The Benefits of Fiddling with Facts - severe spoilers alert

Rating: 9/10 (31 August 2019)

Strange and wonderful things may be achieved through postmodernism. Since one of the features of the genre (for want of a better word) is making us aware that we're watching fiction rather than fact, anything goes, and Tarantino uses this to great effect in his ninth film. Not much plot is needed as long as we are aware that we are heading for the grizzly Manson massacre on Cielo Drive in August 1969. As in other films that deal with actual events (the Titanic, Gallipoli, etc.), the aspect of "who'll survive" is enough to provide dramatic tension, and in fact, any further plot may appear downright redundant. Our awareness that we are witnessing the final days of our characters will provide depth and put even the most trivial things in a tragic light. When we watch Sharon Tate childishly revelling in the audience's response to her own awful movie "The Wrecking Crew" in a cinema and being so eager to let people know that she's in it, this inspires pity and sympathy for the poor sausage.
DiCaprio and Pitt deliver a truly touching double portrait of a fading movie star and his loyal stunt double, a Hollywood Don Quixote and his Sancho Panza, with the dog Brandy thrown in for good measure as Rosinante. DiCaprio is battling a declining popularity, as well alcohol and a sincere and justified doubt in his talent, and Pitt is under a cloud after having caused the death of his wife (but the act itself is elegantly eclipsed since we cut away, sixties style, a split second before it occurs).
The Manson gang members are looming in the background and provide a rare reminder that the hippie movement was not only peace and love, but also the hatred of those who made it in Hollywood, which would eventually lead to the slaughter of Tate and her friends, as well as the Labiancas on the following day. We are left wondering, as we move along, if Pitt, DiCaprio and his Italian wife will count among the victims instead of the Labiancas.
And then, lo and behold, amid a flurry of other postmodern features (intertextuality, as when Tate buys a copy of Hardy's "Tess of d'Urbervilles" - of which Polanski would later make a film - from a bookseller played by the erstwhile matinÃ©e idol Clu Gulager, and little elements of pastiche including commercials and musical numbers), Tarantino spares our main characters when Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and Rosinante step into character and butcher the hateful hippie in graphic details. Just as we were wondering whether Tarantino might let us get through this film without any gore.
In this sense, postmodernism can be said to rectify reality (as when Hitler got shot to pieces in "Inglourious Basterds"), but it cannot be said truly to prettify the story by providing historical facts with the happy ending for which Hollywood is traditionally (and often unjustly) blamed - for we still know that Tate and her friends were viciously massacred in August 1969. Postmodernism never claims to tell the true story. What Tarantino has done is rather the reverse of the postmodern "Atonement" (2007) which ends in the long-awaited reunion of the lovers, and then adds, as an afterthought, that this ending is fiction, since both died separately before they were united. Tarantino provides a different kind of catharsis, and we are grateful for it.
By the way, films don't often show us the gritty downside of the hippie culture. In fact, I can only think of one episode of "Mad Men" in which Betty visits a rat-infested, dirty commune in New York. But in "Once upon a Time in Hollywood", Tarantino doesn't pull any punches.