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Richard Brody blogs about movies.insignificant the detail, the more trium-
phant the director’s glee at plucking it
from oblivion. Why must Cliff live with
his dog, Brandy, in a trailer behind the
Van Nuys drive-in? Because the loca-
tion allows Tarantino, like a theatre man-
ager, to put a title on the illuminated
sign. “Lady in Cement,” it reads. “Frank
Sinatra. Racquel Welch.” The name is
actually spelled Raquel, but I bet you
the error is deliberate.
What became clear, from Taranti-
no’s “Inglourious Basterds” (2009) and
“Django Unchained” (2012), is that he’s
no longer content with the revival of
trivia, forging a style from the scraps of
a consuming culture. History is also
there for the tweaking. So, in the first
of those tales, Hitler is slain before the
end of the war; in the second, a former
slave destroys a plantation. (In both
cases, fire is the purifier, and it flares
again in the new film.) While many au-
diences revelled in the havoc, some of
us flinched at its implications. I felt I
was being inducted into the revenge
fantasies of a blazingly gifted adoles-
cent, or of an even younger boy, galva-
nizing the playground with shouts of
“Let’s kill Nazis!” In short, Tarantino is
the ideal creative figurehead for an era
in which the old-school need to explore
previous eras, or to argue over them, is
being trumped, with the aid of tech-
nology, by the more exhilarating urge
to remake them as we desire.
Hence the title, “Once Upon a Time ...
in Hollywood.” It echoes “Once Upon
a Time in the West” (1968) and “Once
Upon a Time in America” (1984), both
directed by Sergio Leone, whom Taran-
tino reveres. But that coy ellipsis is re-
vealing. It reminds us that “Once upon
a time” is how fairy tales start. The film-
maker may be on a mission to get ev-
erything right about 1969, down to the
sounds and smells, but he’s also invit-
ing us to smoke a little wrongness. Rick’s
neighbors, for example, are Sharon Tate
(Margot Robbie) and her husband,
Roman Polanski (Rafał Zawierucha),
and we observe them partying at the
Playboy Mansion, together with Steve
McQueen (Damian Lewis) and other
celebrities. All perfectly plausible. The
fact that Tate was murdered by mem-
bers of the Manson gang, on August 9,
1969, on Cielo Drive, is also a matter of
record. For Tarantino, however, records
are made to be broken.
The movie is a long haul, running
more than two and a half hours. There’s
an excursion to Rome. There’s a splen-
did, if superfluous, battle between Cliff
and a haughty Bruce Lee (Mike Moh).
And, yes, there’s a part for Nicholas
Hammond, who was Friedrich in “The
Sound of Music” (1965), as the eager di-
rector of a Western. Now and then, you
get a sense, as with “Pulp Fiction” (1994),
that, in Tarantino’s thirst to entertain,
he is trying too hard—striking attitudes
for the simple sake of cool, and encour-
aging his players to push the limits. Rick
Dalton is a pretty bad actor, and Di-
Caprio, a very good actor, strains every
last fibre to dramatize that inadequacy;
the scene in which Rick, having screwed
up his lines on set, lays furious waste to
his trailer strikes me as an indulgence,
though DiCaprio’s fans will doubtless
hail his emotional bravado. Far more
winning is Rick’s conversation with a
child star ( Julia Butters), an eight-year-
old adherent of the Method. Not since
Henry Spofford III, at a similar age, hiton Marilyn Monroe’s character, in “Gen-
tlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953), has pre-
cocity been such a gas. Who’d have
guessed? After soaking adults in blood,
in film upon film, Tarantino turns out
to be great with kids.
“Once Upon a Time ... in Holly-
wood” employs the services of a narra-
tor. In the later stages, especially, he
shepherds us through crazy happenings
as though, without the calming guid-
ance of his voice-over, the various bits
of story would fly apart. That fear of
fragmentation will be familiar to read-
ers of Joan Didion, who, in the title
essay of “The White Album,” reports
firsthand on the period, and the very
place, that Tarantino now patrols. “A
demented and seductive vortical ten-
sion was building in the community.
The jitters were setting in,” she writes.
As for the day after the massacre, on
Cielo Drive, “I also remember this, and
wish I did not: I remember that no one
was surprised.” What Didion gauged
and registered, more faithfully than any-
one else, were faults in the circuitry,
behavioral and neurological, of an en-
tire social structure. Tarantino may be
searching for the same anxieties, but
only in gleams and flickers do they show
through the sheen of his movie, and
two things alone freaked me out. One
was the sudden, insane burst of brutal-
ity that is inflicted by men upon women.
And the other was the reaction of the
people around me in the auditorium to
that monstrosity. They laughed and
clapped. No one was surprised. The jit-
ters have become a joke.