I saw this film exactly a year ago now. I was sure to fly solo for the very first showing in a rather close seat. I saw it again with my fellow cinephile friend Evan in the top row, in the back. Then time went by, I moved, then I bought it on Amazon because the DVD's, for their own security, have remained stored, and none have been bought since Scorsese's Silence. I watched it twice thereafter. That was months ago. I watched it for the fifth time at 3am this morning. I have held off on writing a review until now.
Critics have said that it's the first film by Quentin that isn't a genre film. But that's a very difficult thing to accept when none of his films conform to any single genre, and are completely devoid of formula. Let's settle on the fact that it's the first of his movies where the central characters are not professional criminals or killers in any way. Remember, Death Proof doesn't count, because it was only a toy movie, an installation in the art project that was Grindhouse.
What truly, at its core, makes Once Upon a Time in Hollywood different from all of Quentin's other films is that it once again revolutionizes structure for a big-budget Hollywood film. The Thin Red Line was described as a hypnotic piece that had no real beginning or end, and to some extent, that is true of this unique film. The structure, frankly, is different from any film I can recall. The way he elapses time creates a kind of cinematic Ulysses.
Quentin, like me, has a thing for on-screen duos. White and Orange. Jules and Vincent, Ordell and Louis, the Geckos, Sonny Chiba and Gordon Chu, Django and Schultz, Warren and Mannix. There's always got to be a pair. The thing is that most of the time, we expect one to be the second banana, the fill-in, the punchline. Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt play a famous actor and his little-known stunt man, both perfectly suited for those roles, with an indelible dynamic that says more in a wordless two shot than most co-stars generate in a whole scene. And they, as Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth respectively, are not even on-screen together for all that many scenes. As fascinatingly deep as their rapport and their relationship are, they are still individuals too, worlds apart. And yet, the movie is bigger than that.
Margot Robbie plays against the hype preceding the movie about portraying the tragic idol Sharon Tate, committing to a surprisingly oblique, adjacent place in the story. The movie is not told from an omniscient perspective. It is three days in the life of Rick and Cliff. Sharon is an extension of Rick's neighbor Roman Polanski's celebrity and aura. He and his right-hand man see her thusly. We dip in on her as a tertiary central character, but only to the extent that one can imagine the innocent young thrill of being a fledgling actor. Anyone who has been in a movie or has dreamt of it can claim not to be moved by Sharon giggling to herself at the audience reactions around her as they watch her in her latest release. But the movie is still bigger than that.
Margaret Qualley is a breakthrough, a revelation, as is Dakota Fanning, pushing unflinchingly past her Man on Fire and War of the Worlds image straight into Squeaky Fromm. Al Pacino is back, which is one of the very few scrapes of positivity available in 2019, or '20 for that matter. And a star is born in Julia Butters, who plays a child ac-TOR with more wisdom and maturity than her over-the-hill macho co-stars could combine together.
Mike Moh plays Bruce Lee in a scene that could never have been done today. And by that I mean, they were in fact done today, last year to be exact, but only a director with as powerful a following as Quentin. But if he did not exist, the window for this scene to have existed would have closed the day Bruce died. Such is the point of this entire lounging, nostalgically rambling epic. None of this would happen today, including how it is depicted. Whether Bruce was a vain blowhard or not was never the point, and never will be despite preposterously petty comparisons to yellowface and spitting on the grave of a legend and an icon. He remains the only real-life figure, depicted in a film littered with them to an extraordinary degree, to be criticized in regard to the ethics of his portrayal.
It is because of everything in the great Kurt Russell's entire filmography, iconography and legacy that he appears briefly as a studio veteran with a life off-screen large enough to carry narration duty. We are treated to the brief shock of seeing Rebecca Gayheart in a deeply ironic role. We find great British Damian Lewis in an adequate rendition of Steve McQueen, though somehow the theory must have been more inspired than the execution. We get a parade of virtually a generation of movie stars' daughters from Harley Quinn Smith to Rumer Willis. They all have worlds of backstory and contextual reference behind them that no one could bask in in this movie without finding it still esoteric to some extent.
Because the movie is bigger than that. All that. This is a film with a five-minute scene of Cliff feeding his beloved pit bull Brandy. This is a film with about five driving montages with Cliff alone, let alone Sharon and Roman. The movie is enormously comprised of characters going from one place to the next, always with the radio on. It's also enormously comprised of characters, period, real and made-up, filtered through recollections, recollections within recollections, movies and TV programs within the movie, also real and made-up.
Quentin's camera, or Robert Richardson's camera, rather, is nothing but an unfettered eye that goes anywhere, sort of like a video game where the screen view can pass over walls or switch between any and all conceivable perspectives. It's a fluid, effortless mind's eye of recollection and imagination. And in true classic Hollywood fashion, the camera is almost always on a crane, following a conversation, climbing over a house and following a conversation with the neighbors.
The movie is phenomenally overwhelmed by that principle, the video game-like ability to sprawl through this enormous world down to every little detail. Absolutely everyone watching this film will be flooded with references they will not notice or grasp. In fact, there are huge audiences directly drawn to see this movie---Manson buffs and true crime devourers eager to spot the nuances of accuracy and the breaks into make-believe, the true enormity of young and old Tarantino fans who will see a whole now world of his indulgences, the straddling extent of fans of the indomitably A-list megastar leads, car enthusiasts and foot fetishists---all of whom will sit down and be immersed with an experience that will still flood them with new exposures to other fascinations.
Manson buffs don't necessarily watch auteur's pieces like this, that take you on such an exceptionally intoxicating cinematic ride. Young Tarantino fans will cry foul at deeply subjective and densely layered moments they won't entirely allow themselves to indulge enough to understand. Old Tarantino fans will eat up every little spot and crumb with a ladle, astonished that a movie this expensive and popular has so many wholly specific and obscure references to so many mediums, and hungry to devour even more little-known and forgotten films and music they even still hadn't yet discovered through his densely mythologized and powerfully sprawling body of work.
With remarkably unheard-of scope, this unusually, hypnotically acute piece of art is defined and colored by a wall-to-wall fascination and immersion in every medium, fashion trope, advertising style, meal portion, thread count and bathroom tile. There is a tremendous, loving and indispensably extraneous focus on neon signs, vintage car bodies burning rubber, billboard hits, radio DJ blab, commercials, dancing, backlots, and virtually any kind of transition carried to extravagant extremes. From cranes flying over whole streets or blocks to New Wave-style jump cuts. And Damian Lewis, who starred in the harrowing drama Keane, deserves no blame for the fact that Steve McQueen is more alive in the car stunts and driving sequences than his rather flat cameo, from the mundane spectacle of Pitt and Robbie cruising the scenic route to their destinations to Eurospy-style chase stunts shown from what seem to be sloppy Italian prints.
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, and in 2019 and '20, it is a desperately craved indulgence. We all have a version of this film in us, a pointillist sprawl of our favorite memories, the subjectivity of how it all felt and looked and sounded. Quentin may have been slowly building his mountain of material for years, but there is a special desire for this idiosyncratic brand of nostalgia, sentimentality and homesickness right now, a now we could hardly have foreseen just a few years ago. He is an absolute colossus in the annals of cinema, forever. He was born with his finger on the pulse of pop culture and its basest fixations and gratifications. Absolutely no one else could or would have made this movie. It is a fantasy that results in a miracle.
Critics have said that it's the first film by Quentin that isn't a genre film. But that's a very difficult thing to accept when none of his films conform to any single genre, and are completely devoid of formula. Let's settle on the fact that it's the first of his movies where the central characters are not professional criminals or killers in any way. Remember, Death Proof doesn't count, because it was only a toy movie, an installation in the art project that was Grindhouse.
What truly, at its core, makes Once Upon a Time in Hollywood different from all of Quentin's other films is that it once again revolutionizes structure for a big-budget Hollywood film. The Thin Red Line was described as a hypnotic piece that had no real beginning or end, and to some extent, that is true of this unique film. The structure, frankly, is different from any film I can recall. The way he elapses time creates a kind of cinematic Ulysses.
Quentin, like me, has a thing for on-screen duos. White and Orange. Jules and Vincent, Ordell and Louis, the Geckos, Sonny Chiba and Gordon Chu, Django and Schultz, Warren and Mannix. There's always got to be a pair. The thing is that most of the time, we expect one to be the second banana, the fill-in, the punchline. Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt play a famous actor and his little-known stunt man, both perfectly suited for those roles, with an indelible dynamic that says more in a wordless two shot than most co-stars generate in a whole scene. And they, as Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth respectively, are not even on-screen together for all that many scenes. As fascinatingly deep as their rapport and their relationship are, they are still individuals too, worlds apart. And yet, the movie is bigger than that.
Margot Robbie plays against the hype preceding the movie about portraying the tragic idol Sharon Tate, committing to a surprisingly oblique, adjacent place in the story. The movie is not told from an omniscient perspective. It is three days in the life of Rick and Cliff. Sharon is an extension of Rick's neighbor Roman Polanski's celebrity and aura. He and his right-hand man see her thusly. We dip in on her as a tertiary central character, but only to the extent that one can imagine the innocent young thrill of being a fledgling actor. Anyone who has been in a movie or has dreamt of it can claim not to be moved by Sharon giggling to herself at the audience reactions around her as they watch her in her latest release. But the movie is still bigger than that.
Margaret Qualley is a breakthrough, a revelation, as is Dakota Fanning, pushing unflinchingly past her Man on Fire and War of the Worlds image straight into Squeaky Fromm. Al Pacino is back, which is one of the very few scrapes of positivity available in 2019, or '20 for that matter. And a star is born in Julia Butters, who plays a child ac-TOR with more wisdom and maturity than her over-the-hill macho co-stars could combine together.
Mike Moh plays Bruce Lee in a scene that could never have been done today. And by that I mean, they were in fact done today, last year to be exact, but only a director with as powerful a following as Quentin. But if he did not exist, the window for this scene to have existed would have closed the day Bruce died. Such is the point of this entire lounging, nostalgically rambling epic. None of this would happen today, including how it is depicted. Whether Bruce was a vain blowhard or not was never the point, and never will be despite preposterously petty comparisons to yellowface and spitting on the grave of a legend and an icon. He remains the only real-life figure, depicted in a film littered with them to an extraordinary degree, to be criticized in regard to the ethics of his portrayal.
It is because of everything in the great Kurt Russell's entire filmography, iconography and legacy that he appears briefly as a studio veteran with a life off-screen large enough to carry narration duty. We are treated to the brief shock of seeing Rebecca Gayheart in a deeply ironic role. We find great British Damian Lewis in an adequate rendition of Steve McQueen, though somehow the theory must have been more inspired than the execution. We get a parade of virtually a generation of movie stars' daughters from Harley Quinn Smith to Rumer Willis. They all have worlds of backstory and contextual reference behind them that no one could bask in in this movie without finding it still esoteric to some extent.
Because the movie is bigger than that. All that. This is a film with a five-minute scene of Cliff feeding his beloved pit bull Brandy. This is a film with about five driving montages with Cliff alone, let alone Sharon and Roman. The movie is enormously comprised of characters going from one place to the next, always with the radio on. It's also enormously comprised of characters, period, real and made-up, filtered through recollections, recollections within recollections, movies and TV programs within the movie, also real and made-up.
Quentin's camera, or Robert Richardson's camera, rather, is nothing but an unfettered eye that goes anywhere, sort of like a video game where the screen view can pass over walls or switch between any and all conceivable perspectives. It's a fluid, effortless mind's eye of recollection and imagination. And in true classic Hollywood fashion, the camera is almost always on a crane, following a conversation, climbing over a house and following a conversation with the neighbors.
The movie is phenomenally overwhelmed by that principle, the video game-like ability to sprawl through this enormous world down to every little detail. Absolutely everyone watching this film will be flooded with references they will not notice or grasp. In fact, there are huge audiences directly drawn to see this movie---Manson buffs and true crime devourers eager to spot the nuances of accuracy and the breaks into make-believe, the true enormity of young and old Tarantino fans who will see a whole now world of his indulgences, the straddling extent of fans of the indomitably A-list megastar leads, car enthusiasts and foot fetishists---all of whom will sit down and be immersed with an experience that will still flood them with new exposures to other fascinations.
Manson buffs don't necessarily watch auteur's pieces like this, that take you on such an exceptionally intoxicating cinematic ride. Young Tarantino fans will cry foul at deeply subjective and densely layered moments they won't entirely allow themselves to indulge enough to understand. Old Tarantino fans will eat up every little spot and crumb with a ladle, astonished that a movie this expensive and popular has so many wholly specific and obscure references to so many mediums, and hungry to devour even more little-known and forgotten films and music they even still hadn't yet discovered through his densely mythologized and powerfully sprawling body of work.
With remarkably unheard-of scope, this unusually, hypnotically acute piece of art is defined and colored by a wall-to-wall fascination and immersion in every medium, fashion trope, advertising style, meal portion, thread count and bathroom tile. There is a tremendous, loving and indispensably extraneous focus on neon signs, vintage car bodies burning rubber, billboard hits, radio DJ blab, commercials, dancing, backlots, and virtually any kind of transition carried to extravagant extremes. From cranes flying over whole streets or blocks to New Wave-style jump cuts. And Damian Lewis, who starred in the harrowing drama Keane, deserves no blame for the fact that Steve McQueen is more alive in the car stunts and driving sequences than his rather flat cameo, from the mundane spectacle of Pitt and Robbie cruising the scenic route to their destinations to Eurospy-style chase stunts shown from what seem to be sloppy Italian prints.
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, and in 2019 and '20, it is a desperately craved indulgence. We all have a version of this film in us, a pointillist sprawl of our favorite memories, the subjectivity of how it all felt and looked and sounded. Quentin may have been slowly building his mountain of material for years, but there is a special desire for this idiosyncratic brand of nostalgia, sentimentality and homesickness right now, a now we could hardly have foreseen just a few years ago. He is an absolute colossus in the annals of cinema, forever. He was born with his finger on the pulse of pop culture and its basest fixations and gratifications. Absolutely no one else could or would have made this movie. It is a fantasy that results in a miracle.