Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood

 

“I never could stand a man who was one of those ‘remember-whens’.  Those bitter guys that just sit around thinking about old times.  If I ever see that happen, I’m going right out the front door.  And you’ll never catch me.”

-Barbara Hershey as Glennis Yeager, THE RIGHT STUFF

Veteran frontman of Montrose and California native Sammy Hagar once said that when you do a Greatest Hits album, you’re basically done as a recording artist.  As a pastiche artist, Tarantino is all montage.  Hollywood is, fortunately, very kind to navel-gazers.

Borrowing from the real-life career of Clint Eastwood, who left American television to do Italian cinema, the washed-up lead of now-cancelled Bounty Law—“NBC; Thursdays at eight!”—Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio, cast ingeniously as a has-been who can’t act worth a damn) grapples with a recommendation from producer Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino) to get away from taking roles as the heavy who gets killed in every TV western, and instead work with Sergio Corbucci—the father of the Spaghetti Western.

Dalton takes him up on the offer, but remains contractually-obligated to finish out his role on Lancer, starring Wayne Maunder (Luke Perry; the real Maunder passed away last year).   The film focuses largely on Dalton’s downward spiral before and during production of the latter.

In the process, we discover his relationship with Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), patterned off the years-long friendship of Hal Needham and Burt Reynolds.

Tossing back a few with Dalton at a happening bar, a man randomly interrupts, “You know you’re kind of pretty for a stuntman.”

Echoing Pitt’s Aldo Raine from Inglourious Basterds, Cliff disenchantedly replies, “That’s what they tell me.”

A typically hyper-masculinized Tarantino archetype, Booth drives a weather-beaten Karmann-Ghia—poorly maintained, except for the engine.  Living alone with his dog, he watches reruns of Mannix in a trailer behind the Van Nuys Drive-In.  He’s part stunt double, drinking buddy, designated driver, and sometimes errand boy for Dalton. The bonds of found family make for the most endearing aspect of an otherwise problematic film.

“Going to Rome to star in movies does not sound like the kiss of death you think it does,” opines Cliff, while news of Sirhan Sirhan’s trial crackles through the radio.  Just as we’re reveling in character development, we know what’s coming.

Should we luridly romanticize Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) zipping through Benedict Canyon in his roadster, at a time when social consciousness can’t (and shouldn’t) let us ignore that he’s a fugitive since his 1978 guilty plea for raping a 13-year old girl?  Recall Uma Thurman’s account of the dangerously unsafe driving stunt in Kill Bill.  Never mind, is that Bruce Dern playing George Spahn?

ONCE UPON fails its central premise—an alternate ending to the Manson family’s Beverly Hills murder spree that took the lives of five people, including Tate.  It’s evident from the title and the press that the film is a “what if” like INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS—alluded by Dalton’s Nazi-scorcher flick, THE 14 FISTS OF MCCLUSKEY.  The film invests more time setting up the punchline to that joke than in granting a second life to the deceased Tate.  We don’t really get to know her, or any of the women in the film for that matter.  To Tarantino, they (and their feet), are objects.

In Westwood, Tate sneaks into a matinee of THE WRECKING CREW, starring herself and Dean Martin as super-spy Matt Helm.  Slipping on her TV-sized spectacles under the cover of darkness, she silently delights in the effectiveness of her training with Bruce Lee (Mike Moh).  Does this genuinely sweet moment lead to Tate’s vengeance against her would-be killers?  As if there aren’t enough male buddy movies; women’s agency be damned!

And that’s the problem with Tarantino.  In praise of DJANGO UNCHAINED and THE HATEFUL EIGHT, I wrote that he’d finally started to focus more on story and character rather than mimicry and homage on the outskirts of plagiarism.  From Corbucci and Arduino, to Fabian, Patty Duke and Steve McQueen, to jump cuts, Westwood Village, and the Bruin.  We get it.  We got it twenty years ago.  And still,  none of it lends as much heft as a single exchange between ten-year old Julia Butters and Leonardo DiCaprio.

She asks what he’s reading.   It’s (of course) a pulp novel whose main character is, as Dalton puts it, “Coming to terms with what it’s like being slightly more useless each day.”

Does Tarantino know he’s self-analyzing?  He fashions himself as a hip director giving minorities and women their due, yet all his ideas come from reductive portrayals of both—in horror or blaxploitation films, and television melodramas that, in context, appear subversive not because they’ve anything to say about the realities of being a woman or being black, but because they’re appeals to white producers and distributors who occupy a world in which the white, male protagonist is the authoritative figure against which these allegedly subversive themes push.  What are women if they’re not Final Girls? What are black men if they’re not angry criminals or vigilantes?

I think they’re lots of things.  Tarantino doesn’t.  Like Dalton, he seems to prefer to drown himself in shot after shot in the bar at the end of the Boulevard of Broken Tropes.