written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
For the third time in the last four movies, auteur Quentin Tarantino rewrites a specific period in history, giving it his signature quirky twist. Having tackled the Antebellum South and the middle of the Second World War, Tarantino trains his lens on a slightly more esoteric place and time in history: Hollywood in 1969, and even more specifically, the murder of actress Sharon Tate and several of her friends in a horrific incident that has since been dubbed the Manson family murders.
Here, Tate is played by Margot Robbie, who, if I'm honest, does little with the character other than show how carefree and whimsical a 60's ingenue could be, as well as show off her filthy feet in a movie theater. Here, as she was in real life, she is married to Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), she hangs out with her ex, Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), and lives in the house where, in real life, she was eventually murdered.
In this film though, she is next-door neighbors with fictional washed-up actor Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who, together with his stunt double and man Friday Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), has moved out to Hollywood to live out his career playing bad guys on television shows. The bulk of the movie basically follows Dalton's spiraling descent into depression over his own impending obsolescence while at the same offering foreshadowing of the brutal fate that, to our knowledge at least, is supposed to befall Tate as Booth encounters the commune of hippies from which three people, later known as the Manson family, will come to murder Tate. The film spends nearly two and a half hours doing this, all the while showing off various pairs of feet, including more than one pair of dirty feet shoved right into the camera.
Critics of this film have used the phrase "self-indulgent" so often in describing this movie that I don't want to repeat it, even though I wholeheartedly agree with them. Given that this is the third time that Tarantino dips into the alternate history well, I really cannot help but ask why he has fixated on this specific incident, especially since he basically does nothing to make us feel any connection to Robbie's Tate, or DiCaprio's self-absorbed Dalton, or even Pitt's blank-slate Booth, whose much-reviled fight scene with Bruce Lee (played here by Mike Moh), is every bit as ridiculous as the worst brickbats hurled at this film have described it to be. Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained worked as "reimaginings" of history because there was something utterly cathartic about how Tarantino empowered the previously powerless, putting in a Jew's hands the the machine gun that killed Adolf Hitler and letting a black man go on a relentless killing spree in the deep, deep pre-Civil War South. The coupling of the righting of historical wrongs with fantastically violent wishful thinking was a powerful narrative tonic that helped people overlook just how silly both movies inherently were.
Here, the fate of Sharon Tate and her doomed friends hinges on the actions of two men who were never even there, and she ends the movie blissfully unaware of the horror that very nearly befell her, not in any way empowered or, for that matter, any different than when she started the movie as a whimsical airhead. Sure, Robbie brings her ethereal charm to the role, but given that Tarantino gives her little to do but laugh and show off her dirty feet, not even that counts for much. I mean, what makes Sharon Tate so important that she and her friends deserved to be "saved" from atrocity any more than millions of other people? This cuts to the thematic essence of the film, which, as many have observed, feels like a love letter to that era of Hollywood, an age of innocence when "men were men" as demonstrated by Pitt's ubermensch of a stuntman who can basically kick Bruce Lee's ass, notwithstanding the film's diplomatic stalemate, and DiCaprio's flame-thrower-wielding has-been. Clearly, Tarantino feels something significant died along with Tate and her friends that fateful August day in 1969, and wants to set things right, even in his own fictional world. Tarantino even directs a fake cigarette commercial as a mid-credits Easter Egg of sorts, though to be fair Dalton spends a fair amount of time in the film coughing his lungs up. Still, a fake cigarette commercial these days feels like an excess in a film that is already chock full of them.
What makes this even sadder is that this film is full of Tarantino's trademarks, like biting wit in the dialogue, amped-up songs of the era in lieu of a music score, plenty of morbid humor and, of course, extreme violence, though in this case it's reserved mainly for the very end of the movie. DiCaprio and Pitt have an easygoing chemistry, and the various other actors who pop up throughout the movie are fun to watch, like Tarantino regular Kurt Russell, who doubles as a stunt coordinator who fires Booth after he fights with Bruce Lee and the film's Narrator, and even former television Spider-Man Nicholas Hammond as actor-turned-director Sam Wanamaker. I especially liked the performance of the precocious Julia Butters, who plays a child star acting opposite Dalton's bad guy. That kid's got quite a career ahead of her, perhaps even in more Tarantino movies, which, I genuinely hope, are better than this one.
It just disappoints that Tarantino's considerable talent is brought to bear on a story that doesn't particularly feel like it was worth telling.
6/10
