The Return of Tarantino: Once Upon A Time in Hollywood

“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is Quentin Tarantino’s new film set in 1969 Los Angeles. The story features Leonardo DiCaprio as fictional Hollywood actor Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt as Dalton’s stuntman, Cliff Booth. Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate, a semi-fictitious version of the late actress and wife of Roman Polanski. 

While the film focuses on this duo as they navigate 1960s Hollywood, the Manson “Family” plays a central role in the film, specifically in relation to the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders.

Though Once Upon a Time in Hollywood accrued $373 million at the box office and received generally positive critic reviews, many movie-goers have mixed reactions to this film due to its relative lack of plot development and slow progression. 

Although most Quentin Tarantino films are quite indulgent and gratuitous, the length and subject matter of some of the scenes in his latest film push the limit too far for some audiences. 

Tarantino is a director who is obsessed with the art of filmmaking, and his fixation with aesthetics, meta and style often transcend actual plot threads. Though Tarantino’s abrasive auteurship is sometimes derided as sophomoric and pretentious, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” feels like a more mature moment in his career. 

The film is slow and careful and may lose audiences who do not have an interest in watching a patient, slice-of-life dissection of the New Hollywood era. Tarantino made the film with his own enjoyment at the forefront. 

After his break with Miramax and Harvey Weinstein, Sony essentially gave Tarantino full creative control and a blank check. The result is a film that feels divorced from current Hollywood trends and politics. Only Tarantino could get away with some of the eyebrow-raising choices that give the film a full-bodied character. 

The cast is too expensive for its own good, though DiCaprio and Pitt give outstanding, memorable performances that make their respective characters feel fully realized in the romanticized backdrop of Hollywood. 

The purpose of cinema is not only to convey a story but also to explore through storytelling. The greatest part of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is not its plot but the film’s ability to transport the audience back into a different time period, a time when the California Dream was still alive and well. 

This film has been described as a “love letter to Hollywood” by 7D News. Modern California, the third most moved-out-of state in the nation, is not the cultural icon that it once was. At one point, California was “the edge of the world and all of western civilization,” as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers described it in their song “Californication.” 

California used to have its own ideal and aesthetic that is perfectly captured in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” Through its stylistic preferences, music choices, and pop culture references, the film is able to transport its viewers back to this time period in the same way that “Stranger Things” takes the audience back to the 1980s. 

In many ways, the tragedy of the Tate murders served as a symbolic, dark end to the 1960s and the golden age of Hollywood. While this time period has faded into the relentless backdrop of history, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” allows us to explore a time when the sky was blue, the weather was warm and the California Dream was alive and real one last time.

*Photo by Andrew Cooper.

— brandonallenchristensen@gmail.com

—krfors@gmail.com