a not always gentle hommage to Sharon Tate & a former hollywood

Rating: 8/10 (11 May 2020)

I did enjoy this film, despite its length, probably because I didn't expect it to be earth-shatteringly brilliant. DiCaprio & Pitt are as good as ever. It's not either's best role but they're always watchable & good company, particularly in a film which involves strolling through so much of Hollywood history.
As some point out there isn't that much of a story going on with the male leads. DiCpario plays a fairly successful TV/film star whose career might or might not be about to go down the pan, while Pitt is his stunt man, driver & friend. We get to see them go about their daily lives & careers & although DiCaprio's actor has his ups & downs most of what happens is just portraiture.
One notable & controversial scene involves Brad Pitt's character besting an insufferable Bruce Lee. Why Taranantino chose to show Lee in such an unflattering light is unclear, but I suspect it has to do with something close to the heart of the film, which is something akin to revisionism, Bruce Lee & at least one other 'real character' is subject to some major critical re-assessment in this film, something which with respect to the other personage, & in light of the speculative nature of that re-assessment, is done rather obliquely, presumably so as to skirt anything too overtly libellous.
Though we spend most of the time in the company of Leo & Brad (a man known around town for having got away with the murder of his wife) the real heart of the film is of course about the impending catastrophe that we know is approaching in the house next door to where DiCaprio's actor lives on Cielo Drive.
This foreknowledge of what must be brings a real poignancy to every scene featuring Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate, the young actress (& wife of absent director Roman Polanski) who was so brutally murdered along with former boyfriend Jay Sebring & some others on 8th August 1969.
I don't want to say too much about this, except to say that in many ways the central conceit of the film in relation to this amounts to a what-if twist on the idea that maybe the killers did go to the wrong house that night.
What Tarantino does with this, is, in a small way, kind of ingenious. Robbie's Sharon Tate is portrayed as an innocent, full of joy for life, revelling, in the right way, in her success, even though she isn't quite a household name. Tarantino clearly had a soft spot for his leading lady Uma Thurman, & it's hard not to imagine him feeling something similar for Margot Robbie, who, in this film, is the centre of every scene she is in, ethereally captivating in that particular sixties/seventies way. Except it might not ultimatley be Robbie who Quentin's obsessed with but the Sharon Tate herself, both her story, tragically abbreviated, but also the possibility of a kind of justice, something which strangely we witness delivered somehow in the closing sequences of the film.
A part of this justice perhaps, is in a third Tarantino re-assessment, that of the murderous Manson family itself. Oddly, Charlie himself, makes but one very brief entrance. All other encounters with the family are overloaded with mockery & contempt. Margaret Qualley's youth buys her some slack, but for the rest of them, they are portrayed as fundamentally weak, cowardly, envious, & in equal measure both predatory & incompetent. There's a reckoning due in this film for such people, & with Tarantino in charge of delivering justice, one can rest assured it isn't going to be pretty.
Altogether a fine return to form for Tarantino, if rather too long, but not at all surprising that's it's divided so many reviewers