^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Yikes.
I'm not going to put myself in what would be for me the extremely rare and not especially comfortable position of defending a Tarantino movie, so just let me say that while I can see most of your points and agree with some of them, they didn't bother me or, in some instances, not much anyway. Why so? Expectations, I guess. Tarantino is a director who works hard at getting people to strongly react to him. With the exception of his first two films, my reaction has been overwhelming negative. Yes, he is gifted; yes, he has a certain flare and style, call it showmanship, that give his films a special kind of razzle-dazzle that is distinctive. But, as I have written before, he is the Peter Pan of movie directors. He refuses to grow up. In his defense, sort of, that refusal might be his best way available to hide the fact that he has absolutely nothing to say about life beyond getting all enthusiastic concerning what he loves about vintage movies. Could he even make a movie that doesn't reference old movies in some ways? It would seem not. His enthusiasms for old movies are a big part of his aesthetic DNA such as it is. But even a Spielberg throws in a
Schindler's List or a
Munich occasionally. I can't imagine Tarantino tackling similar projects or treating them seriously if he did. So part of what settled me into
Once upon a Time...in Hollywood was the absence of things that usually upset me in his movies. For starters, the movie seemed somehow less ambitious and less annoying than his usual stuff. His misrepresentations of history seemed less egregious and less offensive than usual. Though language doesn't usually bother me in movies, I thought the absence of racial slurs in a Tarantino film was a relief of some magnitude; that act became so childish and stale that I hope he has abandoned it entirely. So. for starters, I wasn't cringing in my seat as I so often do for one reason or another in Tarantino movies. Of course, the mere absence of the awful and the indefensible is no reason to give the movie a positive review, but it at least forced me to lower my defenses enough to enjoy the movie.
In retrospect what I enjoyed most about this latest fantasy is how well it caught the mood of the period. One of the articles I read after seeing the film mentioned how accurately Tarentino caught the general malaise of the late-hippy era in southern California. The article quoted Joan Didion who wrote about how the most shocking thing about the Tate murders was that no one was shocked by them--people at the time could sense something like this bizarre tragedy coming, a reflection of the zeitgeist of this particular era that I thought Tarantino managed to capture very well. So much of the movie's ambiance seems deliberately a little shabby and a little shopworn and a little sour as was also reflected by the two main characters who have nowhere to go in their already marginal lives. I liked the director's ability to create that. So I took the movie as a character study of two guys but also of a time and place, and I just enjoyed the hit-and-miss scenes on that level without awaiting a plot that clearly was never going to arrive. Perhaps I may have underrated DiCaprio's performance, but most of the fun that I had focused clearly on Pitt, who I thought had the lion's share of the most entertaining scenes. As well, the violence in this movie, graphic though it is when it arrives, seemed less a central focus than usual. And the absence of violence in a key scene seemed positively witty to me--I felt like for once Tarantino wasn't giving his audience what they wanted. He surprised me with his discretion, let's say. The movie is a ramble that only worked intermittently for me, but, despite its potentially grizzly subject matter, it turned out for once to be an amiable ramble. As for its sexism and racism, some of that is unavoidable in a Tarantino movie though, obviously that is no excuse. But that stuff didn't bother me like it usually does, perhaps because the movie seemed less mean-spirited and callous in this regard than other Tarantino films.
.
