Once is enough

Rating: 4/10 (11 November 2019)

This film defies expectation and defies conventional enjoyment too. With a very protracted run time and an undue interest in female feet.
The film is fascinated with its characters and their peripheral Hollywood lives. Sadly I thought that the characters as written and delivered required uniformly one note performances by every actor barring Leo DiCaprio who was required to extend the performance of his character at odd junctures of the films development. This style of piecemeal characterisation scenes is probably representative of the writer/directors approach but in this film the characters as written don't reward the actors or the film with any substance to grow a performance by.
The plot and premise of 'Once Upon a Time.........' is threatened to overbalance as Tarantino's preference for sideways plots, dialogue and narrative pressure comes up against a really uninteresting overall treatment of the chosen subject matter.
This seems to be because the film is not about anybody real at all. The depictions of every person and group, and therefore the play out of every character scene (and there are a lot of those.) are flimsily fanciful conglomerates of Tarantino's own past memories of the transitional period of American screen storytelling in the late 1960's and into the 70's.
As there are no real individuals or groups of people within the films narrative that narrative is flabbily expended upon a distended "interwoven stories" plot vehicle.
For example what do we know of Brad Pitts character? Within half an hour? And then by the end of the film?
DiCaprio's character? Surely we've guessed everything about either of them very quickly, so they prove highly anaemic avatars for us to watch Tarantino's vista by.
Those "hippies" that keep populating the film and irking various of our characters.....what are they trying to do? Where did they come from? What do they really believe? Answer to all these questions is "nothing, no, nowt" to all of the above. Above all, can we actually recognise then as the cult? The family? Members of whom will perpetrate the infamous killings.
Tate, is she in this movie? No. An episode of her life (watching herself in a movie of hers at a local cinema) that's what's in the movie. Not her. I guess that Tarantino is familiar and fixated by this moment of her life due to it's inherent ability to convey sadness and sympathy for someone senselessly, tragically killed.
In summation, if you are a member of the general audience, the entire film rests on the ability of the ensemble of characters and their interwoven lives lived to make sense of the world that Tarantino is marvelling at.
These characters are far to dimly perceived and posited to adequately guide us into a film that is a fantasy scape 'otherworld' constructed of Tarantino's inimitable cultural memory and wistfulness; and therefore we, the general audience, are never sufficiently orientated or acculturated within this fantasy Film to extract anything like the dividends that I believe that Tarantino was trying to share with us.
And that is the sticking point, because it is that world of Tarantino's mental making, drawn from his knowledge and memories of that transitional time, that is the subject of this film. The film is meditating on the death of an entire time period and it's associated paraphernalia. And in not killing Tate, in not allowing the multiple murders to transpire the film wallows in the glow of keeping alive, in memory, that lost entire world.
Therefore the witheringly slim characters, with their lack of satisfying definition, drive, causation, resolution, development and consequence ultimately deny to us a satisfying viewing.
This is all the sadder as this film achieves, and squanders, a truly brilliant level of technical and audacious film making by a genuine movie creator and inveterate movie fan in Tarantino.
Of all the films that I have watched before, the film that I am drawn to compare this to the most is 'Vampyr' 1932, subtitled, 'The strange adventure of Allan Gray' which is described as "leading the viewer, as though guided in a trance, through a realm akin to a waking dream, a zone positioned somewhere between reality and the supernatural."
Whereas 'Vampyr' leads to a fantasy other-world scape of shadows, grey, mists and mires, 'Once upon a time.....' leads us into a fantasy 'never world' of glare, acrylic, marvellous hue and coloured tones but the experience of a voyage into a rare symbolic film is just as strong.
Sadly the inability of the characters to help us there, to act as our true guides, utterly abrogates this film for us.