One of Tarantino's Worst...And it's Still Great

Rating: 8/10 (2 August 2019)

Tarantino has spent the last 25 years weaving yarns that jump in time, play loose with facts, revel in Hollywood history and never shy away from cartoonish violence. Once Upon a Time... carries all of that, to lesser success than some of his past films. Nonetheless, it's still a visual and comedic blast, one that asks as much from its audience as it offers, and sits among his catalogue comfortably.
It's an episodic film, following the varied lives of Hollywood insiders in 1969 navigating the changing landscape of the movie business and American culture with the onslaught of the hippie movement and Charles Manson. DiCaprio plays an aging television star dealing with the existential crisis of being washed-up. Pitt is his stunt-double, a man who never quite fit in the business. Robbie is their neighbor, infamous starlet Sharon Tate. Those three performers are each stellar in their roles, rolling around in their dialogue and settings with the verve and passion of a pig in mud. The film is never afraid to slow down and hang with these characters in their quietest moments, but their individual stories lead to an ending that is among Tarantino's most gloriously insane and irreverently hilarious.
Ultimately this is another Tarantino rewrite of history. However, unlike Django or Inglourious, it's much less black-and-white. Those films are aspirational fantasies, placing the good guys in the winning position, whether true or not. With Once Upon, we're rewriting history with much more complexity than slavery and Nazism; we're creating a history that continues the oppression of the Hollywood studio system, something Tarantino certainly doesn't condone. So what's his point? Not sure, but I'm willing to revisit this highly entertaining histori-fiction over-and-over to find out.