Tarantino Rages in 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood'

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood seems for 80% of its runtime to be Tarantino’s least ‘Tarantino’ film of his career. This sensation comes to an unforgivably show stopping halt with a hideous ending that makes whatever beautifully, delicately constructed and paced film that existed before disappear, nearly forgotten in a cloud of bizarre, unexpected middle aged white male vindictive violence.

The ending is an incredibly shocking, unnecessary, confusing, and disturbing contrast to that which preceded it, and the only explanation that seems to justify it, is that Tarantino was hell bent to piss off all the politically correct police who so love to criticize him with such an angry and hideous finale so as to leave them silent, agast in horror at what they just witnessed. I have never been one to criticize Tarantino for being racist or sexist. His violence, though brutal, never crossed an uncrossable line in my opinion. Any criticism I have against his films is that they are overly long winded and full of themselves. I have enjoyed all of them in bits, but every new Tarantino film proves once again that Tarantino is his own biggest fan.

With Once Upon a Time Tarantino seems to have fallen ill to some sort of premature Clint Eastwood angry white man syndrome. What at one time plays as a sweetly critical look at two middle aged has beens in 1960s Hollywood soon turns them into the heroes they ‘really should have been.’

DiCaprio stars as an actor whose career is on the down side. He is now only picking up guest appearances as villains on TV shows. Pitt is his stunt double who, also having difficulty finding steady work, finds himself working for his friend as his chauffeur/personal assistant. Pitt’s relationship is described as being more than a brother but less than a wife, and there is a beautiful sequence when we are shown the contrast of these two mens’ lives as Pitt drives from DiCaprio’s mansion in Hollywood complete with theatre room and swimming pool to his own drudgy mobile home behind a drive-in movie theater where he and his dog eat their respective can contained dinner sitting in front of a mini television. The sequence is shot with a beautiful attention to detail, reveling in the era and set to a poppy leg tapping period soundtrack. What is most incredible is the subtlety! There is almost no dialogue, and the camera simply observes the action as we are along for the ride between Beverly Hills, to the dusty nowhere land habited by Pitt. Who knew Tarantino could be say so much without literally having his characters talk our ears off.

It is such a shame that subtle quiet moments of period recreation are so unceremoniously overshadowed by several mind-bogglingly insensitive sequences.

Tarantino seems to sabotage his own film by using it as a megaphone to shout ‘I don’t give a fuck’ to the ‘me too’ movement and his other liberal critics. As other figures who have come under attack over the past years, Tarantino becomes distracted by their critiques and ups the ante unnecessarily to show his disagreement with their indictment of him and his films.

The first instance takes place in a scene where it is alluded that Pitt shoots his nagging wife on a boat with a harpoon, and we are… supposed to laugh? Pitt is continually shown to be the ideal man in the film. He is cool, confident, and still has a six pack in his middle age. If he misjudging shot his wife, she surely deserved it.

This leads to another utterly bonkers scene where Pitt decides to fight Bruce Lee after Lee brags he would destroy Mohammed Ali. Neither of these scenes serve any purpose to the plot of the film except to seemingly show the superiority of Pitt’s unjustly marginalized ideal man. And why is Lee represented as such a nobrained cocky bastard? Especially when in real life he never said he would ‘destroy’ Ali, quite the contrary, he admitted that Ali was more than twice his size and he would not stand a chance. Suffice it to say that Brad Pitt once again comes in to save the day, this time putting the Asian show-off in his place by throwing him into a car and humiliating him.

Before moving onto the unforgivable ending, it should also be noted that Margot Robbie is sadly wasted in the role of Sharon Tate. She has a decent amount of screen time, but Tarantino never makes her more than an air headed beautiful blond bouncing and dancing from parties to listen to records at her house to watch herself in one of her own movies at the cinema. Robbie is such a charismatic actress that she does the best with what she is given, but it is a shame that Tarantino could not find a way to write her some dialogue to flesh her out, especially knowing how much he loves to overwrite dialogue for his characters.

But Tate’s depiction is nothing compared to Tarantino’s depiction of hippies and what he does to them at the end of the film. What was daring, shocking, and inspiring about the ending of Inglorious Basterds here is restaged and is an ingloriously embarrassing failure. The way he rewrites history to give Nazis their comeuppance makes for an utterly effective, unforgettable, and brilliant ending to a solid film. The problem is that hippies, as the Mansons are often called, and indeed no other non Manson aspect of the group is depicted in the entirety of the film, simply are not Nazis.

The problem is not that the Mansons are massacred, but that watching the film, one would think all the young people hitchhiking for rides and dumpster diving are Manson followers. The flower power movement is given no other representation then these creepy, deranged, young people with bare feet and long hair.The groovy, peace and love professing hippies in the film are the equivalent to the crazy Manson cult, and thank God we have our two lovable middle aged white down and outs to save the day.

The final scene brutally and grotesquely depicts Pitt and his dog completely destroy the three Manson followers with the help of DiCaprio and a blowtorch. Again, there is no problem with the massacre of fictional Mansons, but it seems less a revenge fantasy of the Mansons, and more a restoring of the correct order of things. Pitt and DiCaprio's more conservative, manly personas, the real men of the world, are able to but these liberal crazies in their place in this ultraviolet alternative reality. The film ends on a note of, thanks to the fact that these blood thirsty, mindless hippies attacked two real mean instead of a pregnant woman and her wimpy friends, all ends well. If only we had more real men around to protect all of us.

Any criticism of how sadly pathetic Pitt and DiCaprio were in their middle age career lull is quickly washed away in the blood of hippies. They are redeemed, and, thanks to them, Hollywood is saved. We can all continue living a testosterone filled caucasion fantasy where our heroes kill their wives, put confused minorities in their place, and protect the innocent from the ravage hippie disease.