Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – This is the first Quentin Tarantino flick I have seen in quite a long time, because I have come to think of Q.T. as being rather full of it. But I decided to watch it for pretty much the same reason I saw Kevin Costner's The Postman back in 1999 – I was too drunk to drive home and the movie was starting at a convenient time and place to allow me to dry out. Full disclosure, I'd had only one (large) margarita, but it hit me hard and I didn't trust myself not to get a DUI. All right? Can we move on? Yes? Good.

So, I was surprisingly OK with this flick, in spite of it being full of it in trademark Quentin Tarantino style. For example, I needn't have seen Inglourious Basterds to recognize one scene, flashing back to highlights of fictional film-and-TV star Rick Dalton's career, as a take-off of that movie. Dalton (played by Leonardo di Caprio, whose recent career I have avoided following as much as the director's) is depicted starring in an episode of Lancer (one scene of which was Luke Perry's last film role), fantasizing about himself playing Steve McQueen's role in The Great Escape and starting to cry every time he thought about the decline of his career until, at one point, his tears made the audience laugh. In the words of Brad Pitt'z character (Dalton's sometime stunt double, who has gradually taken on the role of a body servant), "Don't cry in front of the Mexicans." The plot, to the extent that there is one, hinges on the fact that this washed-up TV actor, recent star of a handful of Spaghetti Westerns and newlywed husband of an Italian starlet, happens to arrive home after several months abroad the night members of the Charles Manson family target Sharon Tate and her house guests at the Roman Polanski mansion next door. After gradually and atmospherically building for quite some time (according to my bladder, almost 3 hours), Tate & Co.'s inevitable, historical doom takes an incredible, hysterical swerve sideways – one door sidewise, to be exact – and for the rest of the movie, the audience's vocalizations register a unique mixture of shocked ejaculations, laughter and enthusiastic cheers.

So. Good cast. Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern, Emile Hirsch, and Al Pacino are in it. Timothy Olyphant, Damian Lewis and the lovely Margot Robbie are in it. Cute young things like Lena Dunham, Austin Butler and (above all) Dakota Fanning prove that they can be fricking terrifying when they put their minds to it. And there were Three Scenes that Made It For Me: (1) The one in which Brad Pitt's character drops in on the Spahn ranch and forces his way past all the Manson Family drones to make sure George Spahn is OK. The suspense kept my flesh crawling throughout the entire sequence – relieved only a little by the enjoyment of (1.5) that one male cult member's feet leaving the ground in slow motion as Pitt's fist connects with his face. (2) Everything that happens at Chez Dalton after Leonardo comes out of his house to yell profanities at the Manson groupies and their excessive engine noise. Mind you, some of what makes it work is the hallucinogenic quality imparted, in the segments governed by Brad's point of view, by an LSD-dipped cigarette. (3) Sharon Tate's visit to a movie theater to watch her own movie. Her character's innocence and beauty went to my heart. I'm so glad that, in this movie's parallel universe, she got to live. What a shame that in reality, she didn't.