‘Once Upon A Time in Hollywood’ Evokes Memories of a Bygone Era and Better Movies (FILM REVIEW)

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Of the common critical refrains that have dogged Quentin Tarantino over the whole of his career the most salient is, perhaps, that he, as a director, is all style and no substance. One could, as I have, handwave over these critiques and dismiss them easily with the most common rejoinder, “Right, but it’s supposed to be like that.”

To a large extent that’s true. Tarantino has a gift for the stylish, creating epic films out of a pastiche of tropes and techniques that have been explored previously in the films that inspired him. A Tarantino film is, at its core, always going to be a sort of meta-film event, which celebrates the narrative and technical history of Hollywood by presenting them in new ways that feel fresh, new, and innovative even if they’re really not.

He’s like a DJ in that regard, one who’s taken the idea of the sample and elevated it to an art in itself. Film being an almost inherently derivative medium, with the old always being recycled into the pavement that ushers in the new, it’s difficult to take those criticisms of Tarantino’s supposed unoriginality seriously. In all his films, including his latest, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, he proves himself truly gifted at remixing the old into something entirely new and giving an impressive form to the familiar.

Unfortunately, for me, it’s a lot harder to dismiss the style over substance critiques this time around. For all the evocative direction and brilliant performances in the film there is precious little holding it together aside from Tarantino’s firm belief that it would be cool if this happened. It’s cinematographic masturbation, a formless void of style in desperate pursuit of substance, that never quite rises to the sum of its parts.

Tarantino’s Old Hollywood fever dream takes us into the world of Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), an aging former star of westerns who is watching helplessly as his star is falling. Resigned to taking guest appearances in various television shows, he and his best friend/stuntman/assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) try to figure out what, if any, their next moves should be. Meanwhile, Dalton’s new neighbors, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate (Rafal Zawierucha and Margot Robbie) are the toast of the Hollywood and a bizarre gang of outcast hippies are beginning to take root in the city.

Despite personal lukewarm feelings towards the film, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is never bad, per se, so much as it has very little with which to justify itself. As a director, Tarantino does seem incapable of making a film that’s inherently Not Good and taken in a vacuum many of the pieces that make up his latest are, in fact, brilliant. DiCaprio and Pitt are perfectly paired as Dalton and Booth and each of them turn out what might be among the best performances of their entire careers. Robbie, too, manages to capture the both mythified version of Tate that exists in our cultural collective consciousness as well as the reality of the young woman on whom those myths are based.

Along with that, are some admittedly brilliant scenes that showcase everything Tarantino has ever done well in his career. As Dalton is on set filming a guest spot as a villain on a new western, we’re given some moments of existential anguish with beautifully written dialogue and pacing that both allow Tarantino to show off his pop cultural muscles and give DiCaprio space to create some memorable moments as a performer. In two of these scenes, DiCaprio is almost upstaged by the 12-year-old Julia Butters, who plays what might be Tarantino’s greatest character.

So what’s the problem? The film’s narrative warbles and wanders with less direction than the eighteenth minute of a twenty-six-minute keyboard solo. Flashes of brilliance are swiftly overshadowed by aimless noodling showcasing little more than self-congratulatory braggadocio. Scenes that seem great in the moment are, when taken contextually with the rest of the work, ultimately pointless and add nothing to the whole. Take Bruce Lee (Mike Moh). His appearance, amounting to little more than a brief cameo, ultimately serves the narrative very little. True, Lee did have a relationship with Tate and Polanski in real life, but that’s left unexplored here, and becomes another indistinguishable flavor in a stew already overwhelmed by spice.

That example serves as a microcosm of what’s ultimately a film that’s both overstuffed and undercooked. In some places, Tarantino pauses the film the tell us who characters are with their appearances ultimately adding nothing. In another, he gives us a minutes long info-dump of exposition that feels both necessary and lazy, as if he couldn’t figure out how to show us this information without distracting us (or himself) from the cool things he’d have rather focused on.

Supposedly, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood began its life as a novel which Tarantino spent five years working on before deciding to turn it into a movie. I would have liked to have read it. The sweeping ideas and epic homages might have worked better for me in a literary format. As it exists, it’s a bouillabaisse of ideas left floundering as the auteur flexes his cinematic might in a fabulously well-lit vanity mirror. As with any Tarantino movie, it’s certainly not easy to dismiss but it still ultimately succumbs to the worst of his excessive impulses. Is it bad? No. But it certainly does a fantastic job at making the same case that detractors have been making for decades. And this time it’s a lot harder to argue against them.

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is now playing in theaters everywhere.

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