At first glance, that messy little ellipsis breaking up the title of “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” seems nothing more than a twee affectation, a cosmetic quirk to brand it a Quentin Tarantino joint as much as the cheekily mangled spelling of “Inglourious Basterds,” or his insistence on numbering his films in the marketing on the assumption that we’re breathlessly keeping count. (This is the ninth, if the loudly promoted posters and trailer haven’t drilled it into your brain by now.) Well, it is that, but there’s method to its, uh, maddeningness. With the title cleaved in two and the words “once upon a time” isolated, it’s hard not to think of the storytelling form with which that homely cliché is first associated: the fairy tale.
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And there I have to stop and change course, just as a number of boat-wide vintage American automobiles do with some effort on the roomy roads of Los Angeles in the course of a film that itself switches lanes and gears with cool, cocky abandon — and performs certain narrative U-turns that I couldn’t responsibly describe even if Tarantino hadn’t expressly instructed us not to. Yep, QT has followed the Russo Brothers (and a more eminent forerunner, Alfred Hitchcock) in issuing an anti-spoiler plea to critics and audiences alike, released online yesterday and verbally repeated (to some bewildered rumbling from the seated journalists) before the film’s first Cannes press screening tonight. To wit, I am here unable to tell you “anything that would prevent later audiences from experiencing the film in the same way.”
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How, then, to talk about a film we cannot talk about? With respect to Tarantino’s directive, “anything” is a dauntingly vague term when there are so many small discoveries and pleasures to address in this bountifully stuffed nostalgia piece; almost by definition, anyone reading this review can’t experience “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” in the same way I did, not least because I had no idea what I or anyone else thought of the film when the lights went down and the shimmeringly retro (of course) Columbia Pictures ident came up.
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Maybe you won’t have a snow-white virgin viewing experience if I tell you that this is Tarantino’s most fluid, richly textured and luxuriously entertaining filmmaking since, oh, say, Millie Bobbie Brown was born. Or that Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, as a has-been movie star and his never-was right-hand man weathering the culture shifts of 1969, have exactly the hangdog old-bro chemistry you’d hope for: not so much Butch and Sundance as Sundance and Scumdance. Or that it’s a dyed-in-the-wool L.A. movie so full-to-bursting with love for the City of Angels and its trashy treasure trails that it occasionally plays like some kind of dreamed-up mashup of “La La Land” and (pointed reference alert) Roman Polanski‘s “Chinatown,” but in a beguiling way.
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But I have to describe something, and that’s how I experienced “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” for nearly two elated hours. Having never been entirely won over by the clever-clever period genre revisionism that has been Tarantino’s mainstay since Bill was killed, I was delighted — after all the lurid what-if speculation over the film’s relationship to the Charles Manson story — to find that his latest is, in such large part, a kind of gorgeously lacquered megabudget hangout movie, cruising happily and chattily between the director’s pet obsessions of B-movies, junk TV and crummy, charismatic men shooting the shit at a particular rhythm that only one man in Hollywood can write.
Indeed, for much of the film, Tarantino’s plea to the press seems a bit of a red herring: there isn’t a whole lot of plot here to spoil. The film takes its sweet, serene time in introducing and unraveling its principal players: squinting TV cowboy Rick Dalton (DiCaprio), whose plush bachelor lifestyle is in as much of a holding pattern as his screen career; his nominal stunt double Cliff Booth (Pitt), who is shruggingly happy to admit that his real job is just driving Rick around; and the real-life intruder on Tarantino’s fiction, “Valley of the Dolls” starlet and scene princess Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). She’s soon to be pregnant with Roman Polanski’s baby and still reveling wide-eyed in her own newfound second-class fame, before you-know-what came to pass.
We drift at leisure with them and their various adjacent strands of town tinsel, in cars, bars, and soundstages, while we wait — with no great hunger or hurry — for the part of this story that we know happened. Generous swaths of screen time are given over to the TV-show-within-a-film that fills Rick’s working days, a typically creaky late-’60s western schedule-filler that Tarantino lovingly recreates just because he can.
And we’re happy to be watching, not least because DiCaprio’s scowling, spitting performance-within-a-performance is worth ten times his arduous, Oscar-winning, bear-grappling labors in “The Revenant”: so often clenched and opaque when straining for greater gravitas, he shows his star quality when playing, well, star quality. Pitt, never one to hide his star quality, scuzzes it up with laid-back glee, only to surprise when his stuntman’s body — a mass of scars and sinew, spackled with bronzer — is sporadically electrified into tough-guy action. Robbie, meanwhile, does her best with, well, not an awful lot: Tarantino has certainly written more generous films for women, though at least the ever-promising Margaret Qualley gets a livewire segment as a jailbait hitcher with the Spahn Ranch as her destination. Again, I’ll turn the car around there.
And so it rolls on, sun-kissed and cheerfully unbound, for two unadulterated hours, with the roof down and the radio on — to an A-grade Tarantino pick-and-mix that runs the gamut from Aretha Franklin to Paul Revere and the Raiders. After the arduous chamber-piece restrictions of “The Hateful Eight,” it’s as if the director, drunk on lungfuls of California air, is determined to roam as fluently and freely as he can, with Robert Richardson‘s camera swooping with him in creamy arcs across the city’s noodly tangle of highways and hillsides.
In case you hadn’t heard, however, “Once Upon in Time… in Hollywood” is longer than two hours, and once we rev up into a final third that I can only describe as berserk, it demands adjustments of its audience that, soon enough, will be the first point of conversation for anyone leaving the theater. It’s enough to say that the film’s woozy spell is brashly broken, ideas of toxic masculinity and heroism go into the cocktail shaker, and I suddenly loved what is otherwise the most enthralling Tarantino film in eons rather less for the disruption. Others will inevitably and fiercely disagree. For the moment, any first-impression review must run into an ellipsis of its own. [B]
