David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Review: Once
Upon a Time … in Hollywood )
Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
Partly inspired by his big
poster collection, Quentin Tarantino’s Once
Upon a Time … in Hollywood reveals the West Coast’s supreme movie fanatic
(Scorsese owns the East Coast) packing a consummation basket. Set in 1969, when
QT was a wide-eyed 6, the story pivots on the buddy bond – “bromance” in modern
argot – of rugged but fading star Rick Dalton and his devoted pal, driver,
gofer, fixer, ego-masseur, stand-in and stunt man, Cliff Booth. Rick is acted
by Leonardo DiCaprio and Cliff by Brad Pitt, two still hunky and (by abundant
evidence) zealously straight stars. But in swingin’ but hardly liberated Hollywood
’69, post-Cary/Randy and more freshly post-Tab/Tony, two such adhesive studs
would have been rumor-milled and even column-nipped as having a closeted
connection. That, of course, is not the QT game, and he zestfully winks it away
with a tossed line (“more than a friend, less than a wife”).
The guys relish bad movies, old TV shows, booze,
broads, cigars and Cliff’s pit bull Brandy (the scene featuring Wolf’s Tooth
dog food joins a very special shelf next to “Couri brand” cat food in Robert
Altman’s The Long Goodbye). As
retro-macho dudes they are wary of marriage, hippies, drugs and guys like Al
Pacino’s Marvin Schwarzs, a vintage agent who urges Rick to reboot via
spaghetti Westerns (proud of his buckskin bonafides, Rick sneers – at first).
With youth fading, Rick and Cliff are, in essence, lonely alcoholics.
His own tequila being nostalgia, Tarantino gleefully guzzles Rick’s career, in queasy decline since his early ’60s TV Western
hit, Bounty Law. He had a cultish war
movie but also endured “a Ron Ely Tarzan”
and is becoming a plug-in villain. This all happens on the pilgrim map of QT’s
memory tour: Capitol Records, Hef’s mansion, the mellow airport wall enshrined
in Jackie Brown, the Bruin Theater
and Van Nuys Drive-in, the Musso & Frank Grill (50 then, now a century
old). History shadows Rick’s house and pool, which lie just below the hilltop
mansion leased by newly A-listed Polish director Roman Polanski and his
adorable new wife Sharon Tate. Tate’s fate date is, of course, Aug. 9, 1969, when
Charles Manson’s berserk “family” slaughtered her and four others.
Manson is only briefly seen, but Tarantino coddles our
shivers by making Sharon (Margot Robbie) a bouncing sunbeam of California
dreamin’. Only he would follow her purchase of a Thomas Hardy first edition
with her dropping into a Westwood theater to enjoy her dippy highjinks in Dean
Martin’s The Wrecking Crew. Sharon
parks her peachy bare feet on the seat ahead of her, setting up a later
ricohet: a Manson slut’s “dirty hippie” feet, splayed on the windshield of
Cliff’s car (but Margaret Qualley, as the lewd lollipop, inhabits her role as
vividly as Robbie does Sharon).
Above all we relish the grooved binary of Rick &
Cliff (Leo & Brad). DiCaprio, with a corn-bin accent and some added weight,
seems at a disadvantage. And yet he goes into the man cave of this vain,
shallow trouper, blending comedy and vulnerable exposure. During a studio shoot
panic his ally is child scene-stealer Julia
Butters, a wee pro (and biz-bud feminist who scorns “actress”). All muscled
cool, with nerves smooth as Shantung silk, Pitt drives hot, flashes his bod and
even humiliates an amusingly pompous Bruce Lee (Mike Moh). Film-fan morsels hang
like ripe fruit, offering juicy bites for Clu Gulager, Timothy Olyphant, Kurt
Russell, Emile Hirsch, Michael Madsen and Brenda Vaccaro, also Austin Butler as
Manson’s creepy enforcer Tex.
Bruce Dern (who replaced the late Burt Reynolds) is a
real wolf’s tooth in his spooky cameo as George Spahn. The Spahn Ranch was a
fabled stable for Westerns, and the Manson bunch roach-nested there. The Spahn
episode is a kind of spaghetti Western Psycho,
with Dern a virtual Pa Bates and looney Norman fragmented into a fox posse of
slutty dirtballs (as nut case Squeaky Fromme, Dakota Fanning is a long way from
Uptown Girls). Pitt attains pinnacle
form and may be the movie’s golden ticket of success. Like Bob Mitchum, he can
register dry wit simply by listening, and he still can flash the abs that
boosted him to stardom in Thelma and
Louise. An acting Oscar at last for ol’ (55) Brad?
Once Upon a
Time, which milks a few scenes but
not stupidly, bends and swoops, held to its roller-coaster rails by Tarantino’s
instincts as writer and director, basking in the shimmer and edge of Robert
Richardson’s 35 mm. celluloid imagery. The music is a whirling festival, from
Western themes to the Mamas and Papas to Bernard Herrmann. The Italian sequence
(yep, Rick succumbs) adds a funny tangent, though the title bounce off Sergio
Leone’s Once Upon a Time films feels
less germane than the teeming L.A. sprawlers of Altman (Short Cuts), Schlesinger (Day
of the Locust), Landis (Into the
Night) and Anderson (Boogie Nights,
Magnolia). The film is a supple, circulating moodscape which, like Jackie Brown, goes beyond the QT corral of genre satire even while it
fondly fondles numerous genres. This layered vision is Tarantino’s most personal.
There could be too much snarling hippie-phobia (though
many industry veterans felt that way at the time). Viewers may evaluate the picture on how it delivers
the Manson nightmare. It does so in a jolting revisionist
pipe-dream that flips the grisly old tragedy into a thrilling and yet
strangely consoling finale. This twist may be a jokey, violent coup de QT, but it is also a great relief valve for the audience. Not really the man for tragedy, Tarantino leaves us with a rather wistful pathos. If only life could be a movie
(and don’t B-stars and stunt men deserve some magic?). The artistic
showman is capping off his youth and roots, his signature obsessions and his
dear, dreamy City of Movies Forever. Few such dazzling entertainments have been
so remarkably human at heart.
SALAD (A List)
Ranking
Tarantino’s Movies by Quality
By my taste, rating top to bottom:
Jackie Brown (1997), Once
Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019), Pulp
Fiction (1994), Kill Bill I and II
(2003-04), Django Unchained (2012), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Inglourious Basterds (2009), The Hateful Eight (2015) and Grindhouse: Death Proof (2007). Can he
really be serious about making only one more?
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Having
once led Martians to Earth for his Halloween 1938 radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds, which roused
panic among the nervously gullible and inattentive, Orson Welles also made a
vocal contribution to the July 1969 moon trip of Apollo 11. Space buff Walter
Cronkite’s TV coverage of the epic event included the documentary A History of Space Journeys, narrated by
Orson. And newsman Mike Wallace looked back with Welles at the 1938 Mars
broadcast. From there it was very earthwardly downhill, to Orson narrating a
pseudo-documentary of Hal Lindsey’s The
Late Great Planet Earth in 1979.
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
“Steven
Soderbergh saw in Jackie Brown ‘a
very gentle piece, in a weird sort of way.’ Jackie and Max, who remain
Tarantino’s most adult, dimensional figures, are not out to screw each other
despite obvious opportunities (in both senses). Their deepening regard gives
the story a core as the actors, in all their zigs and zags and zaps, achieve a
flowing equilibrium of speech and silence, volition and reaction. Pulp Fiction was a hot dance floor. Pam
Grier and Bob Forster take that upstairs for more soulful moves. The film has
remarkably little mayhem for a modern crime story.” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown chapter in my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon,
Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Mr.
Yunioshi, Holly Golightly’s silly neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is a suicidal leap into ethnic
stereotyping, but Mickey Rooney is still pretty funny (Paramount Pictures 1961;
director Blake Edwards, d.p. Franz Planer).
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