Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino is by this point something who either you like or you don’t. He’s as much a film critic as he is a film-maker, albeit one whose criticism usually takes the form of making a film of his own – and he has got somewhat more self-indulgent over the years, with his films accumulating length without necessarily always increasing in depth. Still, it’s the kind of self-indulgence I like, in this case telling a tale of Hollywood in 1969, just on the verge of the great youth-quake which would see many careers end and a whole bunch of new careers take flight. We see this through three characters, two fictional, one real – Rick Dalton, an actor in decline who’s reduced to small guest spots on TV; Cliff Booth, his old stunt-double who’s largely been cut out of the industry and is left helping out Rick by driving him around; and Sharon Tate, their neighbour, a young starlet on the rise, married to a celebrity director, who’s enjoying the heights of her fame and the benefits it brings. On the periphery are various actors and Hollywood types, and the looming threat of the Manson family, whose path, of course, notoriously crossed with Sharon in August of that year.

Much of the film is fairly leisurely, as we look at two days in January 1969 for the characters, as Rick has a guest shot on a new TV pilot, Cliff picks up a hitch-hiker and Sharon meets friends and sees herself in a new film. The third act, set on that notorious August night, is where everything is leading, but in many ways this is more a film about the way fame winds down. Tarantino’s made a very loud point that he expects his career to end after one more film, and this isn’t a film that is particularly interested in the young turks and rebels (I can imagine if Tarantino made a film like this around the time he wrote the script of “Natural Born Killers”, for example, the Manson element might be a lot more to the forefront than it is). It’s an elegiac story of heroes in retreat, men who start to fear that they’ve become passe or irrelevant. But, and perhaps this is a sign that I’m aging too, I found it pretty compelling, using the talents in particular of Pitt and DeCaprio at their peak – both are better than they’ve been onscreen in a while (pretty much since both of them appeared for Tarantino). I suppose in some ways he’s himself a bit of a remnant of another era, the 90s independent scene that he did so much to epitomise and influence – but dammit, he’s still entertaining.