Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #250 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and with this entry I have officially finished a patron-funded ramble through the complete filmography of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well.
I reach two milestones with this entry, friends. It marks the epic conclusion of a project in which I have watched and written about all of Rebecca Gayheart’s movies for a much appreciated patron who has helped the Happy Place stay in business these past few years by funding my looks into the complete filmographies of Tawny Kitaen, Rebecca Gayheart and now Virginia Madsen.
It’s also the landmark two hundred and fiftieth Control Nathan Rabin piece so I wanted it to be special, a movie with deep significance for me. I thought about doing the director’s cut of The Southland Tales, which I at one point was supposed to write the liner notes for, but instead chose 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino’s Oscar-winning smash is Gayheart’s final and best film, although given the length of her blink-and-you-miss-it cameo as the murdered, nagging wife of stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), it’s most assuredly a movie she was lucky enough to be in, briefly, rather than a Rebecca Gayheart movie per se.
I have been looking for a reason to re-watch and write about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood since I watched and loved it during its theatrical release.
How could I not love Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? It’s a labor of love from one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, an auteur who looms large in my psyche for reasons that go beyond me being eighteen years old, hopelessly and happily addicted to film and spending the happiest days of my adolescence working in a video store when Pulp Fiction came out in 1994.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood finds one of my all-time faves making a movie about my all-time period in film and American pop culture—the late 1960s and 1970s.
I love movies about movies so much that I’ve devoted the Fractured Mirror column to covering the good, bad and ugly in movies about movies and am seriously considering turning the Fractured Mirror into a book in 2022 or 2023.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood beautifully illustrates why I am obsessed with American movies about American movies and film as an art form. I’m fascinated by movies about movies because of what they say about how Hollywood sees itself and its role in American culture but also because they contain some of the very worst movies of all time as well as some of the best.
Tarantino’s casually epic tribute to movies, television and friendship qualifies as not just one of Tarantino’s best and most personal films but as one of the best movies ever made about Hollywood and show-business.
I knew where the film was headed this time around but that did not inhibit my enjoyment in the least. On the contrary, it made me appreciate the screenplay’s craft in a whole new way.
What initially struck me, joyously, as a movie about some dudes hanging out in late 1960s Hollywood, the most magical place and time in the world, is actually a masterpiece of storytelling where every scene serves a vital purpose, contributes to the overall gestalt or pays off in a surprising and deeply satisfying way.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood only feels like a shaggy, episodic ramble; in actuality it’s a finely tuned machine. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood similarly only feels like it’s about a sad western actor the same way The Weather Man only seems to be about a sad weather man.
In a career best performance, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, the aforementioned sad western actor. Rick was once the star of his very own western, Bounty Law, but as the film opens in 1969 he is deep into a long, steep, seemingly permanent professional decline. No longer the swaggering hero, he is reduced to doing guest shots as bad guys for whoever will have him.
Schmoozing agent Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino, in a performance so wonderful that it single-handedly redeems the oft-abysmal two decades leading up to it) warns Rick that if he keeps playing bad guys who lose the big fight audiences and the industry will see him as a loser and a heavy and cast him accordingly.
Among its myriad gifts, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of the most insightful and authentic depictions of depression, Bipolar Disorder and mid-life angst in the entirety of American film.
Considering that DiCaprio will forever be associated in the public mind with beauty, youth and success, both in terms of himself and the very young women he famously dates, there’s something wonderfully perverse and mildly sadistic about Tarantino casting him as a b-list lightweight terrified of growing old and failure and losing his boyish good looks.
Upon a Time in Hollywood is consequently a deep look at a shallow man powered by a peculiar but potent combination of empathy and mockery, compassion and dark humor.
Where Rick Dalton struggles desperately to hold onto what he has in a world and business he longer understands yet fears, his stuntman, lackey and best friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) is gloriously comfortable in his own skin.
In a town and a business full of phonies and schemers, Cliff is effortlessly authentic and true to himself, which is a moral victory in its own right.
Margot Robbie, meanwhile, floats effervescently through the proceedings as Sharon Tate, an actress and free spirit who radiates joy and lust for life from every pore. She may not have much in the way of dialogue but she doesn’t need to say anything, really, to make an indelible impression.
The Manson family, meanwhile lurks menacingly on the periphery of the action, feral hippies with lithe young bodies and evil intentions locked in a collision course with Rick and Cliff that they will not survive.
Tarantino takes his time here. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a movie that devotes ample screen time to characters watching television or looking at marquees or driving yet the action never feels sloppy or self-indulgent, with the exception of some fetishistic shots of shapely bare feet.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s extraordinary pleasures are even more pronounced and apparent the second time around. The same, alas, is true of its many problematic areas, which have only become more problematic since the film’s rapturous initial reception.
It remains extremely fucked up that Tarantino’s first film after #MeToo changed everything, particularly the life and reputation of Harvey Weinstein, a mogul and monster synonymous with Tarantino and his iconic early work, features a crowd-pleasing climax in which a pair of macho heterosexual men beat young women to death and/or roast them with a fucking FLAMETHROWER, like some manner of human S’more.
It’s equally fucked up that Tarantino responded to #MeToo with a film that observes Roman Polanski from a flattering-bordering-on-worshipful distance. Finally, it’s disconcerting that Tarantino portrayed Bruce Lee, perhaps the greatest icon in the history of Asian and Asian-American film, as a pompous boob who gets thrown around like a rag doll by an underemployed stuntman.
Like everything in the film, the Bruce Lee scene is wildly entertaining. I just wish that it was with a Bruce Lee-like figure so that Tarantino wasn’t insulting the memory, family and legacy of a real person.
I don’t know how to feel about any of these deeply problematic elements, particularly since anyone who has followed the making of the Kill Bill movies knows that Tarantino has done some things he should feel deeply ashamed of, beyond disturbed.
Despite its troubling aspects, I didn’t just love Once Upon a Time in Hollywood even more the second time around: I wanted to live in its world forever. Tarantino apparently feels the same way, since he took the unusual step of writing the novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood so that he could expand on its characters and themes.
Tarantino is apparently working on a second book rooted in the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood universe, this time a fictional exploration of the films of Rick Dalton, and wrote a bunch of teleplays for Bounty Law that he hopes to direct.
There’s also talk of an extended cut that would take us even deeper into the film’s impossibly deep world.
In the end, there are only three words to describe the ecstasy of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: what a picture!
Buy The Weird Accordion to Al AND THE BRAND SPANKING NEW THE WEIRD A-COLORING TO AL here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or from Amazon here
Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are NINE so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Missed out on the Kickstarter campaign for The Weird A-Coloring to Al/The Weird A-Coloring to Al-Colored In Edition? You’re in luck, because you can still pre-order the books, and get all manner of nifty exclusives, by pledging over at https://the-weird-a-coloring-to-al-coloring-colored-in-books.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
AND of course you can also pledge to this site and help keep the lights on at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace