Requiem for Sharon

Rating: 10/10 (22 August 2019)

The killing is brutal and hard to watch, but justified; it's the "Death Wish" exemption, they had it coming to them. In "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood", the historical revisionist is at it again, rewriting Joan Didion's assertion that "the sixties ended abruptly on that August night in 1969," the day when Tex Watson, Susan "Sadie" Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel, disciples of Charles Manson, broke into the Roman Polanski estate on Cicelo Drive, and left California screaming in its wake. Tarantino gives the 1960s a four-month stay, passing on the dishonor to Altamont, the troubled music festival headlined by The Rolling Stones as being the official funeral for peace and love, the anti-Woodstock experience. That's because the killers go to the wrong house. Sharon Tate, along with Abigail Folger and Jay Sebring, survive the close encounter. Since "The Family" members die in such grisly fashion, a curious thing happens. The filmmaker puts the onus on the cult leader, not its followers, in this phantasmagorical world. Sean Durkin's "Martha Marcy May Marlene" shows how a charismatic man can transform innocent children into cold-blooded killers. With their Ford Galaxie parked roadside, the male driver and his female passenger-side companion start to banter about popular culture, reminds us of their relative youth. This peculiar relatability that the filmmaker instills in the audience still lingers, when the docudrama-like narrative goes wayward. Tarantino, in a sense, rewrites the film with a "Minority Report"-like, or maybe, even Orwellian sensibility. He knows the historical record. He knows the killers' collective "thoughtcrime". Cliff Booth) a WWII veteran-turned-stuntman, not only dispatches the would-be murderers in Grand Guignol fashion, but he also murders the idealism of flower children, along with the nihilism of flower children in lambs clothing, both, who were both anti-establishment. To a man like Cliff, the infantrymen in the war, contemporaneous to the film, are their stuntmen. Lest not the audience forget, Brad Pitt played Lt. Aldo Raine in the WWII period piece "Inglorious Basterds".
Cliff's boss, television actor Rick Dalton(Leonardo DiCaprio), a studio system dinosaur roaming aimlessly in "New Hollywood", never did any military service, but he pays Cliff, which makes the stuntman a sort of mercenary soldier, like "The Dirty Dozen" encapsulated into a single man. At Spahn Ranch, the studio lot where they shot "Bounty Law", the television western that Rick a measure of fame, has turned into a ghost town, overrun by a new sheriff in town, Charles Manson(Damon Herriman) and a group of drug-addled desperados, "The Family", playing cowboy. After Cliff Booth, a classic antihero(the stunt man may have killed his wife) checks up on the ranch owner, he returns to find a shirtless hippie, and an intentionally-flattened tire. The stunt man nearly beats the vandal to death. Cliff, a WII veteran, and his employer are old school; they don't think much of their replacements. These unwashed people belong on motorcycles, not horses. Upon Cliff's arrival, Cliff, a stranger to these parts, cues Tex Watson(Austin Butler), a "homesteader", who comes charging bareback through the wild west movie set, bringing the cowtown façade to life. This is not your father's rodeo, though. The filmmaker, a student of genre, evokes the acid western, which were journeys toward death in a nightmare society, best exemplified by Monte Hellman's "The Shooting" and "Ride the Wild Wind". It's no "Wanted: Dead or Alive"(the inspiration behind "Bounty Law"), this performative simulacrum, like something out of a theme park exhibition. The coexistence of the stunt man and Manson Family acolytes is representative of genre and subgenre, respectively; a contemporaneous dissonance in which Cliff attempts to reverse the alchemy of westerns, or rather, remythologize the myth inherent in John Ford films, by rescuing George Spahn(Bruce Dern), the owner of the ranch, from these bohemian cowboys. Cliff, however, is eight years too late. He is like Natalie Wood, playing Debbie, in "The Searchers"; Debbie never asked to be rescued from her new family, the Comanche tribe who kidnapped her. Ethan Edwards(John Wayne) didn't search fast enough either. George used to be an anachronism, just like the 1966 Cadillac de Ville parked in the middle of this fictive one-horse town. But now he is one of them, an unwitting accomplice to the potentiality for helter skelter, and on a filmic level, a man who remakes himself as a survival tactic, professionally(and literally). It's not his fault that he became a turncoat. The occupation of Spahn Ranch can be traced back to a bad career decision made by Rick Dalton. Without realizing it, Rick contributed to the sea change. "Bounty Law" was a hit with the American viewing public, but the show's star thought he could transition into film, since his name, at the outset, was attached to an early version of John Sturges' "The Great Escape", in which he was slated to play Captain Virgil Hills, a rebellious British commonwealth soldier who orchestrates the breakout of a POW camp. The studio passed on Rick, picking Steve McQueen(Damian Lewis) instead, which catapulted "The King of Cool" pass his small-screen contemporary and into the Hollywood constellation of stars. This deep animosity Rick feels toward hippies is an insincere prejudice, because had he secured the part, it would be him and not McQueen, hobnobbing with Michelle Phillips(Rebecca Rittenhouse) and her ilk at the Playboy mansion hobnobbing with other counterculture types.
The blowtorch cools down. The LAPD officers fish the charred remains of Sadie Atkins(Mikey Madison) from the swimming pool. Tex Watson and Patricia Krenwinkel(Madison Beaty) didn't survive the pit bull bites. Brandie, Cliff's dog, craves cheap wet dog food topped with kibble, and blood. The stunt man is taken away by ambulance, leaving Rick alone, standing alone in his carport, where just minutes ago, he told the hunting party to get lost. And then Jay Sebring(Emile Hirsch), a body in the crime scene photo, like a resurrection, appears at Polanski's gate and asks his neighbor about the hubbub. Lazarus' sister, Sharon Tate(Margot Robbie), the focal point of Quentin Tarantino's requiem for The Manson Family victims, invite the journeyman actor to her Benedict Canyon estate via telecom. Rick knows that she is the gatekeeper, the woman who can introduce him to Roman Polanski(Rafal Zariwuecha) and other A-list talent. Tate will soon realize, through broadcast news and newspapers, the association between the dead youth and Charles Manson, and that Rick's intervention saved her life. She is going to recognize Manson as that stranger who knocked on her door, asking for Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, the previous tenant. Tate, as a promising up-and-comer, who became something of a household name after playing a French "art film" actress in Mark Robson's "Valley of the Dolls", she has the power to rehabilitate a career in decline. But it's her beau, Roman Polanski, fresh off the commercial and critical success of "Rosemary's Baby", whom Rick gets all starry-eyed over. He underestimates Sharon. The proverbial guest star-level showbiz industry hack doesn't mention, or perhaps, even register the ethereal blonde as a presence riding shotgun, when he and his unofficial chauffeur first spot the famous couple, stopping at the remote-controlled gate in their fancy European sports car. Especially now, fresh off his success as the lead in a string of "spaghetti westerns". Rick sees Sharon as little more than Polanski's muse; his inferior, with a complete unawareness of their diverging positions on the Hollywood food chain. Rick Dalton echoes the hubris that infects a washed-up comedian in Charlie Chaplin's "Limelight". Calvero(Charlie Chaplin), too, in the 1952 film, saves a life, Thereza Embrose(Claire Bloom), a ballerina par excellence, which he mistakenly presumes to be a streetwalker. After watching Thereza audition for his old theater company, Calvero sits with the lights out, a darkness that internalizes a deep shame born from his indescribable faux pas, imagining the dancer as a potential partner in vaudeville, a lowbrow art, during the dream sequence. The ballerina gets the clown a job.
There is no transcendent Sharon Tate performance we can point to. Her death was unfair. What Tarantino does is recast Tate in people's minds as an actress with a flair for comedy. He pares down her short career to a single scene from Phil Karlson's largely-forgotten "The Wrecking Crew", in which she holds her own, doing slapstick, opposite Dean Martin. She plays against type; a klutz. Margot Robbie has few lines; it's a silent movie within a movie, a nod, perhaps, to Berenice Bejo's performance as a late-twenties era movie actress in Michel Hazanavicius' "The Artist". Peppy Miller makes the transition into sound pictures. Her pull revives the career of George Valentin(Jean Dujardin), a silent film star, who doesn't survive the talkies, just like how Rick Dalton's career floundered when the studio system dissolved. George never attains the same level of notoriety and fame, but at least he's relevant again, thanks to his generous insider patron. Polanski, who would direct "What?", a 1972 Italian production, starring Marcelo Mastroianni, seems perfect for Rick, since he is already a known entity in the Italian film industry. But this is about Sharon. Did she have the potential to be a true artist. Quentin Tarantino seems to think so.
That's good enough for me.