A love letter

Rating: 10/10 (1 August 2019)

When Once Upon a Time In...Hollywood was announced as a film all about the Manson Family, I was a bit worried. I'm not a part of my generation that worships Charles Manson and thinks he really had anything interesting or relevant to say. In fact, I've compared him to advertising consultants and TED talk speakers, two groups that I find as abhorent as the man who ordered the murder of everyone in the house where Sharon Tate lived and believed that the "White Album" was to be the start of a race war that his Family alone would survive. I didn't want a Tarantino film all about Manson. And good news. This movie is anything but. Instead, it's a love letter to the end of the studio system as Hollywood moves from dashing square jawed leading men to neurotic antiheroes for a few years before blockbusters would change the game all over again.
My worries about the Manson Family in this film were unfounded. Sharon Tate exists as an angel here, above and beyond the cares of the characters that somehow live in the same world as her. She dances alone, not only at the Playboy Mansion but throughout the reality this film has stitched together. She's as much of an ideal and McGuffin as Pulp Fiction's briefcase. Her mention of what a great actor Rick was is enough to make him forget that he just stared death down and might have almost lost the only person in the world who truly loves him, no matter what.
Near pefection. Amen.