In juxtaposition to Dalton's plateau, director of the moment Roman Polanski (Rafał Zawierucha) and his new bride Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) have moved in next door.
While Dalton tries to sort out his career and life, his stuntman/friend Cliff Booth stumbles into the circle of a strange group of hippies led by a mysterious man named Charlie...
This movie feels like the end of the road. Not just within the text, but both for Tarantino's career, and the type of cinema that he represents.
Tarantino has said in the past that he only wants to make ten movies because he is afraid of running out of gas. It feels like he might have hit that point.
This movie is almost three hours long. This is not alien territory for Tarantino, but if you are going to go for an epic runtime, you really have to pay it off. This movie does not even begin to pay the interest.
Firstly, it feels like a retread of Tarantino's past films, from the historical re-writing of the climax to the use of old-school production techniques. We even get a killer stuntman (allegedly).
DiCaprio's travails as Dalton are a highlight - he is a hopeless narcissist, but DiCaprio's fragile, exposed performance makes Dalton for more sympathetic than he may have appeared on the page. When the movie is solely focused on this vain man trying to rediscover his mojo, the movie is kind of involving.
Watching him struggle to remember lines and stay off the sauce, or cry in front of a more dedicated child co-star, it gives this movie something it otherwise sorely lacks: depth.
Outside of Dalton's antics, the rest of the movie just seems to be in neutral, with little sense of connection or development.
When we are watching Dalton try to rediscover his acting toolkit, the movie has shape and purpose. When we are watching 55-year-old Brad Pitt throw a cartoonish Bruce Lee around, the movie feels juvenile and frankly, old-fashioned. The sequence with Lee (Mike Moh) has been criticised for reducing Lee to a punch line, but alongside that I had no idea what the purpose of the scene was for Cliff's character. Aside from setting him up as superhuman, all it does is make him look like an asshole (PLUS by including Lee, it just highlights how un-involving Dalton's story is, while ignoring the more dramatic story of an Asian man working in the Hollywood system).
He is intended to be a mythical man of action, but beyond that? It could be Tarantino's attempt to push the archetypal man's man into full-on sociopath, but I am struggling to see what the ultimate intent is. That the traditional mode of the loner old white guy can be bad?
Part of the reason why I found it hard to figure out what this movie is about is really a result of how slapdash the movie is. Just at a structural level, it never really feels like it is building toward anything.
Most of the action takes place in February, a specific which proved to be completely irrelevant - is it meant to be pilot season? If so, then why is Dalton starring in Lancer, a show which premiered the previous year?
About two-thirds of the way through the movie, there is a time jump that feels totally inexplicable but is only necessary to get us to that fateful night in August, 1969. There is one scene which features a flashback within another flashback. The movie features an entire subplot based around Sharon just enjoying life which will probably appeal to her fans, but which just adds more minutes to the runtime.
If you have no knowledge of the Manson murders this movie probably feels even more directionless than I found it, and I am only know the bare bones.
Speaking of which, I am still trying to figure out what Tarantino is trying to say with his portrayal of the Manson Family and what they did. For most of the movie, they are an unseen presence, and the movie seems to be -through Dalton's story - building toward some kind of end of the road metaphor via the 'death of the sixties'. It also feels like a movie that will sync with what really did happen.
But then Tarantino tries to change what happened, and everything goes up in the air: after an altercation with a drunken Dalton outside Tate's home, the killers decide to strike his house first, and come face-to-snout with Cliff's pitbull Brandy.
We then get a comical, hyper-violent set piece during which a dog attacks multiple people, Brad Pitt uses a can of dog food to brain Sadie Atkins, who is then torched by a flame thrower. While the device is similar, the intent is baffling.
In Basterds, the final conflagration in the theatre works because it uses the power of cinema as an in-text weapon, while also offering a prime example of how cinema can provide primal emotional catharsis (like killing Nazis).
In Once Upon A Time..., it is nigh-on impossible to get what the intent is: Are we meant to rejoice that the Family are killed? If so, what is he saying by having Tate's saviour being a self-obsessed TV star and a (allegedly) wife-killing stuntman? It feels like an attempt to muddy the waters of our anti-heroes' morality, but without any greater point behind it.
That is ultimately the deeper problem I have with this movie. There is a hollowness at the heart of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood that I could not shake off.
If you are a fan of Tarantino or the period, you might be satisfied - but the directorial flourishes have been done before, and the historical context is never justified to a meaningful degree (or a near-three hour runtime).
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