Death of the sixties

When Quentin Tarantino is behind the camera, mayhem and artistic license win out—history and conventionality be damned. Movie No. 9 is a dreamy doozy, and maybe the director/screenwriter’s most unapologetic film yet.

Set in 1969, Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood captures the dying days of both sixties culture and the Golden Age of Hollywood. And through Tarantino’s storytelling lens, they die hard—in mysterious and hallucinogenic ways.

For leading men, we get the pairing of Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt starring as insecure, has-been actor Rick Dalton and his trusty stuntman, Cliff Booth, respectively. Dalton’s career has devolved into playing the bad guys on weekly installments of TV’s The F.B.I., while the blackballed and past-his-prime Booth is relegated to driving the actor around and acting as his confidant.

The setup allows Tarantino to go hog wild with the sixties visuals and soundtrack, and the film is a monumental achievement on the art and sound direction fronts. Some of the scenes are destined to become Tarantino’s most famous, including a crane shot over a drive-in screen that dropped my jaw. And the soundtrack pops with the likes of Neil Diamond, Jose Feliciano (doing a much-less-sunny version of the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’”) and Paul Revere & the Raiders.

The looks, sounds and performances create such an authentic setting that you might find yourself wondering if the Dalton and Booth characters were based on real people. They were not, though they do owe a debt to old-school Hollywood players like Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham.

The most notable “real” character would be actress Sharon Tate, played beautifully by Margot Robbie. She’s the luminous center of the movie, and Tarantino and Robbie take this opportunity to show Tate as the beautiful person and promising star she was before becoming a murder victim and footnote in the annals of Charles Manson’s bloody history.

The Manson family also plays a big part in Tarantino’s twisted fairy tale. Dalton happens to live on Cielo Drive next door to the home of Tate and husband Roman Polanski, and Booth pays a visit to the Spahn Ranch, where the Manson family squatted. Unlike recent movies that strangely afford the Mansons some level of grace (Charlie Says), Tarantino shows them as bumbling, idiotic and pathetic. It’s a solid choice.

DiCaprio, in his first role since taking home his much deserved Oscar for The Revenant (and his second teamed up with Tarantino after Django Unchained), is a nervous, hilarious mess as Dalton, a man prone to crying in public over his career, but still capable of blowing up a TV set with tremendous fireworks. He has a trailer rant and a hostage-taking bad guy speech here that stand as two of his finest acting moments.

In what is also his second teaming with Tarantino (after Inglourious Basterds), Pitt is funny throughout as a man just coasting through life with little care in the world. He faces off with Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) on set just to shush his big mouth, and buys an acid-dipped cigarette for kicks. And when he smokes that cigarette, very strange things happen, and the wonderful Pitt laugh is put to its best use since he played Tyler Durden in Fight Club.

The end of the sixties was bona fide nuts, and this is a nutty movie. It also manages to be quite heartfelt and moving. Tarantino says he might have only one more film in him after this one. I’m curious to see if he can top himself again, or if he just does that rumored Star Trek movie and calls it a day. Either way, he will have left a distinctive mark on American cinema.