Self-indulgent. Misogynist. Completely awful. These are but a few words that could be used to describe Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, the wayward new film from Quentin Taratino. A supposed love letter to old Hollywood, this film is nothing more than Quentin Tarantino being given two hours and forty five minutes to run the audience through all his particular fetishes and indulge his worst instincts.
Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) are an actor-stuntman team that have been friends for years, even as their careers are beginning to wane. Dalton still has the fame of his Bounty Law tv show but is now more known for playing the heavy to other leading men. Booth meanwhile has taken to becoming more like an employee for Dalton, fixing his TV antennae and driving him around. Their lives begin to change as Booth makes the acquaintance of a young girl who hangs around Charles Manson and new neighbors named Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski move next door.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood does manage to nail the friendship between stuntman and actor well. Thank goodness or this movie would not have a single redeeming quality. Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are admittedly fantastic in their roles, even when the movie around is doing everything in its power to get you to not notice. Pitt is particularly great at bending his megawatt movie star power into something breezy, yet maintaining a coiled intensity that allows him to make his presence known in every scene.
It’s too bad the same kind of attention was not paid to anyone else as Quentin Tarantino shows more love and appreciation for the dirty feet of his female characters than he does to the characters themselves. (Seriously, how many shots do we need of dirty feet where they don’t belong: on dashboard and movie seats?) Margot Robbie is completely wasted as Sharon Tate, serving as nothing more than a red herring and a famous face. She barely has any lines and Quentin has no desire to make her character standout without them, calling into question his tirade at Cannes. Margaret Qualley, so vivid in Fosse/Verdon, is used for little more than an elevated manic pixie dream girl who wants to suck Booth’s cock while he’s driving her to a ranch in Chatsworth. The only female character that is served in any kind of significant way other than to be an object of QT’s fetishes is the young actress, played by Julia Butters, on the set of the new western Rick Dalton, who provides a jolt of energy the movie so desperately needs.
The reason that jolt of energy is needed is because the script of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is truly terrible. Tarantino is fully on the loose with this picture and with nothing holding him back (Sally Menke’s editorial eye is forever missed), he unleashes a torrent of bad ideas. There’s a running joke in this film that Booth has killed his wife and gotten away with it and in a flashback we see that his wife was a bitch. No other explanation needed and with even more violence against women set to come up in the movie, it all seems forgotten. This continues to extend through his disregard for the female characters doing anything of substance, the ruining of one potential great scene with Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), and just general nonsense about how great movies are that’s supposed to carry the audience towards an insane third act. Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood’s reputation will mainly rest on whether you think the Booth/Dalton stuff is strong enough to carry you through the muck of the rest of the film. For this reviewer, it was not, landing this film among the worst I’ve seen this year.