Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood (Dir Quentin Tarantino, 2h 40m)

In all senses, Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood feels like an ending, from its recasting of that critical moment in which the hippie ideal took a terrifying turn into darkness at 10050 Cielo Drive, to the death of the golden age of Hollywood, as independent directors and world cinema began to sweep away the trite and old-fashioned studio system, to the end of the career of one of the best directors of the last quarter-century, Quentin Tarantino, in what may be his last film. 

If it is Tarantino's final film, however, he goes with a extended, almost tragi-comic whimper, rather than one last gloriously bloody bang; for all its paeon to the look, the feel, the sound-the smell, almost- of the period, Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood is an oddly hollow thing, a film in which an increasingly jaded director riles, misanthropically, against the forces he sees as changing Hollywood, does little with it, and says even less, in what may be the most underwhelming film of his career.

Set against a backgroup of 1969 Hollywood, Tarantino focuses upon Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), the former star of Bounty Law, a cowboy show, now reduced to playing bitparts and villains in the shows of up-and-coming talent, struggling with alcoholism, and conceding that he is, in his own words "a hasbeen". Together with his driver/stunt-double/friend, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), a man with his own personal demons and a troubled past, the duo traverse Hollywood, as Dalton's career receives meagre boosts from a turn in various shows culminate in a cowboy show, Lancer, where he finally shows his acting ability as a chilling villain, and seems to have finally thrown both his alcoholism and his hasbeen status.

Against this tale of Dalton's struggling career is the day-to-day life of his next door neighbours, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), and Roman Polanski, in the celebrity driven, fame-run form of Hollywood that Dalton has fallen from. In a scene in the Playboy Mansion, largely narrated by Steve McQueen (Damien Lewis), we get a full sense of this, where multiple extremely famous people, of which McQueen is, of course, one of them, intermingle in twisted romantic webs, whilst a later scene has Tate use her celebrity status to attend a screening of her own film, The Wrecking Crew, slipping anonymously into a cheap seat in the one scene where that mask of celebrity slips, and she becomes just another movie goer. 

More than this, though, Tarantino's film is about Hollywood-Dalton of old Hollywood, a figure slipping from the limelight, a style of overly simplistic, overly violent hero, not only on the screen but as a man, engaging in heavy-drinking bonhomie with Booth, that the more nuanced, more complex New Hollywood, that Tate represents, is usurping. This is a lost Hollywood that Tarantino yearns for-his work has always been retrospective, a remix of myriad parts collaged together, often so well the gaps are invisible, but it is felt most keenly in this film. Certainly he catches this mood perfectly in the look and feel of late 60s Hollywood, most notably in a sequence along the Sunset Strip where the lights come on in a dazzling array of eateries and diners, but even in simple establishing shots-his love of this lost world of Hollywood is palpable. 

And casting a shadow across it, the executors, the murderers of Classic Hollywood, of the American Dream on the silver screen-at least in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...are the Manson Family. Though their chief appearance is restricted to a tense showdown on the Spahn Ranch against Booth, who has struck up a friendship with one of them, Kitty, their sudden appearance, their cultish approach, the ominous figures that appear in the shadows of the ranch, and in particular the leader of the group, Squeaky (a genuinely chilling performance by Dakota Fanning), remind the audience, visecerally, that Tex, Squeaky and Sadie, together with the rest of the Manson family, are dangerous, and indeed violent people. Though Manson himself, (Damon Herriman) appears in a single scene where he enquires, at 10050 Cielo Drive, as to the whereabouts of his friend, Dennis Wilson, and, for the only scene in the film, Tate and the architect of her would-be murder share a scene, it's effective enough, chilling enough, and frankly disturbing enough that it's enough. 

As individual parts of a whole, for the first two hours of its run-time, Once Upon a Time... is excellent-Robbie is a nigh-perfect Tate, though this always feels at best bitter-sweet, whilst the trials and tribulations of Dalton and Booth, together and apart, float between the comic and tragic-a scene where Dalton's Lancer character confronts the series protagonist is steadily broken up by Dalton fluffing his lines, the action rewinding as the line between film and filming becomes (in a remarkably avant-garde move for QT) blurred, before Dalton finally snaps, and goes back to his trailer to explode, threaten himself with suicide and finally, it seems, kick his alcoholism.

There's almost a glee in the layers of DiCaprio's performance, in watching one of the best actors in Hollywood play an actor...who himself is playing a character, and DiCaprio, at the very height of his powers, threatens to run away with this movie. Booth, for his part, is impressively understated, almost detached, a man forever in the shadow of, but carrying the load of, the leading man. Whilst the film gives Booth more to do in terms of action scenes-there is a utterly brutal beating of one of the Manson family where the film almost gleefully slows down, play-by-play to show Booth landing each punch-one does get the sense that Dalton is Booth's purpose, even in the film's climatic finale.

And it is, even obeying the faux-pas of giving away this film's ending, where the film comes off the road, crashes down the Hollywood hills, and comes to a rest, a burning, messy, overwrought piece of wish-fulfilment. In a move that smacks of Tarantino trying to have his cake and eat it, with the Manson family going after "the ones who taught us to kill", so we are treated to a, frankly, risible bit of alternative history, complete with wince-inducing violence-Tarantino may have saved this universe's Sharon Tate but the violence inflicted on women, and on the "fucking hippies" that his heroes rile against, is at points worse than anything he's ever put on film before, in a gratuitously violent, lingering way. It rings hollow. 

And indeed, this is the problem with Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood. It is the first time Tarantino has felt reactionary, clearly reeling from the MeToo movement, the sexual predation of his long-time producer, Harvey Weinstein, and indeed the feeling that he is the last movie-maker of an increasingly archaic system, partnering up with the last great actor in Hollywood, before both go their separate ways and Tarantino begins his long ride off into the sunset and retirement from directing. And it is hollow, artificial, and misanthropic. Dalton's career seems to gutter out at the cost of younger men, as Hollywood turns to a new group of actors away from the studio system-we never get the sense that his drinking, his attitude or his inability to change with the times is to blame-it's other people who are to blame. 

It's not Quentin Tarantino's fault that his films increasingly feel stale, clinging to the ephemera of decades gone, or falling back on old tricks-Hateful Eight felt increasingly like a director running out of ideas, reducing his film down, at heart, to a parlour detective story, and even at its best, Once Upon a Time... feels like more of the same-it never steps out of the tried and tested formula, aside from a couple of narrative and neat camera tricks that feel like only minor changes to the usual. It's frankly frustrating at points-even the finale, compared to, for example Tarantino's other dalliance with alternate history, feels understated, half-assed, rather than the grandiose revenge on Charlie and the Family a Tarantino of a decade ago may have made. One almost feels though Tarantino is in two minds on even making a 10th film-he's finally tackled the nostalgia for a golden age of cinema that practically is his cinematic reason d'etre, in the most metatextual way possible.

The thematic problems however, stretch beyond the broad brushtrokes of narrative. Booth's combat with Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) reduces one of the great icons of 70s cinema to a strutting screaming asshole, for the matter-of-fact Booth to beat up. This disservice alone underlines exactly what is wrong with this film, but one is forced to confront it again and again throughout the film-the female and minority figures in this film are either a) cocky assholes that need to be beaten up, or ignored, as in the case of Lee and Kurt Russell's character's wife, who's given an equally screechy and annoying voice, b) to be protected, as in the case of Tate, Dalton's Italian wife, who seems every inch the Giallo scream queen, and even in the precocious form of Trudi, (Julia Butters), whose surprisingly sage wisdom pulls Dalton back from the brink, or c) "a fucking hippy" who plot the downfall of our heroes.

One can certainly frame this film, even shorn of the trappings of what the modern Hollywood is, a roiling mess of a place, where sexual intrigue is rife, people live in excess, the studio-system is back with a vengeance, and an ever more fanatical bunch of cultish, red-hatted mad outsiders plot shocking violence, as a reflection of the Hollywood of 1969, but if Tarantino actively intended this, it's so hamfisted that the analogy has to be eked out. Indeed, any message that Tarantino has, other than as a love letter to a lost age, and that, indeed, this world could never last, is so messy, so poorly realised that it never reaches the audience. By the time the film ends, it feels exhausted, overwrought, and squibs out in a tired, matter-of-fact whimper, over the roof of 10050 Cielo Drive.

It's a reductive, saddening state for a director who gave us great female and African American characters, for a director who perfectly skewered the exploitation and blaxpolitation genres, who, for chrissakes, made a film about a black hero getting his revenge on slaveowners, and two films on a heroine getting her revenge for her attempted murder, and the loss of her child, to make a film where two white men are our heroes, and everyone else is either something to protect or battle against. Tarantino's misanthropic eye colours the rest of this film, and his paean to a lost age is, unfortunately, beholden to the worst elements of Hollywood in this so-called Golden Age.

Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood is, thus, a disappointment, and for all the unevenness of Tarantino's career, none of his films have ever felt this disappointing before-there has always been some spark, something that makes each of his films unique, unmissable, a homage to a particular genre, a particular type of the film. By turning the lens inwards, onto the very act of film-making, of the world that birthed that golden age of cinema that Tarantino has refracted and reinterpreted over the last twenty-six years, so the innate hollowness of his films are laid bare.

In brutally short terms, Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood is the sound of a director running out of ideas, in the worst film of his career so far. This ninth, potentially penultimate film of Quentin Tarantino's career feels empty and tired, misanthropic, reactive. But worst of all, it feels, for the first time, dated and stale on arrival, something that not only reflects, but is of, the past.

Rating: Neutral