The crushing irony of ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ being Quentin Tarantino’s perfect swansong
It’s back to the drawing board for Quentin Tarantino after he decided to scrap The Movie Critic as his tenth and final feature, heaping even more pressure on his grand directorial finale to act as the fitting exclamation point on a storied career.
The filmmaker has been so determined for so long to reach double figures and then call it a day that anything other than an instant masterpiece is going to be viewed as a disappointment. Whatever it ends up being has been repeatedly heralded as the moment he draws a line under his association with cinema.
Of course, it’s a problem entirely of his own making, and clearly, The Movie Critic wasn’t the way to solve it. His now-unknown tenth film won’t be able to be viewed as a standalone work, either, but rather an encapsulation of everything he’s brought to the table since Reservoir Dogs announced his arrival in spectacular style. In the most crushing of ironies, he’s already made that movie, and it’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
There’s so much about the world, the narrative, and the characters that speak to both who Tarantino is and how he wants to be remembered that it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if he counted Death Proof and Grindhouse as two separate entities and downed tools right now. After all, if he’s looking to pay tribute to the things he loves and the filmmaker he is in a better or more fitting fashion, the task is nigh-on insurmountable.
Tarantino grew up in Los Angeles in the 1960s, which is where he first developed his love for cinema. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a love letter to the city during that time period, which makes it the backdrop that most closely resembles not only his upbringing but also his cinematic education. It’s a rose-tinted glance at a key time in Tinseltown, with the old guard losing their grip on the studio system as the ‘New Hollywood’ era and its key figures lurked in the shadows, ready to take celluloid by the scruff of the neck and repaint it in their image.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton is a fading star trying desperately to retain his relevance in the face of an ever-changing system, evocative of Tarantino’s insistence that he doesn’t want to become “an old man filmmaker” who hangs on for too long after the glory days to the point of devolving into self-parody.
Dalton was in part inspired by Burt Reynolds, and the former’s TV series Bounty Law was in no small part indebted to the latter’s Gunsmoke. Tarantino himself was in part named after Reynolds’ character Quint Asper in the show, adding another layer of thinly-veiled metatextuality to a character reflective of where the two-time Academy Award winner doesn’t want to find himself in the years to come.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is also an elegiac and wistful glance at a period – both personally and professionally – that helped shape Tarantino into the man and the filmmaker he’d eventually become, a glowing ode to what he believes is the peak era of the movie star, the concept of the ‘American Dream’ and how it can be achieved through cinema, and the importance of the artform as a means to escape from the unforgiving realities of everyday life and become immersed in the warm and fuzzy glow of film.
Even rewriting history and having Sharon Tate survive feeds into Tarantino at a base level. The rise of the counterculture movement and the Manson Family murders have been cited by many industry professionals at the time as a pivotal shift in the societal landscape that coincided with the gradual decline of the studio system. All of it evolved into ‘New Hollywood’, marked by a seismic shift in the complexion of what movie stardom looked like in the conventional sense.
From that perspective, with Margot Robbie’s Tate alive and well to carry on her career, the Golden Age never really ended in the world of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and it’s not hard to interpret that as Tarantino’s idealised vision of what history should have been. It’s the movie that says more about him than any other, and yet, there’s one more still to come that needs to distil his entire legacy into three hours or less and do it better.
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.