Reduced to an outline, the penultimate film by Quentin Tarantino is not an especially surprising proposition: a shaggy, day-in-the-life evocation of Hollywood circa 1969, complete with washed-up TV stars, uxoricidal stuntmen, and antagonists appropriated from history. Each of Tarantino’s previous eight features has functioned as a celebration of form—cinema as cinema before anything else—and Inglourious Basterds pointedly incorporated aspects of film production into a wartime revenge narrative. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood also reflects Tarantino’s persistent fascination with the margins of popular culture, with the forgotten, neglected or dismissed figures who plied their craft in the service of cheap exploitation flicks and old TV westerns. (Rick Dalton, this film’s waning star, is effectively auditioning for a role in a future Tarantino project.) And, as with his previous three features, Tarantino spikes the drama with real historical villainy, here pitting his invented Hollywood heroes against members of the Manson Family. The result is as unsurprising as its components: intermittently impressive, ultimately frustrating. Once upon a time, you could bank on the reverse.
Opening to a seven-minute standing ovation at Cannes, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood has been praised as a work of restraint and maturity. Some critics have even deployed the word ‘elegy’. Seemingly encouraging such assessments, the film does not proceed via the framework of genre, unfolding instead like a loose, discursive art movie (Jacques Demy’s Model Shop is an obvious reference point), and Tarantino calculatedly arranges the action within a historically loaded timeframe. Yet in many ways Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood represents the director at his most indulgent. Absent any structural momentum, the film effectively operates as a vehicle for his obsessions, accomodating movie star cosplay, meta-Western interludes and scattered clips from Rick Dalton’s showreel. This is the landscape of Tarantino’s childhood, recreated in vivid, loving detail, and there is little room in the narrative for a serious exploration of the era. It is worth questioning, then, Tarantino’s decision to integrate the Manson Family at all. Certainly you can rationalise it from a dramatic perspective; our prior knowledge of the murders is the primary source of tension, and it casts a pall of dread over even the film’s most trivial moments. It also allows Tarantino to inject a splash of gruesome violence into an otherwise bloodless story. But a case could be mounted that Tarantino’s brazen revision is not as exploitative as it initially appears, and that he may have been compelled, at least in part, by something more admirable: empathy for Sharon Tate.
At first I thought it was curious that, given the subject matter, Tarantino did not cast a forgotten Hollywood star in a career-resurrecting role; DiCaprio, Pitt and Robbie all had viable careers prior to being cast. Surely if any of his films warranted such a stunt, it was this one. But Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood does resurrect a forgotten Hollywood star: Sharon Tate herself. From this perspective, the ending is justified—in conception, if not execution. If the film had depicted Tate’s murder, or even simply elided it, it would have re-affirmed the same old narrative, where Sharon Tate’s entire life is reduced to the night on which it ended. You could even defend Tate’s limited role in the film from this perspective, as dramatising her too much would have risked reframing her as a Tarantino character. As it is, we are afforded enough scope to dissociate the real Sharon Tate from Margot Robbie’s portrayal (a process aided by undoctored footage from The Wrecking Crew) and think of her as someone who lived, not merely someone who died. Not that this excuses all aspects of Sharon Tate’s depiction in the narrative, nor the exploitative manner in which her would-be murderers are disposed of, but if this film has a saving grace, it begins and ends with her.