Tarantino's most relaxed and most divisive film. A 1969 Los Angeles hangout movie that becomes, in its last twenty minutes, something else.
Los Angeles, February 1969. Rick Dalton is a fading television Western star trying to convince himself a transition to spaghetti westerns isn't a step down. Cliff Booth is his longtime stuntman, driver, and friend — a man with a violent past Hollywood will no longer cast around. Next door to Rick, Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski have moved in.
The film moves slowly across three days separated by months. Rick shoots a TV pilot. Cliff visits the Spahn Ranch where Manson's family is squatting. Sharon goes to see herself in a matinee. The story builds toward the night of 8–9 August 1969, when in reality Tate and four others were murdered. Tarantino's version of that night is the film's argument.
Most of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a hangout movie. There's a long sequence of Rick and Cliff watching Rick's appearance on F.B.I. on television, drinking, narrating. There's a sequence of Sharon Tate going to a Westwood movie theatre, taking off her boots, putting her bare feet on the seat in front, and watching herself on screen. There's a sequence of Cliff driving across Los Angeles with the radio on for what feels like, and is, six unbroken minutes.
Tarantino's defenders argue this is the point. The film is a love letter to a city and a year, and the murders haven't happened yet. The audience knows what's coming. The film's pleasure is the suspended present, the day before everything changed. The film's argument — finally delivered in its final twenty minutes — is that this suspended present should have been protected, and in this version of the story it is.
Pitt won Best Supporting Actor on the basis of a performance that is, on close inspection, almost entirely physical. Booth doesn't say much. He drives, he fights, he feeds his pit bull. The performance works because Pitt is genuinely a movie star of fifty-five with the body of a stuntman, and the camera trusts that fact.
The film also asks, glancingly, whether Booth killed his wife. The relevant scene is offered without commentary; the answer is left to the viewer. The film's reluctance to clarify is part of its texture — Booth is a man whose own friend's wife thinks he's a murderer and who is also, in the film's moral arithmetic, a hero. Tarantino does not resolve this. Many critics found that a feature; many others found it a failure.
On the night of 8 August 1969, three members of the Manson Family arrive at the Tate house. In real history they kill Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Steven Parent. In Tarantino's film, Cliff Booth — high on an acid-soaked cigarette — kills two of them with his bare hands and his dog; Rick Dalton finishes the third with a flamethrower he kept from a war movie.
The film does to the Manson Family what Inglourious Basterds did to Hitler: it grants the audience the alternate-history fantasy. Some critics found this cathartic, others morally unserious. What the ending does is reframe the entire preceding film. The slow days of Rick and Sharon and Cliff weren't just nostalgia. They were the version of Hollywood the Manson Family wanted to end. The film insists, against history, that it doesn't.