More Misdirection Than Penn and Teller

Rating: 10/10 (21 August 2019)

Tarantino has stated that "Once" is not Sharon Tate's movie. It's Rick Dalton's story. Yes, we get to ride the emotional rollercoaster of a man losing his place in his society, then discovering "too little, too late" that he may have had the acting chops all along that could have saved him from his plight. While that tempest rages we get to glide along with Cliff Booth, who possesses the self assurance of a man adept at martial arts with the ability to have anyone "do anything you want to him. Throw him off a building, alright? Light him on fire. Hit him with a Lincoln, right? Get creative. Do whatever you want ..." Cliff's journey stands in sharp counterpoint to the star he shadows.
But what of Sharon Tate? Her little snippets (not even vignettes) pepper the movie, and leads to ..... WHAT?
In the movie, had she not been featured the way she was, she would have (as in real life) been viewed as just another blonde bimbo starlet snatched up as so much candy on a successful director's arm. The movie provides us an opportunity to get to know Sharon (unlike real life), as a pretty young woman who has maintained her humanity, her friendliness, her affection for her friends and her public, and her warm affinity for all she meets. Her interaction with the ticket taker and the manager of the theater, her quiet enjoyment of the audience enjoying her point to a woman of depth of character, someone worth knowing. Someone worth grieving over.
Reviews have been written about the over the top violence ending this film. Yet none of the violence compares to that actually perpetrated against Sharon and her friends in real life. To know this young woman was repeatedly knifed while her unborn child was carved from her body, to imagine the Manson family reveling in their blood lust, scrawling the word "PIG" on the walls in the young mother's blood, to know she begged for mercy having done nothing at all to provoke the mayhem performed on her makes the movie violence seen here a footnote to the atrocity that actually occurred.
Understanding this, we're left with a piquancy, a longing sadness, barely buoyed by the ending offered by the film. For those criticizing the film for being too slow, for those debasing this effort as not providing enough tension, for the rabid shoot-em-up fans I suggest they view this as a trick performed by the expert magicians, Penn and Teller. It looks like a revenge fantasy: nope, it's a character study. HA! Fooled you all again! It's a rom-com! And like any Tarantino movie, twisting all our expectations, the ending to his rom-com leaves you with an aching heart.