ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD

In Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino tells two concurrent stories that intertwine: one follows Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a fictional character who’s a composite of any number of movie stars who made the transition from TV star to the silver screen – actors such as Steve McQueen and Burt Reynolds. Rick Dalton is most well-known for starring in a TV Western series called Bounty Law but his film career is on the decline (though he was the third lead in a WW2 flick called The Fourteen Fists of McCluskey alongside Rod Taylor)– so Rick is panicking. He’s overly anxious about his job prospects and intermittently has flashbacks, dwelling on ‘what could’ve been’ when he’s missed out on starring-role opportunities that could’ve saved his career. The yin to Rick’s yang is Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Rick’s long-time stunt double and best friend, who has also become his driver and personal assistant. Burt Reynolds had Hal Needham, his best friend and stuntman, likewise Steve McQueen had Bud Ekin (who executed the famous motorbike jump in The Great Escape and the car stunts in Bullitt), who was McQueen’s best friend and stuntman – and so it goes that Rick has Cliff. Both are functioning drunks and Rick, despite being hungover a good deal of the time -  is a talented actor, at times quite emotional and vulnerable as well as being extremely charming. Cliff on the other hand, is a war veteran, terminally stoic and laid-back – refusing to let anything disrupt his chillaxed exterior.

DiCaprio and Pitt have terrific chemistry – very much a Butch and Sundance dynamic– and we’re happy to amble along with them on the ride – quite literally – as we’re frequently in the back seat of Rick’s coup de ville, cruising along with them through an elaborately recreated Los Angeles of the era. But being Quentin Tarantino –  he digresses extensively – much like a meandering conversation about movies between film geeks, with one movie leading to another, then leading to another, then a genre connects to a star, the star connects to a director and so on, in a free-associative frenzy of film styles, film art and film ephemera: Mad Magazine and TV guide covers featuring DiCaprio, Spaghetti western posters for films he’s made, the FM Radio station that pumps the tunes that comprise the film’s soundtrack (which seems to be on in every car, transistor radio and store) and in general, the level of detail in the world that’s being recreated is INSANE. So while DiCaprio’s Rick works on a TV show, we follow Brad Pitt’s Cliff as he kills time, fixing Rick’s rooftop TV aerial, loitering around Rick’s trailer on The Green Hornet set where Rick is starring as a bad guy of the week, then getting into a fight with Bruce Lee who’s holding court, bragging about his fighting prowess. The connective tissue of the film, being at once Hollywood film and LA history, also operates largely on a meta level – for instance one character has a backstory where he may-or may not have – killed his wife on a boat – which echoes the Natalie Wood & Robert Wagner scandal, there’s a scene where Brad Pitt’s Cliff rebuffs an underage girls advances, which feels like a comment on the Roman Polanski scandal and so on – the film is packed with these kinds of references – plot-wise, character-wise and in the casting – where a TV western star plays a TV western star (Deadwood’s Timothy Olyphant) and the children of Hollywood stars play members of the Manson Family (such as Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn, Andi MacDowell’s daughter Margaret Qualley) as well as children of stars playing numerous other cast members like Maya Hawke – Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke’s daughter and also Rumer Willis. So the casting itself is another layer of these meta-connections, more threads in this tapestry of Hollywood folklore. We follow Rick as he films a TV pilot, playing a black-hatted villain on the new series Lancer, then gets into a philosophical chat about acting with his 8-year-old co-star before we’re thrust into an extended segment of the show itself featuring Luke Perry, where DiCaprio delivers a stellar example of just how great an actor he is.

Meanwhile, Cliff’s out driving Rick’s Coupe de Ville and picks up a hitchhiking hippie girl named ‘Pussycat’ who asks to be taken to the Spahn Movie Ranch, where Cliff recalls shooting TV shows years earlier. It’s at this ranch that the Manson acolytes live, which also highlights the bizarre sense of reality and Film and TV fiction colliding, which is a theme of the film. That Spahn ranch sequence in particular is terrifically tense. It’s well-known that Charles Manson wanted to be a singer but he also wrote a script - and stalked Steve McQueen in order to pitch it to him, insisting McQueen’s Solar Productions produce the film. The conversation went south, ending with McQueen breaking Manson’s nose. Consequently, McQueen was one of the celebrities on Manson’s ‘Kill List’.

The other side of all this is Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), who along with her husband, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) rents the house next to Rick Dalton’s on Cielo Drive. Robbie is really great here as Tate, playing her as a light-hearted optimist, an enthusiastic and warm party-girl, she loves the movie business and – in a flip side to Rick’s character - is hopeful about her future as an actor. We follow her as she buys a first edition for her husband, then impulsively goes to a cinema see herself starring in The Wrecking Crew, a spy caper with Dean Martin. It’s this sequence that I found really moving, but alternately quite personal for Tarantino – we see clips from the film but rather than replace Tate in the film digitally with Margot Robbie – we can see the real Sharon Tate performing in it instead.  The fictionalised Sharon Tate gleefully puts her bare feet up on the seat and watches the film as an audience member. An actress playing an actress, watching herself as an actress. Meta, meta and more meta.

To say any more about the story is to ruin it, suffice to say, this is less a glib revision of history for laughs or thrills and more a deeply personal and loving homage to a bygone era of Studio TV and Film that was on the decline at the time the Manson murders occurred, the period itself is a crossroads: for the kinds of films being made and for the culture – and counter-culture -  itself. As Joan Didion said in her essay The White Album, the night of the Manson murders was “the day the sixties ended”.