Only an auteur cinephile like Quentin Tarantino could take a story centered around the grim 1969 Manson murders of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger, and manage to weave the events of that fateful night into the feel good movie of the summer. After a critical and commercial setback with 2015's "The Hateful Eight," which spawned a thousand think pieces criticizing Tarantino's depiction of violence against women on-screen, the internet was rightfully apoplectic over Margot Robbie's casting as the late great Sharon Tate, worried that her big screen demise would be the most distasteful death in QT’s film library to date. Thankfully, "Once Upon A Time In Hollywood" goes in the opposite direction, much like the surprise ending of 2009's "Inglourious Basterds" — he uses history and knowledge to wedge suspense into something which, inexplicably, never quite comes to fruition. By flipping the script on his own cynicism, and subverting audience's expectations yet again, what we are instead treated to is a 3-hrs long bromance period western — and while there's a giddy formlessness to the whole affair, our anxiety-induced prediction about the film's final act is what makes the film feel as fresh and exhilarating as "Pulp Fiction," "Kill Bill," and even "Reservoir Dogs." For the first two-and-a-half hours we're assuming he's going to pull a rabbit out of a hat with some sort of elusive, magic trickery — yet all he really offers us in the end is flowers, which may not so sound appealing to all — but feels just as worthy, if not more welcoming, than some lifeless dead bunny.
That this film, set against the backdrop of one of the most heinous true crime murders in L.A. lore, ends on such a warm and restrained note is a testament to the power of film itself, and what Tarantino has done for the medium over the course of his career. "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs" are near-perfect films, but he took a considerable risk in his non-linear approach to storytelling so that audiences could experience them in a much more impactful way. Ever the perfection-driven illusionist, Tarantino now seems eager to re-write history in the same way he bent time in his earlier work, and while his casting of two Caucasian over-the-hill cowboys may appear regressive, that conservatism plays right into the nostalgia of his carefully crafted era. Especially when one considers he was a young boy at the time of these murders; his worldview, which was logically filled with fictional tv heroes like John Wayne, Burt Reynolds and to some extent Steve McQueen, was heavily undermined upon his discovering that the blonde damsel in distress could not be salvaged by the likes of these men (had they not perhaps lived next door). The shrieking cries for help, surely, would've been tended to if Cliff Booth and Rick Dalton were home, but as the title of the film suggests, this is a fairy tale — a capsule in time that exists for our happy amusement — and so he rights a “wrong” that he believes contributed to the end of the gilded age of television and by extension, our cumulative identity and culture.
Rick and Cliff, equal parts Clint Eastwood and Burt Lancaster (with slightly more self-deprecating comedic awareness) are two Hollywood heroes of yesteryear, who, had they been alive in 2001, would've made the same ridiculous charges as Mark Wahlberg shortly after 9/11: "If I was on that plane, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin." That O.U.A.T.I.H. isn’t wholly preoccupied with giving this duo a set of quippy one-liners and cool scenes, allows it to follow them both at a fixed distance. As men of a certain time and age, brooding with quiet confidence and breezy charm, there is very little that gets in their way without them squashing it like a bug head-on, for Cliff anyway. The tug of war between the two is that Rick is serious as a heart attack when it comes to his career, yet Cliff is content living life behind a drive-in movie theater — just as long as his trusty pit bull, Brandy, manages to keep a full belly. The final curtain call seems to be on the mind of these characters as much as it for Tarantino, and he gives us a reason to root for him again as a cinematic impresario, even as he admits he has lost some of his creative bona fides. The much lauded ending, upon first viewing, feels like a cop out, and the slow-brewing tension that Spahn Ranch, Charles Manson, and sequence of Sharon Tate laughing alone lightheartedly in a movie theater invoke are misleading enough to invoke a palpable sense of dread and excitement. But it is movie magic in the end that saves the day, and by wiping these feral hippies from the face of the earth with such macabre glee is Quentin telling us, in the only possible way Quentin knows how, that what these kids did August 9th, 1969 robbed him (and us) of our innocence. "Once Upon A Time" feels like a sliver of time living in that innocence, for just under three hours, but you get a sense he wants to stay there for a lifetime.
“ONCE UPON A TIME … IN HOLLYWOOD” a.k.a. “When It Acid Rains it Pours” Rated R. Running time: 2 hours 41 minutes.
