Originally published at Cinapse.co.
The specifics of the title of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood have become a subject of much debate over the past few weeks. Is the title Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood? Is it Once Upon a time in…Hollywood? Is the ellipsis even necessary? Now, this debate wasn’t half of the shitstorm that was the Angry Scorsese Discourse and the Tarantino Rankings Discourse, but the varying forms of the title in different pieces of marketing perplexed a lot of us: in the end, why are there two variations on the title? Thankfully, the movie (which I’ll just refer to without the ellipsis) offers a conclusive answer — it’s both. But before we get there, we need to look back at just what the filmmaker was evoking with these two variations in the first place. And look, I know you didn’t click on a review of the new Tarantino movie just for the whole thing to be about the title, but bear with me — I got this.
In 1968, Italian Western filmmaker Sergio Leone, a clear inspiration on basically everything Tarantino’s ever done, released Once Upon a Time in the West, a beautiful western that many consider his masterpiece. Cinema has seen this title turn into something of a genre in its own right, defining films epic in scale and length that frequently attempt cap off a popular genre with an ode to the movies that came before. From Leone’s own gangster-themed follow-up Once Upon a Time in America to Robert Rodriguez’ Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the title evokes Leone’s seminal Western while offering an air of gravitas to the movie itself. Tarantino’s latest, itself a film about the industry, goes all in on the meta-commentary, and uses the title to bolster those themes. By placing the ellipsis just before the word “Hollywood,” “Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood” draws attention to the way Tarantino plays with film history in the movie itself.
Throughout the film, Tarantino obviously uses the movie’s 1969 Hollywood to voice his own thoughts on the industry itself, but it seems the director has learned a touch of finesse he’s never quite shown before. In previous outings, when the filmmaker takes inspiration from film history itself, it can often seem like being hit in the head by a Film Bro’s Superior Intellect, and it’s often just exhausting. But when the lead characters of OUATIH, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt as his stuntman Cliff Booth, interact with the period-accurate film industry, it’s never overbearing. These almost slice-of-life moments compose a heavy percentage of the movie’s runtime, as Dalton, who feels like a failed version of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood combined together, simply does his job. DiCaprio and Pitt excel throughout the runtime, but it’s a transcendent combination of a director helming a scene about filmmaking that’s draped in a reverence for the process, and actors playing actors in a scene that’s equally as reverent to the art of acting. Now this might be all lofty, but these are some of the best moments in the story; they’re a love letter to film history and the art of cinema itself without ever becoming too clouded with nostalgia or bogged-down in specific inspirations. There are some moments where it feels like the story might be going to a more meaningful place, critiquing the inherent flaws of what the film industry once was and how it’s improved, but they’re just played off for laughs. I can see how this can become a gamebreaking issue for some, as the Love Letter to Cinema is half of the movie’s conceit and it almost feels empty without having much to say, but I would say it works in spite of feeling quite shallow.
On the other side of the title’s meaning, “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” draws attention to the fairytale nature of the film, as he inserts two fictional characters into a much-studied piece of cinematic, and American, history. Dalton is a next-door neighbor to Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate, and Tarantino uses this to tell her story in a way we haven’t ever really seen before. So much of the story of the Tate murders and the crimes of the Manson family are buried in the cold, calculated style of true crime. Instead of telling the audience about who Tate was, true crime stories condense the person down just to what happened to her. This story rejects that and films her scenes with the wonder of a fairy tale, allowing Tarantino to finally, fully let go of the bitter, cynical artist that made The Hateful Eight.
Robbie, as the third lead of the story, is the only lead playing a real person, and had a tough task ahead of her. Most of the film takes place in early 1969, when Tate was three months pregnant, but five months away from her murder at the hands of the Manson Family. If the scenes of 1969-style film production are a love letter to cinema, the sequences that follow Tate are a sacred text, as Tarantino treats the late star as a shining example of the best that Hollywood could be. We see her go out of her way to show kindness to people, gleefully soak in crowd reactions to her own movie, and live life with a free joy that so many of us can only dream of. Without needing to say anything, these extended episodes make you appreciate the person she was, and wonder what could’ve been. Though I had never seen a movie with Sharon Tate, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood makes an earnest plea to seek her out, to see the legend she could’ve become, and to understand how much she could’ve done. Tarantino captures all of this with an earnest, sincere sense of admiration and melancholy, and I hope he doesn’t abandon it after this movie.
Justin Don Jones 