Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)

 "Now, that's the way a cigarette should taste..."

This is, seen one way, a typical Tarantino film. It has his signature cinema-literate metatextuality (there’s an extended riff towards the end on spaghetti westerns and the whole Italian B movie industry, which I much enjoy), his narratives within narratives, his sense of controlled irony, his non-linear narratives and his deliberately ambiguous elements- did Cliff kill his wife or not, as many seem to think? He seems a decent man, but people are complicated.

And yet, in another sense, this is a real outlier in that it is not an action film at all but a serious drama with big themes- how one responds to the approach of middle ag;  male friendship and how it develops when the two men are not of equal status, with one living in a Hollywood mansion and the other in a trailer; how, in 1969, the era of Westerns and war films is slowly ebbing away towards an era of auteurs, hippies and changing values. It’s a film that uses footage cleverly to show us all the different sides of 1969, with Tarantino’s usual visual wit, and has a similarly evocative soundtrack, as his films invariably do.

This is not really a film about the Manson “family”, despite Margot Robbie’s splendid turn as Sharon Tate: it’s appropriate that Charles Manson himself only appears briefly and is told to go away. His “family” are shown as shallow, duplicitous petty criminals, manipulating a blind old man with dementia to get a place to stay- and, arguably, raping him. It’s fitting that Tarantino should do as he did in Inglourious Basterds and have history pan out differently and far more pleasingly.

This film is superbly shot, superbly made, and full of both heart and complexity. It may well be Tarantino’s masterpiece.