In August last year, I wrote this piece on ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ which, though not entirely condemning it as a misfire, was certainly far removed from the ravenous praise it received from a significant number of critics and Tarantino fans. But a film’s success rarely relies on one person’s opinion, and so unsurprisingly the buzz that the film has generated was strong enough to carry it through to awards season. So far its major wins have been at the Critics’ Choice Awards where it earned itself Best Picture, the Golden Globes where it secured Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, and several other award shows where Brad Pitt has taken home enough Best Supporting Actor trophies to fill a small shelf.
Outside of Rick’s attempts to revive his dying career there is little contour to the film’s plot, eschewing a traditional narrative structure in favour of presenting a series of snapshots of life in 1960’s Hollywood. Tarantino is playing around in the sandpit of an era that has been part of his identity for his entire life, and his expression of unrestrained joy in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ is incredibly inviting to those who are well acquainted with the culture of that time, and those who are only now being introduced to it.
Throughout the film, there is an undercurrent of Tarantino reflecting on his own career as it comes to an end, this being his penultimate film if we are to take his word at face value. Scorsese shares a similar reflection in ‘The Irishman’, also nominated for Best Picture this year, but Tarantino’s thoughts dwell less on his personal regrets, and more on what the world should have done differently.
If only the bright idealism of the 60’s never came to an end. If only the good guys always won and the bad guys were always punished, much like the fairytales we tell. If only audiences were more forgiving to ageing professionals in the film industry. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton shares Tarantino’s wishes, particularly the latter, and becomes the strongest binding force in the film by pulling together the many scattered elements into his own arc.
The most effective scenes in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ are those that let Tarantino indulge his love for genre films, such as the Western-tinted Spahn Ranch scene, and the sequences that allow DiCaprio to fully inhabit the eccentricities and egotism of Rick Dalton. In his conversation with a child movie star, his trailer breakdown, and his teary moment of glory after cast and crewmembers heap praise on him for a powerful performance, he is playfully satirising the personalities that populate Hollywood, and he even reaches a moment of self-recognition in the ridiculous seriousness of it all. For a city populated by people who play pretend, there is a lot of self-importance going around, and in his direction of his cast Tarantino fully realises the comic potential of that.
When it comes to Tarantino’s trademark hyper-violence, directing any criticism towards it feels utterly pointless given how embedded it is in his filmography. Of course it’s over-the-top, of course it’s uncomfortable to watch, that’s entirely the point. It also usually serves a purpose in narrative, whether it is to point at the dark senselessness and messiness of the hitmen’s careers in ‘Pulp Fiction’, or to satiate a character’s need for vengeance. In ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’, there is still that element of revenge present in its final scene when we finally see the violence unleash, but the real indignation does not belong to Cliff and Rick in the same way it belonged to the Bride, Django, or Marsellus Wallace. It belongs to Tarantino, and by proxy it belongs to us, assuming that we are more clued in on the real history of the Manson Family than the characters we are watching. It’s only with all this context that I am going to apply the word here that I usually roll my eyes at when used to describe Tarantino’s violence – this scene is gratuitous, because it only exists to serve our own desire for catharsis with little connection to the narrative elements that preceded it.
The Golden Globes have not historically been a completely reliable predictor of what will win Best Picture at the Oscars, but there is still a slight correlation there. This century alone, roughly 50% of Oscar Best Picture winners have also won one of the two Best Motion Picture awards at the Golden Globes. Not great odds to go off on its own, but taking into consideration that the only thing the Academy loves more than movies about movies is celebrating veteran filmmakers who are still going strong, and suddenly this film’s chances start looking more solid. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has struck a chord with a mainstream audiences and critics alike, and with so much love for it going around, it has become an obvious frontrunner in this year’s Oscar race.
