cinema; culture; united states · 11 min
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There’s a scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that does nothing whatsoever for the plot and is, I believe, the heart of the film. Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth are up on the roof of Rick’s house on Cielo Drive, drinking whiskey sours and watching the sun go down over Los Angeles. They talk about nothing much, nothing gets settled, and the story sits still while they sit there, two men who’ve known each other for years sharing a drink and a silence neither of them feels any need to fill. Tarantino shoots it with a calm nobody knew he had in him. The camera takes its time, and the light is the real light of Los Angeles at seven in the evening in August, gold and dusty and almost gone.
It’s a scene about time, though less about time passing (films about old age have that covered) than about the time that’s left, the stretch between knowing something is ending and the moment it actually ends, when ordinary things take on the odd quality of being done for the last time by someone who hasn’t noticed yet.
The film came out in 2019, Tarantino’s ninth. It may not be his most impressive or his most influential, but it is, by a wide margin, his best.
Leonardo DiCaprio does something here I’d never seen him do before, which is to be pathetic in the old Greek sense of the word, pathétikos, the thing that moves you to compassion. Rick Dalton was a television star in the fifties, the lead in a cowboy show called Bounty Law, and by 1969 he can’t get work. He isn’t a bad actor. The film takes pains to show that when he focuses, when he gets past the insecurity and the booze and gives himself over to a scene, he’s genuinely good. On the set of some B-movie western he nails a scene, takes the material somewhere it had no business going, and a child actress tells him it was the best acting she’s ever seen in her life. Rick comes apart and goes back to his trailer to cry.
What hurts about that scene is how seldom film shows the most common experience on earth, being good enough and finding it isn’t enough. Rick has real talent and the bad luck to be standing on the wrong side of a cultural shift. Hollywood is giving up on the kind of pictures he knows how to make; studio westerns are dying off, and New Hollywood is arriving with Coppola and Scorsese and people who want different things and speak another language altogether. Rick doesn’t speak it, and that has little to do with brains and a lot to do with being forty-something in a world that moved on while he stayed put.
Tarantino, obsessive as he is about Hollywood history, knows Rick Dalton is a real type multiplied by a hundred. Sixties Hollywood was full of Rick Daltons, TV actors who’d had their moment and woke up one morning to find it had passed. They could ride a horse and fire a gun on camera and deliver a line with conviction, and then one day none of that was worth anything, because the market had gone somewhere else.
DiCaprio refuses to protect him. He won’t dignify Rick or make him cool; he lets him stutter and weep, get drunk before noon, stand at a mirror talking to himself with a self-loathing that’s hard to sit through, and in the same scenes he lets him be charming and funny, capable of an instinctive generosity his insecurity never quite manages to snuff out. Rick is a wreck and he’s loveable, both at once, which when you think about it is more or less everybody’s condition.
Brad Pitt won the Oscar for Cliff Booth and he earned it, though what he does is so understated you could easily miss how much of it there is. Cliff is Rick’s stunt double, so his job is quite literally to put his body in harm’s way so that Rick doesn’t have to. By 1969, though, Rick barely works, and so neither does Cliff, who has drifted into being something between a personal assistant, a chauffeur, a bodyguard and a friend. He lives in a trailer behind a drive-in theatre with his pitbull, Brandy, drives Rick’s Cadillac, fixes his antenna and keeps him company.
There’s a rumour going round in the film that Cliff killed his wife. Tarantino never confirms or denies it; he drops in an ambiguous flashback on a boat and leaves you to make up your own mind, which says plenty about what he wants from the character. Cliff has something dark in him, and the film acknowledges it without ever going in, like a room in the house that nobody uses.
Where the film does go, with something close to devotion, is Cliff’s competence. He can fight, drive, fix an antenna, feed a dog, and he moves through the world with the economy of gesture you see in people who trust their own bodies. When he climbs onto Rick’s roof to sort out the TV antenna, Tarantino shoots it like choreography, every movement precise and functional and elegant without trying to be, and the camera watches him with the respect you’d give a craftsman at his bench.
That quiet, physical, hands-on competence is what the film picks as its subject, and it looks at it closely, without the soft focus of nostalgia. Tarantino watches Cliff Booth the way a documentary maker might watch the last blacksmith in a dying village, aware that what he’s recording is on its way out.
Rick and Cliff are two versions of the same predicament, men whose worth was tied to a world that’s gone. Rick mattered because Hollywood made westerns and he was good at westerns; Cliff mattered because movies needed stuntmen to fall off horses and he was good at falling off horses. Once the world stopped needing those things, both of them were left with their talent intact and nothing to use it on.
Where they differ is in how they carry it. Rick carries it badly, with drink and anguish and an insecurity that eats at him in plain view. Cliff goes quiet. He doesn’t complain or dwell on what he lost or what might have been. He keeps going with what he’s got (the trailer, the dog, Rick’s car), and there’s a dignity to him that’s plainer than any philosophical stoicism and comes from being unable to picture an alternative. Cliff doesn’t know how to be otherwise, and what looks from a distance like style, that complete absence of self-pity, is to a large extent a limitation.
Tarantino films their friendship with a tenderness that’s new for him. In the earlier films, whatever went on between men came down to power and friction: Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield are colleagues, the crew in Reservoir Dogs distrust each other from the first frame, Bill and the Bride love each other and try to kill each other. Rick and Cliff just love each other, without any tension, with the ease of two people who’ve known each other twenty years and have nothing left to explain. Rick knows Cliff probably killed his wife. Cliff knows Rick is fragile and will fold the moment anything goes sideways. Neither of them ever brings it up, partly because they belong to a generation of men who don’t bring things up, and partly because friendship, as they understand it, can manage without total transparency so long as the other one reliably shows up.
The film presents that friendship as something precious and also something gone. Precious because it’s real and it works, because these two hold each other up and stay afloat that way. Gone because the masculinity that makes it possible is disappearing, the quiet, capable kind, stoic because that’s how it was brought up, good at fixing things and hopeless at talking about feelings. Whether that’s good or bad the film won’t say. It films it with the care of someone who knows he’s looking at something for the last time.
The film is set in the days leading up to the Cielo Drive murders, the night Charles Manson’s followers killed Sharon Tate and four others. Tarantino’s remarkable move is to leave that fact in the background. Tate, played by Margot Robbie, is young and pregnant and luminous, happy in a way that has no psychological depth and doesn’t need any, and Tarantino films that uncomplicated happiness the way you’d film something about to shatter, with too much attention, almost obsessive attention, as if the camera knew what the character doesn’t.
In one scene Tate goes to the cinema to watch a film she’s in, The Wrecking Crew with Dean Martin, and sits among the audience watching them laugh at her scenes. Her delight at seeing herself up there and realising it works, that people respond, is so unguarded it hurts, because we know what’s coming and Tarantino knows we know. The film turns that knowledge into a kind of mourning in advance, and the sadness that hangs over every frame is something the viewer brings in with them.
In American cultural mythology 1969 is the year it all ended: Manson, Altamont, the collapse of hippie innocence, the way into the dark seventies. Like every symbolic date it’s a simplification, naturally, but Tarantino is working in myth, and in the myth 1969 divides a world where you could still believe certain things (that people were decent, that California would keep its promise, that a simple life in the sun was possible) from one where that belief could no longer hold.
And then Tarantino rewrites history. The Manson family never make it to Tate’s door. They stumble into Rick Dalton’s place instead, with Rick drunk in his swimming pool, and Cliff Booth, who has just smoked an acid-laced cigarette, tears them apart with a can opener and by slamming a girl’s skull against the walls, while Brandy the pitbull rips into flesh. It’s Tarantino at his most violent and excessive, the same revisionist trick he pulled with Hitler in Inglourious Basterds and with the plantation in Django Unchained.
Here the trick means something else. Killing Hitler in Inglourious Basterds was a revenge joke, a fantasy of payback. Saving Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is closer to a prayer, Tarantino, who loves classical Hollywood with an intensity that occasionally verges on the pathological, pleading with the past: let me fix this. Let me save her. Let me imagine a world where the night of August 8th, 1969 turns out differently, where the monsters never arrive, where the pregnant woman survives, where the sixties don’t end in blood.
It’s nostalgia turned into fiction, with all the weight and all the trap that nostalgia always carries. Tarantino knows history can’t be undone, that Tate died and the sixties are over, that the Hollywood he loved is gone. What he has is a camera, and a camera can do what the real world won’t permit: hold time still, rewrite the last page, let Sharon Tate live one more night, invite Rick Dalton in for a drink and end the picture on a door opening instead of one closing.
1969 is where it’s set, but Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a film about endings, the end of a certain kind of cinema and a certain kind of masculinity, of the friendship that grew out of it, and of a way of relating to work in which what counted was knowing how to do something well and doing your job, and that alone was enough to make a life feel worthwhile.
Tarantino was always a nostalgic. His whole filmography is a love letter to cultural forms that have ceased to exist, blaxploitation, wuxia, spaghetti westerns, seventies B-movies. In the earlier work, though, the nostalgia was raw material; he took those genres, recycled them and turned them into something new. Here nostalgia is the subject. He looks at the past and moves into it, and films it with the patience of a man who knows that once the camera stops rolling, all of it disappears.
You can read the film as conservative, and that wouldn’t be wrong. It does say something was lost, that the world used to be better, that people were more capable and more dignified and more real, and I suspect Tarantino would sign up to all of that on his more sentimental days. But there’s another reading, more existential than ideological, in which everything ends: the worlds we love will vanish, the people we look up to will fade into irrelevance, and the skills we prize will lose their market. Against that the film sets aside complaint, and with it any idea of adapting or reinventing yourself, and settles on something simpler and harder, just being there, doing what you know how to do, drinking a whiskey sour on the roof with your friend while the sun sinks behind Los Angeles and not saying a word, because there is nothing to say that could possibly match what is being lost.