Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is 
a many splendored thing.
It’s dazzling and meandering, brilliant
and indulgent, sparkling but also stretched.
Quentin Tarantino’s 9th film is a portrait
of the classic age of Hollywood movies
and the people who made them.
It’s soaked in nostalgia.
It’s also a showcase for 
outsized, old-schoolstardom,
with Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio 
delivering terrific performances.
I first saw the film at the Cannes Film Festival
and then again this week.
I can’t tell you that I loved it.
But I felt richer for having watched it.
As the title 'Once Upon A Time...' suggests,
this is a fairy tale.
But it’s a fairy tale marinated in melancholy.
Because the plot hinges on 
horrific real-life events.
On August 9th, 1969, actress Sharon Tate, who
was eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time,
and a group of her friends, 
were brutally murdered in Tate’s home
by cult leader Charles Manson 
and members of his gang.
Tate’s husband, the celebrated director
Roman Polanski, was abroad on shoot.
The multiple murders sent shock waves through
Hollywood and are widely seen as the end of an era.
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood 
climaxes with the night of the murders.
The film is constructed as three days in the
lives of the principal characters.
But the film isn’t centered on Tate or even Manson 
and his makeshift family of mostly young girls.
The focus is on Tate’s neighbor Rick Dalton,
a fading actor who's clinging to his fame.
And Rick’s stunt double Cliff Booth, 
who's described as
‘more than a brother, less than a wife.’
Rick was once the star actor on 
a television series called Bounty Law
but now he’s mostly doing 
guest roles as the villain.
He’s drinking more than he should.
His face is weathered.
When an agent, played with delicious glee
by Al Pacino, warns him that audiences
are going to stop rooting for him, 
Rick is reduced to tears.
So Cliff loans him his sunglasses because
people, especially the Mexican car park attendants,
shouldn’t see Rick Dalton cry.
Cliff seems impervious to any such insecurities.
He lives in a trailer with a ferocious dog
named Brandy.
Cliff seems unafraid of what 
life might throw at him.
We're told that he may or 
may not have killed his wife.
In one scene, he takes his shirt off 
and we see scars.
We can sense that Cliff is 
capable of serious violence,
but Brad Pitt plays him with this languid ease 
and industrial-strength charm.
Cliff and Rick’s bromance 
is the heart of the film.
Even when the narrative becomes inert, 
their chemistry sustains entire scenes.
DiCaprio is wonderfully free of vanity
– there this tragi-comic scene in which Rick chats 
with a child actor during a lunch break.
She’s an eight-year-old devotee 
of Method Acting.
Her dedication and his own inadequacy 
reduces him to tears.
As I watched, I wondered: would any Bollywood
star have agreed to do Rick’s role?
Incidentally, Julia Butters who plays the
child actor, is flat-out terrific.
This character deserves her own spin-off movie.
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood languorously,
over two hours and forty one minutes,
immerses us into a distinct place and time.
Tarantino fills the screen with references
– some real like TV Guide magazine,
which used to be a Bible, and others fiction.
The production design and costumes are fantastic.
But this isn’t a film 
propelled by dramatic tension.
A sequence in which Cliff lands up 
at a ranch where the Manson family lives
is genuinely unsettling, but there are 
enough stretches in which the narrative sags
because people are just hanging around, talking.
If you don’t get all the innumerable pop culture
references, the spell isn’t as magical
and emotionally, the film quite doesn’t connect.
The character of Tate especially feels under used 
– she's more like an idea than a person.
The film ends with a burst of violence 
that's almost cartoonish.
Like in Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained,
Tarantino is once again, tweaking history.
But you need to know that history to get what
the director is trying to do here.
My suggestion is do a little homework before
you see the film – read up on what happened.
And go in ready to be transported 
to late 60s Hollywood.
The film is a revisionist fairy tale 
and a time machine.
It’s a slow burn that’s worth it.
One more suggestion – prepare to willfully
ignore the warnings about smoking
and psychotropic drugs.
A lot of characters are smoking so 
those warnings are practically in every frame
and they really mess with your movie experience.
