once upon a time in hollywood (w&d tarantino)

For a while it feels as though Tarantino is back where he belongs. In Hollywood, poking fun at the bear, as only he’s allowed to. The film feels less ‘talky’ than some of his more recent endeavours. There’s a flow to the edit. The design, as ever, is impeccable. You know you’re in for a long ride but it’s going to be a good one. Then, gradually, the ride starts to fizzle out. Perhaps it’s when Pitt’s lop-sided grinning stuntman visits the Manson ranch and nothing happens. Perhaps it’s when the director decides to interrupt the action approximately two thirds of the way through and skip six months. Whenever it is, there’s a gradual realisation that this film isn’t really going anywhere. It’s just driving around the Hollywood hills, looking at itself in the mirror, saying “you’re looking mighty fine”. A friend of mine said it was a bit like a slacker movie, which it is. A low-key buddy movie, where Brad and Leo hang out and chill. Nowhere does the film feel more like itself than the scene where the two of them watch an old ep of DiCaprio as a villain in the series “FBI’. Right there you feel you could almost be hanging with Quentin, chuckling at the hammy acting and the melodrama and plotting how you’re going to find a way to fit this into a movie some day. 

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with any of this, but nevertheless it all feels mighty smug. Perhaps Tarantino has always been smug but when he kicked off he succeeded in recalibrating the use of dialogue in US movies, employing a Mametian use of subtext. His early movies (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown) also seemed as though they were saying something about race, even if that something was nebulous. Always a stylist, the style started to completely overwhelm any real attempt at content. Extreme semiotic gestures replaced any need for plot. A candy-coated wish-fulfilment ethos began to dominate. Tarantino discovered he, like Shakespeare, could rewrite history. Once Upon a Time is the culmination of this. A real-life tragedy becomes a grotesque comedy. Flame-throwers are cool. Sharon lives. Polanski’s a harmless sixties pixie. The question is whether this means anything, apart from the fact that Quentin gets to do whatever he wants with his mates? In a Trumpian dystopia, the notion that Hollywood can make everything doozy feels even more of a cop-out than ever. Politics is irrelevant because it will all work out well in the end. Some might say there’s some high-end Zizek intellectual irony at play, but I don’t really buy it. A generation of US moviegoers get to see their favourite stars larking around and come away with the adrenaline high of justified violence. At the end of the day, one suspects people will look back on Tarantino as the high priest of American imperialism, the greatest spinner of fake news in the greatest fake news factory on earth.