But that plan, as well as history as we know it, gets upended in gruesome, darkly comic fashion when first Cliff, then Rick, violently kill the murderers before they can murder. Three of them - Tex Watson (Austin Butler), Susan “Sadie” Atkins (Mikey Madison of Better Things), and Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel (Madisen Beaty, formerly of The Fosters) - burst into Dalton’s house with the intention of murdering everyone present. The so-called hippies do as he says, but then - after realizing he’s the Rick Dalton who starred in the TV Western Bounty Law - they decide to return. He tells them to leave and never come back, turning fully into an old man yelling “get off my lawn” at some young’uns. Rick Dalton - already drunk, drinking more alcohol out of a margarita pitcher, and wearing a weirdly emasculating robe - storms out of his house screaming at “the hippies,” whose muffler-deprived car is in his driveway and making a major racket. ![]() But in Tarantino’s version, it goes to … the wrong address. On the night of August 8, 1969, which eventually bleeds into the early morning hours of August 9, 1969, a car filled with members of the Manson family putters its way up into the Hollywood Hills. The specter of what will eventually happen in that house in August of 1969 - the place where followers of Charles Manson famously killed a pregnant Tate and four others - hangs over the entire story until the fateful date of the murders finally arrives. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood lets us know all this early on, and also lets us know that Rick happens to live on Cielo Drive, in a house located right next door to the one being rented by Roman Polanski and his actress wife, Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie. He doesn’t like what that portends for his show-business future, and, as a man aging farther away from his prime, he doesn’t like what that suggests about his future in a broader sense, either. ![]() (Fun side note: Pacino made his film debut in 1969, in a movie called Me, Natalie.) Rick is coming to grips with the fact that he’s been relegated to cameo roles instead of leads, a situation that probably isn’t going to change. As Marvin Schwarz, the agent played by Al Pacino, tells Rick in an early scene, he’s now officially transitioned from playing the perpetual hero to playing the heavy who’s always going to be beaten by the hero. Rick is a man frightened of the changing tides around him, specifically in terms of his career. Most of the film focuses on the fading career of Western movie and TV star Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and his relationship with stunt double and personal assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). (If you haven’t seen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, heads up: I’m about to spoil large portions of the movie, including the ending, for you.) ![]() It took some processing and deeper consideration of the film’s context, within 1969 culture as well as the culture of today, to finally determine that what bothers me is what it tells us about men frustrated by cultural shifts, the ways we define and glorify old-school heroism, and how unwilling the movie is to dig more deeply into what it’s ultimately trying to say about both things. I fully enjoyed all of these elements and, for the most part, the entire movie.īut I was also disturbed by it in a way that I have not been able to shake. It’s got outstanding performances from an exceptional cast production design that plunges its audience into a distinct time and place that is - and this is an enormous added bonus - different from the same damned portrait of the ’60s we’ve seen a jillion times before a fantastic, idiosyncratic soundtrack (a Tarantino specialty) and camerawork that is stylistic and dynamic without coming across as too showy. As critics have said, ad nauseam at this point, there is a lot to love in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s grand, meandering flashback to the final months of the 1960s.
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