There’s a scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that has no narrative importance at all and is, I believe, the heart of the film. Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth are sitting on the roof of Rick’s house on Cielo Drive, drinking whiskey sours and watching Los Angeles at sunset. They don’t talk about anything that matters. Nothing gets resolved. The plot doesn’t move an inch. They’re just there, two guys who’ve known each other for years, sharing a drink and a silence that doesn’t need filling. Tarantino films them with a stillness nobody knew he had in him. The camera is in no rush. The light is the actual light of Los Angeles at seven in the evening in August, golden and dusty and running out.
It’s a scene about time. Not time passing, which is what movies about old age are about, but time remaining. That narrow band between knowing something is ending and the moment it actually ends. The strange quality things take on when you’re doing them for the last time and don’t know it yet.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood came out in 2019. It’s Tarantino’s ninth film. And it is, by a wide margin, his best. Not the most impressive, not the boldest, not the most influential. His best.
Rick Dalton and Fear
Leonardo DiCaprio does something here I’d never seen him do before: he’s pathetic. Not pathetic as an insult. Pathetic in the old Greek sense, pathétikos, the thing that moves you to compassion. Rick Dalton was a television star in the fifties, lead of a cowboy show called Bounty Law, and now, in 1969, he can’t get work. Not because he’s bad. The film goes out of its way to show that when Rick focuses, when he pushes past the insecurity and the booze and gives himself over to a scene, he’s genuinely good. There’s a moment on set where he’s shooting a scene for some B-movie western and he nails it, 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 falls apart. Goes back to his trailer and weeps.
The scene is devastating because it shows something film rarely bothers with, something that happens to be the most common experience on earth: being good enough and having it not matter. Rick is no hack. He’s a man with real talent who had the misfortune of standing on the wrong side of a cultural shift. Hollywood is done making the kind of pictures Rick knows how to make. Studio westerns are dying out. New Hollywood is arriving, Coppola, Scorsese, people who want different things, who speak a different language entirely. Rick doesn’t speak that language. Not because he’s stupid but because he’s forty-something and the world moved and he didn’t.
Tarantino, who is obsessive about Hollywood history, knows Rick Dalton is a real type multiplied by a hundred. The Hollywood of the sixties was full of Rick Daltons. TV actors who’d had their moment and one morning woke up to find that their moment had passed. Men who could ride a horse and fire a gun on camera and deliver a line with conviction, and who discovered overnight that none of those skills were worth anything anymore. Not because the skills were bad. Because the market moved on.
What DiCaprio does with Rick is refuse to protect him. He doesn’t dignify him. Doesn’t make him cool. He lets you see him stutter, cry, get drunk before noon, stand in front of a mirror talking to himself with a self-loathing that’s hard to watch. And in the same breath he shows you a man who can be charming, funny, capable of an instinctive generosity his insecurity never quite manages to kill off. Rick is a wreck and Rick is loveable. Both things, simultaneously. Which is, when you think about it, more or less the human condition.
Cliff Booth and Quiet Competence
Brad Pitt won the Oscar for Cliff Booth, and he earned it, but what he did was so understated you could easily miss the scale of it.
Cliff is Rick’s stunt double. His job is, quite literally, to put his body in harm’s way so Rick doesn’t have to. But by 1969 Rick barely works, which means Cliff doesn’t either. He’s drifted into something between a personal assistant, a chauffeur, a bodyguard, and a friend. Lives in a trailer behind a drive-in theatre with his pitbull, Brandy. Drives Rick’s Cadillac. Fixes the antenna. Keeps him company.
There’s a rumour in the film that Cliff killed his wife. Tarantino never confirms it, never denies it. He drops an ambiguous flashback on a boat and leaves the rest to you. It tells you a lot about what Tarantino is after with this character. Cliff isn’t a clean hero. There’s something dark in him, something the film acknowledges without ever exploring, like a room in the house nobody goes into.
What the film does explore, with something close to devotion, is Cliff’s competence. Cliff knows how to do things. Fight, drive, fix an antenna, feed a dog, move through the world with an economy of gesture that belongs to someone who trusts his own body. There’s a scene where he climbs onto Rick’s roof to fix the TV antenna and Tarantino shoots it like choreography. Every movement precise, functional, elegant without meaning to be elegant. A man doing something well, and a camera watching with the kind of respect you’d give a craftsman at his bench.
That physical, manual, quiet competence is the film’s real subject. Not as nostalgia. As something worth paying attention to. Tarantino watches Cliff Booth the way a documentary filmmaker might watch the last blacksmith in a dying village: aware that what he’s recording is on its way out.
Two Kinds of Men
Rick and Cliff are two versions of the same predicament: men whose value was tied to a world that no longer exists. Rick mattered because Hollywood made westerns and he was good at westerns. Cliff mattered because movies needed stuntmen who could fall off horses and he was good at falling off horses. When the world stopped requiring those things, both men were left without a function. Not without talent. Without a function.
The difference is how each one deals with it. Rick deals with it through anguish, through drinking, through an insecurity that eats him alive in plain sight. Cliff deals with it through silence. He doesn’t complain. Doesn’t reminisce. Doesn’t talk about what he lost or what might have been. He just keeps going, doing what he can with what he’s got, living in his trailer with his dog, driving Rick’s car, carrying himself with a dignity that isn’t stoicism in any philosophical sense but something plainer: the inability to imagine being otherwise. Cliff doesn’t know another way. His lack of self-pity isn’t a virtue he chose. It’s a limitation that became a style.
Tarantino films their friendship with a tenderness that’s new in his work. In his earlier films, the bonds between men were always about power, competition, friction. Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield are colleagues, not friends. The crew in Reservoir Dogs don’t trust each other from the first frame. Bill and the Bride love each other and try to destroy each other. Rick and Cliff just love each other. No tension. The easy, unexamined love of two people who’ve known each other twenty years and never felt the need to explain. Rick knows Cliff probably killed his wife. Cliff knows Rick is fragile and will collapse the moment anything goes sideways. Neither of them brings it up, because they’re men from a generation that doesn’t bring things up, and because friendship, as they understand it, doesn’t demand total transparency. It demands reliable presence.
There is something in that friendship the film presents as both precious and gone. Precious because it’s real, it works, it keeps two men afloat who would otherwise sink. Gone because the kind of masculinity that produces it, the quiet, capable, stoic-by-formation-not-by-choice kind, the kind that can fix things but can’t talk about feelings, is vanishing. The film doesn’t say this is good or bad. It films it with the care of someone who knows he’s looking at something for the last time.
1969
The film is set in the days before the Cielo Drive murders, the night Charles Manson’s followers killed Sharon Tate and four others. Tarantino does something remarkable with this fact: he pushes it to the margins. Tate appears, played by Margot Robbie, luminous, young, pregnant, happy in a way that needs no psychological depth because it is itself the point. Pure, uncomplicated happiness, and Tarantino films it the way you’d film something about to shatter: with too much attention, almost obsessive attention, the camera lingering as though it knows what the character does not.
There’s a scene where Tate goes to the cinema to watch a film she’s in, The Wrecking Crew with Dean Martin, and sits in the audience and watches people laugh at her scenes, and her joy at seeing herself up there, at realising it works, that the crowd responds, is so unguarded it hurts. It hurts because we know what comes next. Because Tarantino knows we know. And the film turns that shared knowledge into a kind of anticipatory mourning that stains every frame with a sadness that belongs not to the script but to the viewer.
In the mythology of American culture, 1969 is the year it all ended. Manson, Altamont, the collapse of hippie innocence, the threshold of the dark seventies. A simplification, naturally, like every symbolic date. But Tarantino isn’t making history. He’s making myth. And in the myth, 1969 is the line between a world where you could still believe certain things, that people were decent, that California kept its promise, that a simple life in the sun was possible, and a world where that belief could no longer hold.
The Ending That Wasn’t
And then Tarantino rewrites history. The Manson family never makes it to Tate’s door. They stumble into Rick Dalton’s place instead, Rick drunk in his swimming pool, and Cliff Booth, who’s been smoking an acid-laced cigarette, tears them apart. With a can opener. With a girl’s skull against the walls. With Brandy the pitbull ripping into flesh. Full-throttle Tarantino, his most violent and most excessive register, the same revisionist trick he pulled in Inglourious Basterds with Hitler and Django Unchained with the plantation.
But 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 not a joke. It’s 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 is nostalgia made into fiction, and like all nostalgia it carries the full weight and the full trap. Tarantino knows he cannot change what happened. Knows Tate died. Knows the sixties are over. Knows the Hollywood he loved is gone. But he’s got a camera, and with the camera he 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, end the picture with a door opening rather than closing.
The Elegy
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is not a film about 1969. It’s a film about endings. The end of a kind of cinema. The end of a kind of masculinity. The end of a kind of friendship. The end of a relationship to work in which what counted was knowing how to do something well, being competent, showing up and doing your job, and where that alone was enough to make a life feel worthwhile.
Tarantino was always a nostalgic. His whole filmography is an act of love towards cultural forms that have ceased to exist: blaxploitation, wuxia, spaghetti westerns, seventies B-movies. But in his earlier work the nostalgia was raw material. He took those genres, recycled them, made them into something new. In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood nostalgia is the subject itself. He doesn’t use the past as material. He looks at it. Lives inside it. 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 it wouldn’t be wrong. It’s a film that says something was lost, that the world used to be better, that people were more capable and more dignified and more real. Tarantino would likely agree, at least on his more sentimental days. But there’s another reading, a deeper one, which isn’t ideological at all but existential: everything ends. The worlds we love will vanish. The people we look up to will fade into irrelevance. The skills we prize will lose their market. And the answer to that is not complaint, not adaptation, not reinvention, but something at once simpler and more difficult: presence. Staying. 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.