The last scenes of Tarantino’s film assault the factual with the newly minted mythical and somehow transcend the charge of tastelessness. We watch her gauge the crowd reaction: another touching index of the vulnerability of the notionally invulnerable.
In mid-movie, Margot Robbie as Tate flits into a downtown screening of The Wrecking Crew, the Dean Martin popcorner she starred in. Their Benedict Canyon mansion is next door to Rick’s. Sharon Tate and her fellow victims-to-be weave in and out of the plot. In a brilliantly scripted conversation scene with a precocious eight-year-old, his co-star in a telly Western, she has the wisdom of centuries, he the bewilderment of a newborn sliding helplessly down the New Hollywood birth canal. He is every Old Hollywood gene of gallantry and insecurity, slipping towards a whiskied second childhood. (Bruce Dern electrifies as Spahn, old and semi-blind, in a role originally written for the late Burt Reynolds.)ĭiCaprio is riotously poignant as the washed-up protagonist. To judge that, watch its longest scene of action/suspense: a stand-off at the Spahn Ranch, the onetime film backlot that became the Manson gang’s pre-murders hang-out. Pitt is Rick’s stuntman, friend and driver, and perhaps the movie’s real hero. His agent (Al Pacino doing a turn and nearly having one) wants him to go to Italy to make pasta Westerns.
How should we respond to extreme events in history? How does reality interact with showbiz and vice versa? And how can Robert Redford and Paul Newman - yes, Butch and Sundance was 1969 too - turn into Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, in a 50-years-on buddy Western all at once postmodern, post-ironic and proto-apocalyptic?ĭiCaprio is Rick Dalton, ageing TV action star, whose career is curdling into cameos. It is probably time to re-examine both 19. And when canons of taste get old, they blow themselves up anyway. I won’t spoil the last half-hour: it defies all expectations and known canons of taste. How can you base your story on a tragedy and play it for comedy? How many liberties with fact can you take, in fiction, before you’re a criminalisable artistic anarchist? It is played like one long exclamation mark - an exhilarating impersonation of a giddy, garish, ghastly-for-some moment in Hollywood history - while for doubters or detractors it may be one long question mark.
It is Tarantino’s best, bravest and most confrontationally impudent movie since Pulp Fiction. Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood is set in the year and place of the Manson murders. And the nurses are stellar blondes resembling Margot Robbie, who in QT’s new film plays the 1960s starlet Sharon Tate. His vital-signs video monitor has cameo appearances from old movie stars. His life-support tubes are made of sprocket-holed celluloid.
Whenever I picture Quentin Tarantino, I see him wired up in the critical ward of Hospital Moviemania.