Quentin Tarantino says he’s going to retire from filmmaking after he makes 10 movies. I don’t believe him, but if it’s true, then he should probably just stop now, with his ninth, Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood.
I say this for a lot of reasons, but a primary one is that Tarantino’s movies have always been saturated with film history, and here he’s literally recreated it to tell the story of the fictional Rick Dalton, a semi-washed up former TV star; his stunt double and right-hand man Cliff Booth; and the very real actress Sharon Tate, who, of course, was murdered by the Manson family in 1969, when this movie takes place.
The movie spends a lot of time seemingly wandering around in their lives, as Rick tries to figure out what he is now that his starring days are over, while Cliff supports him, and we take detours into Tate’s life. But that wandering is doing a lot of work, depicting the nature of masculine friendship and the panic of an aging man’s perceived obsolescence, showing us a world that’s gone away and is never coming back, and finally letting us see Sharon Tate as an actual person instead of just the memory of a horror that altered our social fabric.
We could talk and argue about this movie for hours, but I want to say that, when we ultimately get to that fateful night with Tate, I was surprised by how emotionally moved I was by the way Tarantino handles it. I’m still deeply conflicted about certain aspects, but what we see is an acknowledgement of real human feeling that’s rare for the director.
And this is another reason I think that if he’s going to stop making movies, he should stop with Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. Tarantino’s an exceptionally talented filmmaker, but we don’t really ever see actual humanity from him — I can think of this and Jackie Brown, and that’s about it. If you’re going to go out, why not do it with a bit of compassion? Life doesn’t really let you choose your endings, but if it did, this would be the one to have.
