Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood (2019)

Wise guys and Convertibles

As I've now lost access to my own movie review blog of old 'Celluloid Seduction', I've posted my spoiler-light film review here. Comments welcome!

There’s a clue in the title, Once Upon a Time... is a fairy tale, a modern Grimm, where truth and fiction mingle. The trouble with Tarantino’s latest fable is that there isn’t much of a moral to the story and his monsters, witches, and princes, are actors with ‘use by’ dates. 

It’s April 1969 in sunny California. In the background of the opening scene, a car radio blurts out a news report with familiar names from the era. Sirhan Sirhan has been sentenced to death for the murder of Robert Kennedy. 

Our protagonist (Leonardo Di Caprio as fading actor Rick Dalton) and sidekick in sideburns (Brad Pitt as his stuntman double Cliff Booth) are has-been players in the fickle world of cinematic entertainment, about to get their just rewards as they calculate their headcount of fictitious ‘kills’. 

If you are a Tarantino fan there is no doubt you will enjoy this latest offering, and it’s clear to see QTs love of Hollywood shining bright. From the billboards and lights of a dozen old cinemas and theatres strewn through a 1960s Hollywood. He delights in taking the viewer on a wild ride courtesy of a fast convertible screeching around corners, passing famous mansions, through the Hollywood Hills, well before the seatbelt was compulsory.

Familiar faces pop up here and there, familiar themes of buddies on a mission, baddies with a plan, and some indulgence in revenge for the ‘what might have been’. There’s even a bit of lazy storytelling, where a few minutes of narration fills in for a missing half-hour of plot, segmented between some genius scenes of Hollywood irony.

Regarding that plot and characterization, well as the story goes, this is old Hollywood meets new age and the so-called swinging-60s. If you remember them, you were never there. It’s clear Tarantino remembers his childhood and love of teatime TV Westerns, and hippie music, and movies about Nazis, and Asians, and very, very high-cut denim shorts and… feet. I’ll leave you to ponder that one.

Without giving too much away, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is billed a ‘comedy’, which on the most part it is. Simmering along the edges of the film, reflected in mirrors and windows, not quite taking us there, the news headlines we all know (Manson Cult/Sharon Tate murder). The sinister creeps in, together with the absurd, as the mind of the viewer is toyed with, made fun of, and generally left traumatised by the experience...

Pure Tarantino.