you looping back a lot, in your head, after
you’ve seen it; it’s definitely had that effect on me. I don’t think it’s in
the very top line of Tarantino’s work, but it’s certainly his best since Death Proof (2007); I enjoyed watching
it, and agree with Yann Tobin in Positif (no. 701/702, July/August 2019, “Cadillac
vintage”, pp. 112-113) that it’s “un Tarantino de charme”. (1) But, for
all that, not merely charming on an easy-viewing, enjoyment level. So I want to
start the more reflective part of this review not with the typical array of
hot-button topics like gender (does Margot Robbie as Sharon get enough lines
of dialogue? Is she an overly angelic pixie girl, a male-projection?), race
(disrespect on Bruce Lee, for shame!), violent revenge (to which I will
return), the counter-culture, and an entire American reality of the late ‘60s
only alluded to (if at all) as it disappears into a vast, off-screen space …
No, I want to start with a scene that beguiled me in
its set-up and unfolding. It’s the presentation of Rick’s first major scene in Lancer – the scene he keeps fucking up
by forgetting his lines. Now, Lancer (directed here, and in the historic reality, by the actor Sam Wanamaker, played
by Nicholas Hammond) is a TV show – a TV Western, in fact. Joachim Lepastier in Cahiers du cinéma (no. 757,
July/August 2019, p. 80) began his mostly negative review (titled
“Schnockllywood”) by registering his disappointment at this malign “fall” from
cinema to TV homage at the project’s very outset – he calls it a “smaller than life Hollywood”. Judging by
Sam’s enthusiastic blabber about Shakespeare and improv and contemporary truth, Lancer may have somewhat more
pretention than the earlier TV Western (opening the film) that made Rick’s fame
as the character of Jake Cahill, Bounty
Law – but it’s still, all in all, destined for mostly small, black and
white sets the world over.
Tarantino, however, gives this scene to us from inside
a dream – his own movie dream, and perhaps Rick’s as well. Lancer, as it initially unfolds for us here, is in colour and
widescreen; the camera moves are ample and elegant. It’s been – in a mode we
are seeing a lot today in supposedly realistic, behind-the-scenes showbiz
exposés like Fosse/Verdon (2019) – already cut, graded,
mixed. It’s ‘60s TV as ‘60s TV never, ever was – and definitely not like the
(lovingly restaged) square-ratio ‘50’s TV clips we’ve seen earlier from Bounty Hunter, with their chintzy low/high
angles, dialogue and cutting. Until, of course, Rick’s lines are off and –
still in the same kind of frame – he calls for line-prompts and retakes. Then
we are suddenly back in the messy process of making, not the sleek, fabricated
(even fantasticated) finished product.
Tarantino knows what he’s doing here; the shift or
slide in the scene is well handled. And it made me think about the category of confusion – between movies and life, TV
and cinema, fantasies and realities – which is everywhere in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. At one
point, it gives us the digital update on this type of confusion: DiCaprio as
Rick imagined inside The Great Escape (1963), “seamlessly” (well, sort of – it is a fantasy, after all) substituted
for dumb-lucky Steve McQueen (although the McQueen incarnated in another scene
by Damien Lewis thinks he’s dumb-luckless for not being Sharon’s preferred
physical “type”).
And then there’s the centrally significant site of the
Spahn Ranch – previously a town-set for Westerns, now gone to seed, and
inhabited, as far as the eye can see, by members of Manson’s Family (Manson
himself, curiously, is almost completely absent here – although the same actor
playing him, Damon Herriman, gets a lot more time and many more lines in season
2 of the strictly contemporaneous Mindhunter [2017-2019]).
And – not quite as well done as in Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984), which is surely
Tarantino’s source of inspiration for this detail – there are the painted trompe l’œil landscape backdrops that
are wheeled aside to reveal some other, usually less picturesque reality. (2) And so on – tying up, for me, in the only
seemingly deranged but in fact highly lucid speech by a Manson girl (Susan
Atkins played by Mikey Madison), arguing that these Hollywood types deserve to
be killed, since all they ever showed this younger generation, through their
media screens, was killing. She has a point there! (An earlier reflection on
this theme in relation to Tarantino, first written in 1994, can be found in my
essay “Just Another Bullet
in the Head”.)
Twenty years ago, I mused about how Tarantino’s
arrival on the cinema scene could seem like the answer to the prayers of No. 1 supercool
critic Manny Farber – or, at any rate, the small army of self-styled Farberians
of the time (and since). For there, especially in Pulp Fiction (1994) but also, a little differently, in Jackie Brown (1997 –
still, significantly, the only adaptation of another writer’s material in QT’s
career) was a certain version of termite
art: ambling, loose-limbed movies, full of jazzy eccentricities, high on
description (rather than narrative), lingering with people in places … In 2019,
there’s an instant meme for this that whips around almost every published
review of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood:
it’s no longer termite art but a hang out movie, where the characters do the hanging out (and we, in our fancies, do the
same alongside then, as spectators), cruise down the streets in smart cars,
drop in on this or that locale …
Loose-limbed, or loosely wound, it sure is. Is this
quality both Tarantino’s immense charm and his fatal limitation as a filmmaker?
He is the type of director once described (alongside Wim Wenders and Jacques
Rivette, and they all do tend to make rather long films) as “one thing at a
time” artists; i.e., each scene is devoted to one major point, one mood, one
incident, one place, one slab of dialogue – as distinct from (not better or
worse than) artists who work to layer many things at once into each scene (Joseph
Losey, De Palma, Ernst Lubitsch, Ritwik Ghatak, etc.). In Tarantino
specifically, this comes with an overtly casual “pick it up and drop it”
approach: in Once Upon a Time … in
Hollywood, some characters get on-screen IDs and others don’t; Kurt Russell
as narrator (in his character of Randy?) pops in and out, seemingly only to
exposit whatever is judged as needing exposition. This lack of consistency in
the use of a technique or device is virtually flaunted.
But I find the film a little odd on this level: it has
echoes, patterns and motifs, as many fine, well-constructed films do – or
rather, it has what seem like they should be echoes, patterns and motifs. We
rarely get a sense in Tarantino’s cinema of a systematic expressive process: details that (beyond the biggest and
most obvious ones) click into place as meaningful pattern. The categorical
confusions listed above are the strongest, clearest and most coherent example I
can find. But many other examples tend to float their way through, lazily.
Bare feet, for example: Manson girl Pussycat (Margaret
Qualley) sticks them up on the car window, while Sharon pops them up on the
seat ahead in the cinema screening The
Wrecking Crew. Is that a comparison, a contrast, an opposition, a sameness,
what? Melissa Tamminga (Seattle Screen
Scene, 20 August 2019) has a stab at this one: “It’s the visual link between the women … that highlights the divide
between them, the Madonna and the whore. Both reduced to the sum of one part”.
I am not convinced by that interpretation.
Likewise, J. Hoberman (The New York Review of Books Daily, 19 August 2019, now behind a
paywall) finds the “heavy” that Rick plays in Lancer an awful lot like Manson (his acted gesture of “violence”
included). Does Tarantino intend this musing play of interconnective thoughts?
Unlike with the earlier Lancer scene
I’ve discussed, I’m not so sure. And Lepastier reckons that Sharon constitutes
the semantic pole of “ambient hedonism” set in contrast with the “sad passion”
of Rick and Cliff. Hmmm …
Central characters are given “arcs” – Rick,
especially, overcomes his alcoholism (almost as speedily as Dude/Dean Martin in Rio Bravo [1959]!), and the entire
ending, as noted, is constructed on clever narrative “folds” and reprises of
previous actions (everything from Cliff’s training of his pit bull Brandy to
the positioning of objects in Rick’s home) – but, in Tarantino, people don’t
really change or “grow” much. Maybe that’s a blessing – I find the alcoholism
crisis sequences the weakest in the film.
But let’s look at Rick and Cliff. They’re best friends
without the slightest element of tension or disagreement – even when the former
has to let the latter go. Think of the rich dramatic (and comic) potential in
the position of the stunt-double – everything it could raise in terms of
resentment, wounded pride, mischievous secret satisfaction, and so forth. Not a
second, not a single hint of any of this in the film – it’s the polar opposite,
on this level, to Sergio Leone’s Once
Upon a Time in America (1984). Cliff is just a nice guy who enjoys Rick’s
company and is happy to be hitched to his actorly wagon, until he isn’t
anymore. The types of small, daily, infinitesimal betrayals between friends
that Elaine May’s cinema (for example) is built upon are totally foreign to
Tarantino’s universe; he could never remake Mikey
and Nicky (1976)! If there’s betrayal in his work, it’s got to be on the
biggest, grandest, most melodramatic level, between lovers, with life and death
at stake – as in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004).
Buddy-characters don’t talk much about their pasts
much, either, in Tarantino; their endless chat (and this is pretty unique to
him) is focused almost wholly on the present moment, and on the future – its
prospects, dreams and fears, short-term or long-term. Talking about the past is
very uncinematic and boring to QT; if there’s a fragment of backstory, put it
in a flashback. This brings us to (for me) the strangest and least resolved
scene in the film: Cliff and his wife on a boat trip. On one level, it’s just a
quick, cruel, throwaway gag, and it worked like that, worked like a dream, for
the happy Barcelona audience I saw it with.
Here’s how I see it. Script-minded commentators often
talk disparagingly these days about the presence of reverse engineering in screenplays – having a scene idea, then
figuring out what has to precede it in order to justify and set it up – as if
artists at the level of Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Pedro Almodóvar, and
probably every great dramatist who ever lived, don’t use this basic creative
technique all the time. I confess, I find it almost impossible to spot the
evidence (so glaring to some eagle-eye scouts!) that such reverse engineering
has ever occurred. But in pondering Once
Upon a Time … in Hollywood, it hit me.
I think Tarantino’s mental process may have gone
something like this. The film needs Rick and Cliff to be together all the time
– to share the same house, more or less. Cliff, as stated, is fanatically,
slavishly devoted to Rick and his wellbeing. So, maybe Cliff is, even a little
bit under the surface, gay? Not in this film, no way, José! His heterosexuality
needs to be established “in good faith”, as it were. Yet to give Cliff an
active, visible wife or girlfriend would immediately get in the way of the
story (indeed, this buddy plot ends the moment Rick gets married). And to have
Cliff just talk in some maudlin
fashion about ex-wives or past lovers – the kind of backstory monologue that is de rigueur in so many movies of all
kinds – is a no-go for Tarantino.
So we need a scene, a visual gag with a
suggested/elided punchline: and that’s the mystery of whether Cliff did or not
kill his “harpy” wife. Or maybe the boat just lurched and the scary, loaded,
harpoon-thingy in his hand went off. Whatever. The reverse engineering is now
complete: Rick and Cliff can keep hanging out together, non-homoerotically. As
I said: works like a dream …
Many have commented – and it’s virtually impossible to
avoid formulating the matter this way – that Tarantino’s film dramatises the
clash or confrontation between Old and New Hollywood. One that is on the way
out, another that is on the way in. Tobin’s semi-enthusiastic review suggests,
a little cryptically, that Once Upon a
Time … in Hollywood is not about the end of innocence (“that would be World War II, treated in Inglourious Basterds”) in this regard,
but the end of illusion. But which
species of illusion, exactly? Hoberman makes the intriguing observation that
the decrepit Spahn Ranch where the Manson Family hangs evokes the modern,
revisionist, gritty Western: Stan Dragoti’s legendary Dirty Little Billy (1972) and all the rest. But what, really, is
the substance of these Old and New movie worlds? And who – what – can be safely
allocated to either side of this semantic divide? More confusion quickly ensues
…
Old Hollywood here – the thing to be idolised,
defended and nostalgically revered, we assume – is nothing like studio-era
“classical Hollywood”: given his oft-expressed disdain for grand directors
practising their craft way beyond their personal use-by date, I guess Tarantino
didn’t want old guys like Hawks, Hitchcock or Ford doddering around making
their “testament” works (I know the dates don’t exactly coincide, but bear with
me), or Lang and Renoir, somewhere up in the Californian hills, giving their
last interviews before passing on to the Great Beyond.
But Good Hollywood of the ‘60s – full of the kind of
energy and inventiveness (not least in the depiction of screen violence) that
Tarantino himself is heir to, is all over the Los Angeles map by 1969: it’s
Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, that whole “live TV drama”
generation. Not to mention Sam Peckinpah, of “every film is a Western” fame! Or
– stopping short of the avant-garde, experimental and underground milieu that
QT seemingly has no interest in whatsoever – it could be John Cassavetes. It
could even be Michelangelo Antonioni prepping for Zabriskie Point (1970) or Jacques Demy shooting that other, smaller
melancholic cruise liner of a film, Model
Shop (1969). But there is scarcely an allusion to any of this in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. (3)
What is American Cinema in ’69 to Tarantino? It’s weird:
TV Westerns, plus a side-trip to Italy to star in a Sergio Corbucci movie or
two. And it’s The Wrecking Crew (1968),
for goodness sake: end-of-the-line stuff for both Rat Packer Dude Dino Martin
and poor Phil Karlson in the director’s chair (Jeff Smith diplomatically
places it in a “largely forgettable” bag alongside many of the movies of the
period glimpsed on posters, marquees, magazine covers, etc.). Tarantino has
stated, many times and in many ways, that the film is built basically as a
projection from his childhood experience of Hollywood, or his memory of that
experience: these were the films, the names, the billboards, the droning TV and
radio broadcasts that surrounded and formed him, sensibility-wise. But is that
its only level?
On another level, it’s a certain kind of very
contemporary trash-cult taste in film, fed for decades by Video Watchdog magazine and a dozen other prime influencers (not
least Tarantino himself in his many film-cultural activities). You may well
reply: but that’s exactly where Clint Eastwood came from (TV and spaghetti
Westerns), and how he came up into what he is today! Yes, but there is no
mentor figure present here like Don Siegel (let alone Sergio Leone) – I mean
incontestably good directors, not talked-up cult-fetish figures – and Rick
Dalton is not in any way on the destined road to becoming an auteur. The fairy tale finds its sweet
ending and its ultimate crane shot before that possibility can even arise.
We also strike intense temporal interference here –
naturally enough – between Tarantino’s 1969 and the 2019 in which he’s living
and working. Because the “Hollywood in transition” that he shows is an awful
lot like now – especially at the level of casting, with the stars of hit TV
series including Billions, Girls and Better Things filling the film and lighting up our recognition
cells as it unfolds. Yet QT keeps banging on, in his public gestures and
pronouncements, about the sanctity of 35mm (both as a shooting and a projection
medium) and the physical reality of what his camera captures … so, some
semi-fog of denial on his part is surely at play here.
What is New Hollywood, then? I don’t think (despite
Hoberman’s observation about the Spahn Ranch) that it’s the realistic cinema of
Robert Altman et al. – because, once again, Tarantino owes a big debt to that,
too. It seems to be – because it’s allowed to survive – embodied first, last
and only by Roman Polanski in his immediate post-Rosemary’s Baby (1968) era of fame: on the way to Chinatown (1974), definitely a L.A.
classic, for sure, but also a global, internationalist filmmaking career par excellence. Not to mention other
scandals that (like the spectre of QT’s ex-producer Harvey Weinstein) get no
play on any level here, beyond Cliff’s gallant refusal of Pussycat’s underage
“poontang” … If Raymond Durgnat were alive, he would surely be spinning off on
the association of Polanski with a demonic/Satanic cinema, thus linking him
with Kenneth Anger and hence Manson via the Bobby Beausoleil connection (Jeff
Smith persuasively argues for a number of almost entirely buried intertexts
similar to this one, that weave important connective networks in the film). For
Lepastier, QT’s “hatred of hippies” overrides his love of – and very real debt
to – the genuine New Hollywood, especially in its modernist aspect, which
remains “the great absence” in this particular fairy tale …
Revenge: it’s a topic that Tarantino’s commentators
fix on, myself included, particularly when I wrote about Inglourious Basterds. Yet Once
Upon a Time … in Hollywood is not, strictly, a revenge tale; Rick and Cliff
are not avenging themselves on the Manson Family for some horrible thing done
to them or those they love. They simply respond – with extravagant, murderous
heroism – to a sudden, screwy home invasion. Yet what they do feels, for all intents and purposes,
like the conclusion to a revenge tale – and a Tarantino movie. How can that be
so? The film is unusual on this level because, as an “if only” speculative
fairy tale, it is really a fantasy of reparation rather than traditional revenge – or rather, it is an act of revenge against
the Manson Family, almost against history
itself, against the destiny that befell these innocents (like Gaspar Noé,
QT can get extremely sentimental about mothers-to-be). The film “rights the
wrong” by imagining an alternative course, an alternative path into the future
– whatever that future may be, which the film leaves wide open.
It’s intriguing (to me, at least) that Tarantino has
sometimes played with quasi-magical effects – the scrambled time-structure of Pulp Fiction that allows Travolta to be
“reborn” in the editing, if not in the diegesis; and here (as in Inglourious Basterds) the “alternative
history”/Man in the High Castle thought-experiment – without ever tipping entirely over into magic realism, or
full-blown surrealism. (Tobin well formulates what he considers the central paradox of the director’s basic approach
to mise en scène: “Hyperrealism in
service of a ‘suspension of disbelief’ pact with the spectator”.) Something
holds Tarantino back from that further step (not that anyone is obliging him to
take it!), and I wonder if it’s the fact that, once he reaches the “tipping
point” – once the single, momentous gesture has been performed that alters the
course of world history – he’s reticent to imagine further consequences: just
what the New World will be with or without certain of its pieces. The dream
only goes so far.
MORE Tarantino: Reservoir Dogs, Four Rooms
1. Even within the first few weeks of its widely-released
public life (which was the time frame in which I wrote this response), Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood had
already generated hundreds of reviews and think-pieces across many languages –
many of which seemed to toss around almost exactly the same things, whether pro
or con the movie. Such is the echo-chamber effect of film criticism in the
Internet/social media age! I find this deluge can sometimes (often) wield a
deleterious influence on a critic’s brain, so I deliberately limited myself to
reading only a few (the ones that I cite) through to the very end. Naturally,
much more has been written and said since the film’s initial release – a
discourse whipped up once again by the event of Tarnatino’s novelisation (of
sorts) published in June 2021. I cover none of that post-2019 extrusion here. back
2. There is more to this Body Double connection. Of course,
Cliff as stuntman is a “body double”, too. And, most importantly, De Palma’s
film contains an amazing “leap” that many accounts of it simply overlook: at the
climax, the main character “rewrites” his own past, the fear and paralysis on
the movie set that we witnessed at the start, and “moves forward” heroically in
a now different, altered future!! De Palma’s cinema has long investigated, in
various ways, the theme and device of the second
chance – reaching an apotheosis in Femme
Fatale (2002). And QT, as we know, has always been a big De Palma fan ...
back
3. Alexia Kannas has rightly pointed out to me that
several car-cruising shots, and especially the setting where Cliff lives in his
caravan, strongly evoke particular images from Demy’s film. back
© Adrian Martin August 2019 |
