(whole lotta spoilers)
I drive through my old neighbourhood quite regularly.
13 years ago, I moved on, lugging myself and my few possessions about twenty minutes south. I left my childhood home in north Toronto (formerly North York) when I was 36 – yes 36 – and headed about a twenty minute car ride to a tiny bachelor apartment – still in Toronto – in the city’s Forest Hill region. That’s the same neighbourhood where Drake “Started from the bottom…” I was not starting from the bottom, but I wasn’t starting from the top, either. “Started from the middle, now we’re here” – not as catchy.
In my new digs, I was closer to where I worked. The cozy apartment was also close to family – one of my two sisters lived with her husband just a short walk away on the very same street. Baby steps.
I must explain that I am a Canadian with Italian ancestry – my parents came to Canada in the mid to late 50s. You may have heard that, unlike many other parents, Italian parents want their children to stay well past eighteen – if not forever. Accordingly, guilt builds a nest and settles in for an extended stay in the hearts and minds of the children that leave – especially if they leave before getting married like I did.
One of my sisters – the middle child – still lives in the old neighbourhood, though. My family gets together all the time and her house is often the place to be for birthdays, holidays and Toronto Maple Leaf playoff games. Thankfully, there have been more of those in recent years.
So, I find myself driving through my old hood quite a lot. It has changed or, more accurately, it continues to change. Gone is Studio ’81, the video arcade I regularly hung out at. There, quarters fell like raindrops. Gone, also, is Tony’s Barbershop. I got my hair cut there from age 4 or 5 way up until my early twenties. I stopped going there after my father had a falling out with Tony. For reasons unexplained, he started calling my father, “Jules.” My father asked him to stop it. He didn’t. So, my father stopped it by stopping his visits to Tony’s – my father was always practical. In solidarity with my Papa or Babo, if you like, I, too, left for the scissors of another Italian barber up the road. Again, baby steps.
Across the street from Tony’s Barber Shop – which is now called Hair By Marzy – they have, just recently, started tearing down a strip mall that was home to a supermarket my father and I once worked at long, long ago. The supermarket went by the name Miracle Food Mart. I worked in the bakery. And it truly was a miracle I didn’t eat everything up before customers had a chance to fill their carts. I often blasted Led Zeppelin from a small radio/cassette player while pushing loaves of bread through the jittery jaws of a monster of a bread slicer – “Got a whole lotta of loaf, ennnnnnnn! Got a whole lot of loaf, ennnnnnn!” Sorry.
Another store that called Newtonbrook Plaza home was Consumers Distributing. You would go in there and flip through the pages of these big fat magazines they had arranged on a long counter at the front of the store. Finding what you wanted, you would then write that product’s model number on a small form and hand it to one of the friendly clerks waiting patiently to snap into action – if you were lucky you would get my sister. The clerk would then head back into the stockroom and retrieve your order. Kind of an analog Amazon for its day. They closed all their stores in 1996.
That mall was also once home to a hair salon my Godmother and Godfather ran. Add to that a bowling alley that I frequented with friends both after school and during school and you could say that this simple little stripmall – one of thousands throughout the Great White North – was a big part of my younger years. Brick and metal and glass really can seem like more than the soulless and sturdy structures in which we shop and work and play. In looking back, these places seem so connected to who I was when I spent so much time in them that they’ve kind of become like clothing – like something I used to wear. If I could, I would assemble a photo album of just the places where I worked or went to school or bowled in or played video games in and each of those photos would say something about me. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. But something.
Forgive me for the very leisurely walk I’ve just taken, but I feel that this long stroll of sentences was a necessary trip to take before getting anywhere near to Quentin Tarantino’s latest, “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.”
If you’re a guy like me, you mourn the places of your youth that have long since succumbed to the fizzling out of trends or the giant metal claw of a construction vehicle. If you’re a guy like Quentin Tarantino, however, you mourn them and then, one day, you dig up their graves, open up their caskets, pull their skeletons out and task the talented people working on your latest movie to nail, staple and glue new flesh to their bony remains.
What I am trying to say is that, as we all now know, Tarantino went to great lengths to recreate the Los Angeles of his youth for “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” And all of that effort is on glorious display throughout the movie. He recreated a piece of his childhood – good for him. We should all be so lucky.
Imagine that, though, for a moment – a whole team of talented artists, backed by a wonderfully generous budget, working hard to recreate your youth. Imagine transforming – if only for a brief moment in time – the way the streets of your hometown look right now into the way they looked when you were just a kid. It sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it? If we did it, yes, but filmmakers do it all the time and some even get applauded for it – think Fellini’s “Amarcord” or John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory.”
So, my Studio ’81 and Tony’s Barber Shop and Miracle Food Mart and Newtonbrook Bowlerama as well as Consumers Distributing and my Godmother and Godfather’s hair salon would all return, if only for a few days, maybe a week at most. I could walk through them once more and, for a little while, fool myself into believing I was a kid again. Ah, but I wouldn’t really fool myself, would I? The stiffness in my back and numbness in my left thigh alone would keep me from feeling like a fourteen year old again. I wonder how successful Tarantino was fooling himself.
In “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, Tarantino not only brings back the metal, brick and neon of his youth, but he also brings back the music, the radio jingles and announcements, the TV shows and commercials and the actors of the time.
In Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), Tarantino fashions a composite made up of the kind handsome, but bland, semi-stars who, in the late 60s, saw their hopes of becoming box office champions fading as a new generation of actors took their place. Good looks and blandness were out and scruffy looking, rough around the edges, volatile, and scrappily expressive actors were in.
Dalton is a mess of insecurities. He’s convinced his career is in ruins – confirmed when his new agent suggests taking a trip to Italy to star in some Spaghetti Westerns. This I find strange. Dalton, who was, as we are told and shown, a star of TV back in the late 50s and early 60s – in his own black and white western called, “Bounty Law” – surely would have crossed paths with another actor who had a starring role in another late 50s early 60s black & white TV western that went by the name of “Rawhide.” That actor, of course, was Clint Eastwood. And Clint Eastwood went to Italy 5 years prior and made a Spaghetti Western called, “A Fistful of Dollars.” Maybe you’ve heard of it. That film made him an international star.
So, with this recent example staring him in the face, why would Rick Dalton think going to Italy to make a Spaghetti Western was a bad idea and signalled that his career was over? Heck, he would’ve known that Lee Van Cleef became a huge star in Italy making westerns and even the legendary Henry Fonda headed to the great soccer boot overseas to make the brilliant “Once Upon a Time in the West.”
Occupying the loyal buddy and all around chill dude space is Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth. Cliff’s stunt double days have dried up along with his buddy Dalton’s career. He now spends more time driving Dalton to meetings and fixing his downed TV antenna than he does falling off horses or being thrown through the front windows of phony saloons for him.
Though Dalton and Booth were inspired by real life people, the third most prominent character in the film is the only one of the three identified as an actual person who lived and worked in Hollywood during the time in which “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” takes place. I’m talking, of course, of Sharon Tate.
Slipping into Sharon Tate’s heels is Margot Robbie. Much has been made about how Robbie has little to do in the film – a clip of Tarantino swatting back just such a criticism from a female journalist at a Cannes Film Festival press conference is on Youtube for your perusal – and there is certainly some truth to that. Tate doesn’t face much in the way of drama in the film. Her character is in a constant fun loving, free-of-worry state throughout. She smiles, she poses, she smiles some more, she laughs, she dances and she complains about the heat. Fade out.
While some are pissed off about this and point to it as proof of Tarantino’s chauvinism, I won’t be revving that particular engine. Robbie floats through the film without a care in the world, yes, and that’s why I found Tarantino’s treatment of Sharon Tate – as a character in his film – so touching.
We know all about Sharon Tate’s actual, real life, gruesome fate. It has been documented in every form of popular media ever since that awful night. Tarantino is well aware of all this. So, he elects to show her at her happiest and, in doing so, allows us to contrast those joyful scenes with the darkness we know she faced in her final moments. We do half of the work. For me, it worked and lent her scenes an undercurrent of sadness and a very real and affecting poignancy.
Here, in Tarantino’s film, Sharon Tate, ironically, becomes a kind of fictional character who avoids the fate of her real life counterpart and goes on to live a life well beyond the brief 26 years she was given in the real world. I found that to be a wonderful instance of art triumphantly not imitating life. The woman deserved so much more. Here, in the hands of a filmmaker often accused of doing wrong by the women in his films, Robbie’s Tate gets to escape the dark shadow of Manson, and his gang of murderous idiots, if only for one brief shining moment.
And let’s not forget that three other people – who had lives, dreams, friends and family – also get to live on in Tarantino’s fictional reimagining of that awful night. Those three are Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger.
What can I say – it worked for me. That last scene, which Tarantino wisely shoots from high up above, is a stunner. Rushing down her driveway, Sharon arrives at the front gates to hear all about the craziness that went on next door. There, she is introduced to her neighbour, Rick Dalton, who she gracefully welcomes into her inner circle – an inner circle Dalton has longed to enter for some time. Sharon, and her friends, meanwhile, are safe and happy.
Yes, you could argue that the Sharon Tate of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is a glorified extra in her own story – though, to be fair, Tarantino is not exactly telling her story, or at least, not only her story. Yet, sometimes less is more. I found that Robbie’s Sharon Tate made as much of an impression on me as DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton or Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth made. Though she doesn’t get as much screen time, Robbie makes the most of it and establishes Tate as a real person who we truly do care about in the end. She shines and sparkles – her million watt smile a respite from the dreaded year of 1969. That awful year saw more bloodshed from the bodies of the people of the United States, and the bodies of the people they were fighting overseas, than any country should ever see in 100 years.
As you might have guessed by now, this is somewhat of a mixed review. To be honest, I’m not much of a Tarantino fan – this was the first of his films that I’ve had any desire to see since Jackie Brown. His films strike me as initially exciting, but ultimately lacking depth and care. They don’t seem to age well. I’d much rather see “Once Upon a Time in the West” for the fourth time than see “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” for the second. It’s all subjective – I know.
Meanwhile, well before the fireworks at the end, Rick Dalton gets a guest shot as a heavy on a TV Western called “Lancer.” This will be his last TV heavy role before he departs for Italy to play heroes dispensing with black hatted paisanos while his lips move to form the sounds of one language and his dubbed voice shouts and whispers in another.
Dalton is desperate to do a good job, but he’s nervous and a persistent cough is getting in the way. A pre-shoot meeting with the director, Sam Wanamaker (Nicholas Hammond), fails to calm his nerves.
On his way to set, he takes a seat next to a 9 year old – all dressed up like an extra on “Little House on the Prairie” – who has the part of the little girl Dalton’s mean bastard kidnaps for ransom in this particular episode of “Lancer.”
She is calm and collected to Dalton’s jittery mess of doubts. Trying to take his mind off his anxiety, he pulls a paperback western from his back pocket and starts reading. She asks what it’s about. Half way through explaining the plot, Dalton realizes that it mirrors the downhill path of his career as an actor and begins to break down. She is quick to comfort him.
A scene like this one either works and gets you closer to sympathizing with the lead character and his struggles or it doesn’t and, consequently, pushes you further away. It pushed me further away.
So, during the scenes that followed, where Dalton screws up on set only to redeem himself later on, I felt removed – more casual observer than riveted audience member. I don’t know if the character wasn’t compelling enough or likeable enough or both, or something else entirely, but his struggles just didn’t register.
I was also a little confused. Though I didn’t read any spoilers, I guessed Tate would survive in the end because of all the attention given to the importance of not including any spoilers in reviews or pieces discussing the film in the first place. How’s that for irony?
So, I assumed Dalton would find his redemption, not on the set of some TV western or Italian cowboy opera, but in his off-set life as the once super famous TV star, now fading actor neighbour to Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. Sometimes my assumptions about the film I’m about to watch get in the way of the film I am watching. That’s hard to police.
But, I wondered about that – Rick Dalton saving Sharon Tate. He kind of does in Tarantino’s film, but I assumed Dalton would race to Tate’s house and get there just in time to save her from getting stabbed by one of Manson’s idiot followers. Then, championed as a hero, Dalton would become a national hero and meatier film roles would follow – a career resurrected. A mind goes where it wants to go.
As it is in the film, Dalton’s in a great mood prior to the Manson gang assault – Italy was better than he expected and he even brought back a wife. So, his encounter and triumph over the Manson clan has less bite and less of a lift for his character. However, it would’ve been in bad taste to make Rick benefit too much from this reimagining and so that probably eliminated any ideas about him rushing up to the Tate house to play hero. But, what we’re left with is an ending bloodbath that seems tacked on to a lukewarm drama about an actor in crisis.
So, Rick and Cliff take out the three Manson idiots and all’s well that ends well – Rick meets up with Sharon and new possibilities for him and her are born. Again, I think the final scene is touching, but the Cliff/Rick and the Manson gang confrontation is more than a little forced.
When the Manson groupies originally arrive at Tate’s home, ready to kill everyone in it as Charlie has ordered, they, instead, have a confrontation with an incensed Dalton. Pissed off that the group has driven their loud, broken down piece of crap car into his exclusive neighbourhood, Dalton storms out of his house, half naked in his robe, with a blender full of a mixed drink in his hand, ranting and raving at them to f-off. And they do!
Regrouping a short drive away from the Tate house, one of the gang suddenly hits upon an idea about killing the famous people – like Rick Dalton – who taught them to kill during their childhoods through their TV shows and movies.
So, now, they’re going to Rick Dalton’s house instead of the Tate house to kill him for teaching them how to kill when they were children and not killing anyone.
The scene struck me as shoehorned in, at the last minute, to provide a plausible reason for the revisionist take on the bloody acts that took place on Cielo Drive in August of 1969. The idea of “killing those who taught us how to kill on TV” strikes me as the kind of writerly idea that takes you out of a film. At that moment, I could almost picture Tarantino – hunched over his typewriter/laptop – all wide eyed and smiling and congratulating himself for having just come up with that idea. But, Tarantino had to come up with a plausible reason for the Manson gang to go to Rick’s house instead. It’ll have to do.
The bloody end in Tarantino’s film is played for laughs and he gets them. What in real life was a brutal, ugly tragedy of young lives cut short by a gang of longhaired losers becomes, in the Hollywood of 2019, a slap-sick set piece complete with the gleefully repeated bashing of a face against a stone fireplace mantel, a big dog chomping down on a man’s crotch and not letting go and the complete incineration of a petite gun wielding maniac courtesy of the fiery flames shooting out of the barrel of Rick Dalton’s very own personal flamethrower – a prop he kept from one of his earlier film roles.
Look, I enjoyed the scene. Tarantino deftly holds the tension of the confrontation for an excruciatingly long period of time before mercifully letting go and letting all the mayhem loose in all its gruesome and gut busting glory. The man knows what he’s doing. Bravo! It’s the set up that is a little rickety.
Pitt, I think, scores the best role. He gets to be all laid back and in charge. Ain’t nothing going to throw him off. Heck, he even manages to project maximum coolness while turning down a blow job.
And, besides the crazed ending, Pitt scores the film’s most gripping scene. After picking up a cute hippie chick he’s spotted around town for a while – and, after turning down that blow job offered so enthusiastically by her – Booth drives her home. That home turns out to be a place very familiar to Pitt’s Cliff Booth. It’s the place where “Bounty Law” was shot some years ago – Spahn Movie Ranch.
When Booth pulls into the place and spies all these feral hippies hanging around, he suddenly feels like checking up on his old friend and the owner of the place, George Spahn, just to make sure he’s doing all right. Despite being discouraged by the grubby Manson clique, Booth soldiers on and heads to the small, broken down shack at the far end of the property. Tarantino keeps the tension high – I was certain Booth was going to get it – and the scene remains riveting throughout.
It was telling, to me, that of the two – Dalton and Booth – Booth was the character I least want to see killed off. Booth struck me as the more loyal and more decent of the two. That’s quite something considering that, for some reason, Tarantino saw fit to give him a backstory that included – possibly-we’re-not-quite-certain – killing his wife. Why? I don’t know. But, Booth is the more likeable of the two because he doesn’t take himself all that seriously and he takes care of his friends.
Ah, but there is one moment where Booth’s coolness and likeability come at too great a price – the cheapening of Bruce Lee.
It happens on the back lot where both “Lancer” and “The Green Hornet” – the TV series Bruce Lee co-starred in from 1966-1967 – are being filmed. Mike Moh – as Bruce Lee – is going on and on about how badass he is while Booth and others sit around and listen. Booth has a grin on his face that makes it clear that he thinks Lee is a clown. Unfortunately, he comes off as one.
Did Bruce Lee spend his time during breaks in filming “The Green Hornet” bragging about how he could cripple Muhammad Ali and challenging barely employable stunt men to fights? Is this scene based on something that actually happened? If not, it’s puzzling why Tarantino would choose to turn a very real human being, long since dead, who is admired the world over, into a boob just to establish that Pitt’s Cliff Booth can kick ass with the best of them. Puzzling.
Tarantino has publicly stated that this is his 2nd last film. If so, that would be a shame. Though “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is a mixed bag, it at least stands out – in a very good way – amongst the endless Disney remakes, Spider-Man, Star Wars and Horror film sequels that crowd the theatres on a regular basis. Having a major Hollywood filmmaker intent on making something original in the face of so much sanitized sameness sure is a welcomed change. Going back to his childhood, Tarantino provided a brief relief for many a film fan bored by a summer of movies intent on giving everyone a bad case of deja vu, deja vu.
In the end, though, the thing about recreating your childhood and putting it on display for millions to see is that you put it on display for millions of others like me to critique. That takes courage and chutzpah that few possess. For that, I applaud him. It can’t be easy.
My days at Studio ’81 et al wouldn’t stand up near as well as what Tarantino has crafted here. But, if I had his resources, I’d be tempted to spin a tale about a boy who worked in the bakery department of a local supermarket, loved bowling 5 pin with his friends at Newtonbrook Bowlerama and, once, yes, once, on one hot summer night, saved a beautiful girl from a group of maniacs at a video arcade named Studio ’81.
