Film Buff's Dream

Rating: 9/10 (28 August 2019)

"Once Upon a Time....in Hollywood" is entertaining as hell for an avid film buff. Steeped in the elegiac luster of an era in which the golden dreams of Hollywood were colliding with the darker, spoiled illusions of counter-culture America, the film, as its fairy tale title suggests, is one big "What If?" "Inglourious Basterds" was a "what if" movie too, providing an alternate ending to WWII in which Hitler is taken down in a literal blaze of cinematic might. The scope is much smaller in this film, circling as it does around a washed up cowboy star (Leonardo DiCaprio), his career stunt man and personal buddy (Brad Pitt), and their run in with the Manson gang in the days leading up to the murder of actress Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie). For all of its usual Tarantino swagger, there's an ethereal, delicate, and melancholy thread running through the middle of this film. It's at once a love letter to movies while at the same time a sad acknowledgment that life can't be more like them.
I'm not big fans of either DiCaprio or Pitt, but I can and have liked them in other things depending on the movie that surrounds them. I liked them both tremendously in this. Tarantino has always been an expert at casting. He gets the right people for the right roles, and the result is that even mediocre actors give great performances in his films almost by default. The two men get the showiest roles, but it's Robbie who threatens to steal the film. She gets virtually no dialogue, but it's mesmerizing to watch her play Tate as a budding starlet new to fame, flitting around Los Angeles, sneaking into theaters to watch herself in movies, and enjoying the promise of a fairy tale career. That we know what happens to Tate in real life imbues Robbie's performance with an intense sense of tragedy. We fall in love with her a little bit, but don't want to because we know we'll have to say goodbye to her.
Except that we don't, which brings us to the film's finale, the one thing I really had a problem with. I didn't have a problem with the story; in fact, I thought the idea of what happens was pretty hilarious. But the abrupt transition into stomach-churning violence really turned me off and took me out of the world of the film. Unlike in his other movies, the violence is fairly short lived and it doesn't ruin the whole experience, like it did in "Django Unchained" and "The Hateful Eight." But it feels so exploitative, and I was disappointed that Tarantino felt the need to end such a beautiful little movie with his trademark violence-as-porn. And worse, it's played for laughs. The audience I saw this with (though admittedly small) was yucking it up, which made me queasy.
Still, my reservations about the ending aside, this is Tarantino's best movie since "Inglourious Basterds," and really the first one since maybe "Jackie Brown" that I felt wasn't just a parody of other directors' styles.
Grade: A