Five years ago, on July 26th 2019, Quinten Tarantino’s 9th film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood hit the big screens across America. I remember watching it the weekend it came out at my local theater. The room was packed as tight as I’ve ever seen it, before or since. As the previews rolled, the audience’s anticipation for what they were about to see was electrifying; they knew what it meant to be at a Tarantino film. They had seen Pulp Fiction and Inglorious Bastards, and they were ready to be taken for a ride. But then the movie surprised us all. Because while it did deliver all the Tarantino staples (sharp dialogue, crisp editing, random film trivia, cooler-than-cool characters, stylish cinematography, and of course some deliciously gratuitous violence) it delivered them all in a package that no one in the audience could have possibly predicted when they picked up their popcorn buckets and sat down in their seats. That July night, we, the audience, had entered expecting to see another action movie and exited having experienced something much more incredible than that.
The movie is about two men and a woman. The two men are friends, the woman is their neighbor. The men are fictional film star Rick Dalton (played by Leo DiCaprio) and his equally fictional, but exponentially more suave, stunt double Cliff Booth (played by Brad Pitt). The woman living next door is real life actress Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie).
The movie is about an era coming to an end. The year is 1969, and both Rick Dalton’s career and Hollywood itself stand on the precipice of change. They just don’t know it yet.
Dalton is a man down on his luck. His claim to fame as an actor was playing leading man on a cowboy TV show called Bounty Law, which seems to have been a combination of the best of Gun Smoke and Bonanza. But Bounty Law was some years ago. The question on Rick’s mind is the mantra of every actor between roles, “what do I do next?” Cliff, who in addition to being Dalton’s stunt double serves as his chauffeur and life coach, is looking for the answer to that question with him.
In almost any other movie we would simply be told that Dalton had been on a TV show some years ago and that would be the extent of it, but Tarantino delights in including clip after clip of Bounty Law to showcase Dalton in his prime. In fact, that is actually how the movie opens. The very first thing the audience sees is a retro black and white TV promo for Bounty Law where Dalton and Cliff give an onset interview to NBC, explaining the relationship between a stunt double and an actor. At the end of the interview, the news anchor tells us that next week he will be interviewing the cast of the Dick Van Dyke Show. This opening is such good screenwriting it almost feels like cheating. By framing the opening as a primetime television segment, Tarantino is able to film Rick and Cliff literally sitting in chairs explaining their relationship to us in simple terms and it is exciting. This segment also accomplishes two very important things upon which the rest of the movie stands.
Firstly, it establishes Cliff and Rick’s genuine friendship in addition to their working relationship. Throughout the runtime, Brad Pitt’s character is the crowning jewel of this film, but he could have been its pitfall (pun intended). If Rick was a rude and unappreciative boss, or if Cliff was a jealous and resentful employee, their dynamic would be adversarial and this story would collapse in on itself into a workplace rivalry. But in the NBC TV promo, Rick and Cliff are shown to be able to gently poke fun at each other, it is made clear that the two are trusting allies in the entertainment industry. Their friendship is only expounded on and celebrated as time goes by. That rock solid friendship forms the ground upon which we the audience are allowed to explore the larger world of Hollywood.
Secondly, the opening segment quickly and successfully accomplishes a magic trick: it subsumes Once Upon a Time in Hollywood into the 1960s in less than three minutes. When the news anchor signs off by saying he will speak to Dick Van Dyke next week, we are tempted to believe him. We are tempted to imagine that despite this film being released in 2019 we are actually watching something that was made sixty years ago; that Dick Van Dyke really is still on the air. This suspension of disbelief, this time travel via pop cultural reference, is the ‘through the looking glass’ invitation of the film. And we the audience dutifully follow it right through into the world of make-believe.
After the TV opening, we jump forward several years after the cancelation of Bounty Law to 1969, where the film’s story will take place. Cliff drives Rick to a meeting with a film agent interested in speaking with the actor about a role. The film agent is named Mr. Marvin Schwarz, and he is played by the one and only Al Pacino. The mere image of Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Al Pacino doing a scene together at a bar makes this film worthy of mention in the history books. How Tarantino was able to pull off this casting coup is anyones guess, but no matter how he did it, in one film he was able to unite my generations greatest film stars with an icon of Hollywood past, bridging a gap between film eras in a way more dramatic than any other film of recent memory. Later on in the movie, Tarantino also has Pitt and DiCaprio do some scenes with the great Kurt Russel; another a casting coup. The names Pitt, DiCaprio, Pacino, and Russel combined elevates this film’s star power through the roof to levels almost unparalleled. But I digress.
To return to the bar scene, Mr. Marvin Schwarz has both good and bad news for Rick. The bad news is that the actor’s career is going down the tubes. Dalton has recently been on a streak of playing the villain of the week for TV shows, a role in industry terms known as “the heavy.” It may be good money, but Mr. Schwarz believes it is bad business. TV villains always lose, and every week the audience doesn’t just see the character losing, they see Rick losing. If Rick doesn’t find a way to revitalize his career, Schwarz prophecies he will become known as a punching bag, not a leading man.
The good news is that Schwarz has an offer for Rick. The agent gives him a chance to move to Rome and star in Italian Westerns, an opportunity to reinvent himself as a leading man and start winning fights again.
[ I would be remiss if I did not mention that at one point in this scene Al Pacino pantomimes firing a machine gun (an homage to his iconic role in 1983’s Scarface) and at another point he imitates Adam West’s Batman throwing a punch, complete with “POW” sound effect. With the Batman imitation, Pacino effortlessly helps seal the deal on our magic trick transportation back to 1969, with the Scarface homage he winks at us while he does it. ]
Rick agrees with Schwarz’s analysis, but it doesn’t make him happy. He cries his eyes out in the car on the way home, protesting to Cliff that Italian Westerns are not worth his time. The next day we follow Rick as puts in a days work on a TV show.
Some of the most insightful moments of the movie happens when Rick is on the television set. One of his co-stars breathlessly asks him if a rumor they have heard is true, did Rick really almost get the Steve McQueen part in 1963’s The Great Escape? (The Great Escape is a classic WW2 caper film that you really should watch if you haven’t already.) Rick responds that yes, he was almost cast in the part but cut out at the last second. The TV costar gasps and offers their condolences. Being a movie star is a career we the audience sometimes fantasize about as being all freedom, expression, and fulfillment. But this scene helps clue us in to the reality that even movie stars, like everyone else, have to mourn the big ones that got away.
In another powerful moment, a child actor helps Rick to rediscover his love of acting. We see that in Rick’s life the affirmation of this little girl matters more than all the accolades of Hollywood. This episode ultimately gives Rick the courage to take Schwarz’s deal and go to Rome.
While all this is happening to Rick, we also get to see what Cliff does when his boss is at work. This subplot ranges from a mundane repair job on a satellite dish, to a flashback kungfu fight with Bruce Lee, and finally features an unexpected visit to the Manson family ranch.
Sharon Tate, and her historic gruesome death at the hands of the Manson family, is lurking in the wings of this movie as a ticking time bomb of suspense. Tate is first introduced riding shotgun with her husband up the driveway to their house, the very house where the historic murders happened. In the movie it is located right next door to where Rick lives. Rick and Cliff watch as Tate’s car pauses to be buzzed past a security gate and then peals off. Rick is ecstatic to have spotted them because Tate’s husband is Hollywood royalty: the talented and in our day controversial director Roman Polanski. Sharon’s life in the movie serves as a thematic counterpoint to Rick Dalton. The former Bounty Law star is at the edge of Hollywood society, the wife of Roman Polanski is at the center of it. Through their eyes we get to see the Hollywood social ladder from two perspectives, the top of the top and sliding towards bottom.
It must be mentioned that Polanski’s inclusion in the film is itself something of a dark shadow, in some ways equally ominous as the appearance of the Manson family. Years after the Manson family murdered his wife, Polanski would plead guilty to the charge of raping a minor and then flee the country to avoid prison. To this day Polanski does not come to the U.S. for fear of being arrested. For whatever reason, many influential people in the film industry have more sympathy than anger for Polanski. In a very bad 2003 radio appearance on the Howard Stern show, Tarantino himself joined in on this misplaced sympathy; he downplayed the severity of Polanski’s crime and implied that the victim was asking for it. Tarantino later apologized to Polanski’s victim for his comments, but the incident shows the dark side of Hollywood’s power of celebrity, the hypnotic power of good art to trick people into making excuses for abuse. Additionally, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood features a possibly underage character throwing herself at Cliff Booth in a way that makes Booth look like a potential victim of entrapment. I hope this isn’t the case, but one wonders if this is still more commentary on the Polanski incident from another angle.
This subject of abuse being hidden in the name of great art is a dark side of the film industry, a side that Tarantino has had a direct and personal brush with. After all, up until Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Tarantino’s films were produced by a man named Harvey Weinstein.
But even the film’s collision with Polanski’s dark legacy is fitting. And its portrayal of Polanski visiting the Playboy mansion to party with now disgraced pornographer Hugh Hefner is perfect. This is a movie about Hollywood, and these warts, these dark spots hiding behind a facade of glamor, are part of Hollywood.
Something incredible about this movie is how little time passes in the story. The title could very well have been “Three days in 1969 Hollywood,” because the first 2 hours cover just two days and the last 40 minutes covers a third. But the story never drags, we enjoy every moment of visiting these people’s lives.
On the film’s final day, the fateful night arrives. The Manson family decides to kill Sharon Tate and all her friends. The movie provides no theory as to why they wanted to do this, much like in real life the motive for the crime remains shrouded in mystery. In real life the cult killed several defenseless adults and Tate’s unborn child.
But it is this Manson family’s great misfortune to find themselves not in the real world, but in a Quinten Tarantino movie. After a number of funny coincidences the Manson family decides to make a detour before killing Tate, they decide to murder everyone inside Rick’s house next door. Inside they run into Cliff Booth high on acid and ready to rumble, Cliff’s loyal musclebound Pit-bull Brandy, and the business end of a flame thrower.
In Tarantino’s WW2 film Hitler had to die in a hail of bullets, in Tarantino’s Slavery film a Plantation had to be blown up and its slaves freed, so it follows with iron-sided logic that in a Tarantino 60s movie the Manson family must endure some of the most graphic deaths ever filmed. They are bashed, stabbed, chewed, punched, and torched into blobs of flesh unrecognizable as human beings. Like all of Tarantino’s violent endings where the villains of history die, it is an invitation to the banquet table of guilt free schadenfreude. We know what these psychos would have done to Sharon if they had been allowed to live, so each time Cliff bashes a Manson family woman’s head into a fireplace we cheer, even as we flinch in horror.
After the fight is over and the police are helping clean the crime scene up, Rick is invited by Sharon Tate to come up to Polanski’s house. As his neighbor she’d like to know what happened. More than that, she even recognizes him as the former star of Bounty Law and would like to talk to him about his career.
Rick is buzzed through the security gate and walks up the hill to Polanski’s house. The movie ends with him walking up very the road he wished he could visit at the start of the movie. Dalton hugs Sharon, and all the other people he has unknowingly saved, and then the credits roll.
The craziness and instability of 60s culture sowed the seeds that would blossom into the liberated New Hollywood Movement, which began in the late 60s but really came into its own in the 1970s. Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese, all endured the highs and the lows of the 60s and then came to prominence in the 70s. Additionally, the grind house films that Tarantino loves so much came out of the 70s. Tarantino’s sole nonfiction book “Cinema Speculation” is a 370 page celebration of 1970s cinema. So what does Tate’s murder have to do with all that?
It depends on who you ask. As a cultural symbol the Manson murders have been seen alternatively as either the death knell of the hippie movement or as the starters gun for Hollywood’s increased focus on death and the occult.
But I think the key to understanding the ending of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is to remember that we are not in our world, we are in Tarantino’s. And as this film is really about the birth of the 70s, the birth of the films that Tarantino loves, I think it should be looked at as the book of Genesis for Tarantino’s Cinematic Universe. And in Tarantino’s Universe, the violence and passion of film didn’t benefit from Sharon Tate’s death, violence and movie stars prevented it.
In a way, the ending to the movie is Tarantino’s final absolution of 1970s cinema on the charge of celebrating or empowering evil. In fact, Tarantino turns the tables and asks us to imagine whether or not film violence might be a force for good.
Quinten Tarantino has always loved a good genre film. When discussing genre in interviews, Tarantino always stresses the importance of a filmmaker “delivering the goods” of whatever genre they are working in. Classifying Once Upon a Time in Hollywood into a genre is difficult, not because Tarantino failed to deliver any goods, but because in the film’s runtime it somehow delivers the goods of a dozen different genres, all without breaking a sweat or losing the audience for a second. There are elements of comedy, slice-of-life, western, physiological thriller, period piece drama, action film, and even quasi documentary strewn throughout this movie.
To my eyes, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is part Singing in the Rain, part American Graffiti, part Taxi Driver and all heart.
Like Singing in the Rain, it is a movie about making movies and a movie about Hollywood undergoing a massive change. Singing in the Rain was about the transition from silent to sound. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is about the transition from the clean-cut screen characters of the 60s to the raw violence of the 70s, from Andy Griffith to Dirty Harry.
Like American Graffiti, this is a day-in-the-life movie about a person deciding to leave their home to avoid stagnation. In both movies we watch the hero drive around in circles while they make up their minds.
And like Taxi Driver, this is a movie where society’s malcontents are brooding in the shadows, their rage building up moment by moment until they are ready to strike out with violent action in the final scene. The Manson family even pulls up to Tate’s house in a dirty yellow car that could pass for a cab. But unlike Taxi Driver, their rage isn’t directed against evil pimps, and unlike Taxi Driver, we root against them during the final climax.
As an influential director, Tarantino has used his movies as a platform to revitalize the genres he loved most as a young man. He has made a Western (Hateful Eight), a Samurai flick (Kill Bill), and a WW2 caper (Inglorious Bastards); all excellent movies in fun genres, genres that Hollywood doesn’t give as much attention to as it once did. In a way, Tarantino’s life’s work can be summarized as a quest to synthesize the power of the genre films that shaped his childhood, jam their power into a cannon (along with hundreds of f-bombs and oceans of blood), and then fire that concoction violently onto American movie screens again and again; all in order to make a spectacle that no one can ignore, a testimony to the power of genre that will never fade away. I believe that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a culmination of that quest.
In this movie Tarantino isn’t just using his skills to harken back to an old genre, he is using them to harken back to a bygone Hollywood. Here the Hollywood he loves, the gritty Hollywood of the late 60s and 1970s, is brought back to life; its origin story mythologized. This is Tarantino’s last stand against digital film and for 35mm; against green screens and for traditional stunt doubles; against streaming and for the theater; against soulless corporate franchises and for the individual movie star. This is both Tarantino’s celebration and transcendence of the idea of genre itself, it is his victory dance atop the mountain he has climbed over the course of his distinguished career, it is his love letter to the films and era of filmmaking that shaped him.
This movie is Tarantino’s magnum opus, and it will stand the test of time.
Wow! Thanks for this sweeping and profound review! I feel like I just went to a master class in film history!