Inglorious Hollywood

Rating: Null/10 (13 December 2019)

In the bonus track of the DVD of "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood," there is a montage of deleted scenes that reveals the satirical style of writer-director Quentin Jerome Tarantino. The most typical of the scenes is a television commercial for a fictitious brand of cigarettes called Little Red Apples. The commercial drips with irony in promoting something destructive to a human body that is being portrayed in a over-the-top way not dissimilar to the actual ads of the mid-twentieth century. The cigarette commercial demonstrates in microcosm the film's overall approach to violence in the 1960s.
In the film's graphic violence twisted into satire, the filmmaker attempts a retrospective of the tragic Tate-La Bianca murders of 1969 and indeed violence as a whole on one of the most self-destructive decades in American history. The humor derives from shifting the perspective on the murders and rewriting history through the lens of two Hollywood types, a grade-B movie star of the Westerns, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his sidekick stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt).
The viewer is forced to slog through most of the film that seeks to present a slice of life in the Los Angeles film colony of 1969. Far too much time is spent in establishing atmosphere and stringing out scenes that are overwritten with pacing that is a slow as L.A. rush-hour gridlock. One of the most unnecessary sequences is the long stretch at the Spahn Ranch that even fails to introduce the character of Charles Manson.
The film's payoff finally arrives with the fateful night of August 8, 1969, when Tarantino pulls off a "what if" scenario, wherein the life of the beautiful Sharon Tate is spared due to the heroics of the star of the TV program "Bounty Law" and his faithful and quick-thinking buddy, who is on acid at the time!
The most interesting character is without a doubt the faithful Cliff Booth, as played with great gusto by Pitt. Cliff's devotion to his pal Rick has no bounds, and the character has the kind of decency that was at the heart of the stock characters and melodramatic television series built around myths of the Wild West, on which he has built his career.
The film still depicts a nightmare on Cielo Drive. But it also provides some much-needed distance from the gruesome realities of the event to serve as a reference point for understanding the most violent of decades in modern American history.