A Western in cars

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is no less a Western about a fairy-tale West than John Huston’s The Misfits (1961), but here cars are the horses and cowboys past their prime are aging Hollywood cowboy movie dudes in the studio sunset.

Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) and Rick Dalton (Leo DiCaprio) miss the good old days.

Tarantino’s story imagines an alternative version of the fateful August night fifty years ago in which four followers of Charles Manson shocked the world after they wreaked their helter-skelter mayhem on four unsuspecting Beautiful People and a happenstance teenager in Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s Hollywood hills home. Other than note that the main characters repeatedly cross paths, this is all MP will say about the plot.

Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) does Playboy Mansion with the Beautiful People.

The four Beautiful People are all characters: actress and model Tate (Margot Robbie), girlfriend of film director Polanski (Rafal Zwierucha in an Austin Powers get-up); Tate’s friend and confidante Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), hairstylist to the Hollywood in-crowd; coffee heiress Abigail Folger (Samantha Robinson), and Polanski’s friend Voytek Frykowski (Costa Ronin). But these worthies take a back seat to their neighbors, the fictional fading cowboy star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double and sidekick Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), ‘more than a brother and a little less than a wife.’

Tarantino’s black-and-white opening feels straight from the Coens' playbook.

The film’s opening feels straight from the Coen brothers’ playbook: a black-and-white Western meet-up with Rick and Cliff via a campy 1960s-television-style Hollywood celebrity interview; it closes on a similar note, with Rick doing a black-and-white television ad for ‘Red Apple Cigarettes’. Another Coenesque touch is a spunky eight-year-old girl, Trudi (Julie Butters), an actor on a television Western pilot set with DiCaprio’s Rick. Anyone as focused and dedicated as Trudi would make someone even twice her age feel washed-up.

A focused Trudi (Julie Butters) gives cowboy Rick a good going over.

Tarantino has done something similar to what Huston did with his own misfits, in that he put together a movie buff’s dream team. Like Huston’s Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, DiCaprio and Pitt each is at the top of his game; though Robbie appears to have a lot more fun playing a self-conscious, method-mad actress than Marilyn Monroe had being one.

Margot Robbie shares the fun playing a self-conscious Sharon Tate.

The Mansonites and reasonable facsimiles also are here: Charlie himself (Damon Herriman) and Tex Watson (Austin Butler), with a Katie (Madisen Beaty) and a Sadie (Mikey Madison) presumably as stand-ins for Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkle. Lena Dunham is Gypsy and Dakota Fanning looks like one of the Evil Dead as Squeaky Fromme. Bruce Dern is George Spahn of Spahn Ranch where the Mansonites lived with a full contingent of hippie chicks with single handles like Pussycat (Margaret Qualley). We hear the John Phillips song ‘Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Come to the Valley)’: do they ever!

Lena Dunham’s Gypsy and Margaret Qualley’s Pussycat meow at Cliff (Brad Pitt).

Hip Hollywood is no less in the mix. Damien Lewis and Mike Moh cameo as look-alikes of Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee, and Al Pacino is Rick’s over-the-top agent Marvin Schwarzs—‘without a “t”!’ a character Terry Southern could have made up. A cavalcade of actors play movie and music people of the 1960s.

Damien Lewis catches Steve McQueen’s magic in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. 

Along with the sunny, chart-topping music of the time, a sweet touch is having Folger (Samantha Robinson), one of Tate’s houseguests, accompany herself on a piano in Tate’s house on the John Phillips song ‘Straight Shooter’.

Al Pacino’s Marvin Schwarzs is the only Tarantinoesque motor mouth.

But apart from Pacino’s Schwarzs, with all the laconic cowboys, Hollywood people obsessed with their looks and laid-back Angelenos, youthful cultists and druggies, Tarantino does not have one of his trademark motor-mouth characters. The verbal humor in this film, consistent throughout, is keyed to a lower register. Rick, instructed in the use of a military flamethrower for a movie by a technical expert, asks: ‘Anything we can do about that heat?’ to which the instructor replies, after a beat: ‘It’s a flamethrower.’

Tarantino peppers his script with film and television references to both actual and his own fictional actors, television shows, films, and music, but this is the common language of media that unite this world. He executes a tidy entrechat in leaping out of this frame of reference by having Tate buy Polanski a signed first edition of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Polanski’s film Tess came a decade later), and then back into it by making the senior actor who plays the bookseller the former 1960s television Western star Clu Gulager.

Cliff (Brad Pitt) chauffeurs a cowboy friend who lost his license (Leo DiCaprio).

So where does this leave Rick and Cliff? Tarantino’s nostalgia would be for fairy-tale old Los Angeles where every tomorrow is the same beautiful today and movie cowboys ride classic cars to happy tunes on wide-open freeways into the golden light. But Rick’s old frontier is filled with the new; for a washed-up cowboy actor, the new frontier is spaghetti Westerns.

In a sense, DiCaprio channels Philip Seymour Hoffman. And Tarantino lets Pitt, with his true best friend pit bull Brandy, open up a stand-up guy character, incidentally a ‘war hero’ who infamously ‘got away with killing his wife’, like a muscle car on the 1969 freeway. 

Cliff (Brad Pitt) and his true best friend in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.

This great-big picture is a long feast for the eyes. All the actors appear to be having fun. Filled with incident, detail, pop references, terrific writing and acting, humor, action, and classic tunes, it is so beautifully shot that it begs to be seen on a big screen.

Though back to Cliff—whose player’s most notable screen drug use was as Floyd the pothead roommate in the Tarantino-scripted True Romance—the question may come down to how the Manson family look on acid.

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood 2019 U.S. (161 minutes) Sony Pictures Entertainment. Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino; Robert Richardson, director of photography; editing by Fred Raskin; casting by Victoria Thomas; production design by Barbara Ling.