Please contact us
with corrections
or breaking news
A Thrilling ‘60s Rewrite by Quentin Tarantino by Doniphan Blair
Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton, in an imaginary WWII film, wields a weapon that makes Chekov's mantelpiece gun seem like a pen knife. image: courtesy Q. Tarantino
THE '60S ENDED FOR MOST CALIFORN-
ians not on new year’s eve, 1969, but three weeks or five months earlier, respectively. That would be the Altamont concert, where some Hells Angels killed Meredith Hunter, a black man, after The Rolling Stones played “Sympathy for the Devil”, and the Tate-La Blanca murders in Los Angeles, when acolytes of Charles Manson did almost ten times that damage, albeit after listening to The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter”.
Quentin Tarantino attempts to address this story, along with the angst of an aging actor and his homoerotic relationship with a similarly-sinking stuntman, supposedly based on Burt Reynolds’s relationship with his stunt double Hal Needham, through alternate history in “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood”, his ninth film.
The biggest hipster cinema event since “Black Panther” last year, I and a majority of my friends raced out on opening night, July 26th, or later that weekend, the lucky ones also bringing home a ‘60s-style “Once Upon a Time” brochure.
Despite a couple of false notes, notably his characterization of actress Sharon Tate and martial artist Bruce Lee, Tarantino grabs hold of his three massive themes—especially the hippie story—and doesn’t stop shaking until he squeezes out the revenge catharsis, with his signature hyperbolic film violence, that closed his last three films.
The fading actor Rick Dalton, excellently enunciated by Leonardo DiCaprio—an obvious stand-in for the director, who claims this is his second-to-last-film—became a TV star in the ‘50s, playing the lead in “Bounty Law”, one of the hundreds of period pieces and props Tarantino lovingly concocts. Unfortunately, by 1969, he has degenerated from leading man to having to hustle for one-episode bad-guy roles.
Dalton and his stunt double Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt, cruising Hollywood in his Cadillac. image: courtesy Q. Tarantino
To watch DiCaprio overact a lushly-filmed western bar scene, transition to fully human, after the director yells cut, and then wreck his trailer, in a symphony of self-indulgence and pathos, all while playing a shallow soul trying to find himself, is a wonder in acting styles and agility as well as psychology.
An adulatory homage to all things early-‘60s, replete with faux cigarette brands and commercials, movie scenes, posters and billboards, dog food and much more, “Once Upon a Time” actually hails the freedom of the late-‘60s in the form of Dalton’s stunt double Cliff Booth, tenderly rendered by Brad Pitt. Even further down the backside of his career—indeed, Dalton will soon be letting him go—Booth is Dalton’s Man Friday and only friend, leading to a well-developed buddy picture.
Reviewers from Variety to The New Yorker ridicule “Once Upon a Time” as a paean to ‘50s’ establishment white maledom and a frontal attack on hippies, especially with the pummeling of longhairs that Booth provides in a couple of scenes. He also kicks the ass of Bruce Lee, oddly overplayed by Mike Moh, but an obvious symbol of what many Americans would like to do to today’s China.
Although hippie shaming may be what Tarantino tells us, it’s not what he shows. Booth wears moccasins, presumably for a better grip from which to launch into stunts, but also a footwear famously favored by hippies. Booth is upbeat, even Buddhist, in the face of adversity and follows the adventurous life, wherever it might lead, even scuba diving and “accidently” spear-gunning his nagging wife, or smoking LSD.
Booth picks up hitchhikers, notably Pussycat, a vivacious hippie chick played by Margaret Qualley, who steals the picture in a bravura, over-the-top performance. While she claims she was inspired by Tarantino’s cine enthusiasm, he obviously directed her to within an inch of her just-starting career—one millimeter further it would have imploded into farce, clowning and embarrassment.
The daughter of Andie MacDowell, the more sedate center of “Sex, Lies and Videotape” (Steve Sodenbergh’s 1989 break out pic which started an indie wave), Qualley makes hippie life incredibly attractive—until it’s not—and has the film’s most iconic line.
Pussycat, played by Margaret Qualley, steals the movie before and after stuntman Cliff Booth picks her up hitchhiking. image: courtesy Q. Tarantino
Two anti-heroes meeting to trigger a super nova, Pussycat provides Booth both the opportunity to maturely turn down the sex with a minor she freely offers and to drive her to the Spahn Ranch, the abandoned Western set where the historical Manson Family holed up.
“To live outside the law, you must be honest,” according to Bob Dylan ("Absolutely Sweet Marie", 1966), and it’s a dictum Booth takes to heart.
After meeting The Family, which was 90% female as well as the epitome of evil hippies, Booth becomes the good hippie, the mensch, the standup guy who checks in on his acquaintance, Spahn the ranch owner (Bruce Dern), who was in fact half blind, 80 and trading sex for rent, to make sure he’s not being held hostage.
Those who live outside the law must police their own, as Oaklanders learned the hard way on December 2, 2016. That was when a once-happy artist collective turned, within fifteen minutes, into an inferno, the horrific “Ghost Ship” fire. If one of the hundreds of people who attended events there had pulled a Cliff Booth, grabbing the venue’s ringmaster by his dreads and insisting he make some changes, many lives could have been saved. Derick Almena and his assistant, the more innocent Max Harris, are currently awaiting sentencing on 36 manslaughter counts (see article).
For the fictional Pussycat character and the very real Spahn Ranch scene, Tarantino borrowed beaucoup from “The Girls” (2016) by Emma Cline, who in turn may have borrowed from her ex-boyfriend, a contention still in litigation. As if that were not enough first-hand female insight, he also had Lena Dunham, director/writer/actor of the television series “Girls”, play one of Charlie’s angels of death.
Although hippie material can easily veer into kitch, Tarantino’s rendering of the ranch, the Manson matriarchy and especially their “man”- and “like”-ladened pseudo-revolutionary rap is dead on.
Unfortunately, Tarantino only comes close to his signature, slow-crawl set pieces, like the gimp in “Pulp Fiction” (1994) or the café in “Inglourious Basterds” (2009), a couple of times in “Once Upon a Time”: when the Mansonites pull up to Tate’s house in their smoking hulk of a ‘60s classic car, and in the film within the film when Dalton, as an outlaw, takes a girl hostage.
Director Quentin Tarantino yucks it up with his new star, Julia Butters, between takes. image: courtesy Q. Tarantino
Fantastically played by the twelve-year old Julia Butters, who’s being called the next Meryl Streep, she schools Dalton on method acting and is about to do the same with misogyny—his patronizing use of the term “pumpkin puss”—before magnanimously letting him slide.
Tarantino, however, is not one to leave well enough alone and has her show a sado-masochistical streak. When Booth throws her to floor in the scene and politely apologizes after, she says “It’s OK, I’m wearing pads. Anyway, I like to throw myself on the ground just for fun.” Altogether, it’s a beautifully nuanced commentary on the Me Too movement, which undoubtedly plagues Tarantino, given he owes his meteoric rise to the producer of his first eight films, the notorious abuser and alleged rapist Harvey Weinstein, also still in litigation.
While the Hollywood women have not come after him for this film, Shannon Lee didn’t see anything of symbolic value in Tarantino’s trashing of her father, the brilliant and innovative Bruce Lee, who had to work extra hard as an immigrant of color to break into Hollywood, even teaching Tate kung-fu for a few extra bucks, which Tarantino shows briefly.
Another voice of outrage is from the French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, Roman Polanski’s 33-years-his-junior third wife—Tate was his second—who claims HE is being exploited, without his consent, to make money for a Hollywood which abandoned him—pretty rich for a guy with almost a dozen sex-with-underage-women charges against him, something Brad Pitt’s Booth would NEVER have done.
The real crime against Polanski, which Seigner fails to mention, is that Tarantino plays him flat, as a happy-go-lucky rich guy zooming around the Hollywood hills in his MG.
In point of fact, he was a Holocaust survivor riddled with injury while also the king of Hollywood, due to his masterpiece hit “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), about Satanists no less. I would have loved to see “Once Upon a Time” grapple with the character of Polanski—the European, the short, dark filmmaker, the Jew, and the tantric opposite of the aging-if-still-adolescent gentile Rick Dalton—but that is both another movie and something Tarantino couldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, due to Polanski’s sex abuse.
Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie, takes in one of her own movies, 'The Wrecking Crew' (1968), one afternoon on Hollywood Boulevard. image: courtesy Q. Tarantino
In his stead, Tarantino places Sharon Tate, decently played Margot Robbie, but whom Tarantino portrays as a shallow, smiling model type, another missed opportunity. Despite the critics' frequent complaint that he can’t write women, his films have many intricate females—Jackie Brown, played by the great Pam Grier, leaps to mind. Indeed, Tate was a shy, alienated army brat as well as stunning beauty and talented actor, who was making her way in Hollywood as a second Marilyn Monroe, including her literary side—falling for the obviously difficult Polanski—and great comedic acting, replete with pratfalls.
While not quite achieving the genius of “Jackie Brown” (1997) or “Pulp Fiction”, “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood”’s alternative history provides a lot of intensity, story and love—Dalton for Booth, Booth for life, Tarantino for hippies, and, most of all, Tarantino for Hollywood—enough to provide those of us who raced out on opening night numerous enjoyable repeat viewing for years to come.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .Posted on Aug 01, 2019 - 10:34 AM