Believe What You've Heard: 'Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood' May Be Tarantino's Best Film Yet

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD 

★★★★1/2

If Quentin Tarantino is cinema’s master of postmodernist pastiche, Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood may be the master’s mastepierce of postmodernist pastiche. Like all of Tarantino’s films, it seemingly exists solely as a way to pay homage, riff on, recreate, and remake other movie making styles, eras, genres.

Here, in Los Angeles in 1969, Tarantino spins and splices the fictitious Hollywood mythology of cowboy star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) among real Hollywood history. And, in doing so, clearly delights in inserting Dalton into The Great Escape, in fashioning his own TV series Bounty Law, in riffing on Spaghetti Western and “James Bond-type rip off”s, and, finally, on close, delivering an MCU-styled mid-credits in-joke, turning Dalton into a pitch man for Tarantino’s own fictional brand of cigarettes, Red Apple.

Taken in a vacuum, this sounds repulsive: the world hardly needs more movies that exist as meta movies about movies, and the world hardly needs more nostalgia for 1969. But Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood can’t be taken in a vacuum, or at face value, simply because it’s a Quentin Tarantino movie. Saying such isn’t blindly lionising that most ’90s of all directors, but reasserting something that may have been lost with the overwrought, career-nadir The Hateful Eight, with the associated stink of a career-long association with Harvey Weinstein, and with Tarantino now a moviemaking model — the Great White Macho Auteur — falling fast out of fashion.

But watching Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood, it’s impossible to avoid that Tarantino is an incredible filmmaker, operating with a command of craft, and making good on having the resources/luxury/indulgence to make this picture as impressive as possible. There’s one shot mid-movie, when Leo is striding down Main Street of a frontier Western settlement, whilst, also, of course, just finding his way onto set on a Hollywood studio lot. It starts off as an overhead, a long shot of this gun for hire striding into town, then the camera cranes down until it sits on the dirt, and the long shot turns close up as his boots step into the front of frame. Maybe it’s unnecessary, but, God, it’s glorious; one of countless moments herein where fans of, like, filmmaking, the craft of composition and the dark arts of editing, will either be laughing with delight or have their jaws on the floor.

This is, in short, a glorious film to look at, and it moves, this way and that, like a dream. After the unnecessary bloat of The Hateful Eight, Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood is a 160-minute movie that just goes. It follows narratives in various directions, down strange little rabbit-holes and moments of minor joy (like Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, smiling sweetly as a cinema audience laughs at her performance in The Wrecking Crew).

And, as it does, it betrays those best-of-Tarantino hallmarks: every verbal exchange is its own moment of poetry; and every character we meet, even if they’re in it for a scene, is memorable. Julia Butters, as a precocious 8-year-old method actor, delivers one of 2019’s great cinematic turns; and Brandy, a pitbull fresh off winning the Palme Dog at Cannes, can be instantly enshrined amongst the most memorable of canine performers. There’s plenty of other Tarantino hallmarks —like, obviously, the endless foot-fetish shots; like when Margaret Qualley’s hippy hitchhiker presses her feet against the windshield of a car, and the camera lingers on the squish — but none serves the film better than its depth of character, of colour.

All of which may not mean much if the film didn’t have merits as a story, in its narrative. But, just as Inglourious Basterds wildly fucked with the end of WWII, and Django Unchained was a trashy, obnoxious riposte to America’s burying of its greatest shame, here Tarantino again takes dark history — the Sharon Tate murders at the hands of the Manson Family — and, rather than just bringing it to light, rewrites the book; again authoring a vivid cinematic fantasy in which the horrors of the past can be changed, the supposed ‘historical accuracy’ of Oscar bait filmmaking going up (again) in flames.

Whilst we only see a brief glimpse of Charles Manson (played by Australian cinema’s villain-of-the-moment Damon Herriman, concurrently being evil in Judy & Punch and The Nightingale), we spend time with his many followers. In this story, the Manson Family are the clear villains, but Tarantino pulls away and, more broadly, indicts hippies. It’s clear why Dalton and his stunt double/gopher/“buddy who’s more than a brother, less than a wife” Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt, impossibly charismatic and reminding us of his undimmed movie star glow) hate hippies: as war veterans and men of the 1950s, they are from the previous generation, old-men lamenting kids these days. But, beyond the characters within, the film itself feels like an indictment of Baby Boomers, their veneration of the cultural power of free love and the supposed peak of 1969.

Whilst Tarantino is a filmmaker big on cinematic nostalgia, he’s less interested in cultural nostalgia. And his 1969 doesn’t give rise to the clichés of it being some watershed moment in culture, an epoch that subsequent generations have, for decades, been told was more meaningful than anything we’ll ever live through. Here, the director’s fetishising of past forms becomes a form of critique, via how saturated everything in is advertising. Everywhere someone drives, their AM radio is plastered with ads; when watching TV, they’re always being sold something. It’s a very noisy film, its sound design fashioning a sort of audio ad-creep, in which the voices of pitchmen muscle in on conversations, and swamp us in sales. Rather than serving up your standard venerated classic rock hits, here the Age Of Aquarius seems far more like the Dawning Of Hyper-Capitalism, taking place in a world dreamt up by Don Draper.

The result is a film that’s both broadly fun and that has a sly, sharp sting. It’s brilliantly made, full of charming actors and memorable characters, and has meta-acting/Leo-commentary in-jokery that feels of its world, not lazily thrown in (like, say, the fourth-wall-breaking in the awful The Dead Don’t Die). And it’s also a film that counters all the fears you may’ve had going into it: Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood harbouring none of your standard ’60s nostalgia, nor being some $100mil blow-out of a tired ‘true crime’ narrative. Saying that Tarantino is a great filmmaker, and this is a great movie, is hardly a particularly cool position to take in 2019; but dismissing him or this work would be shameless grandstanding. There’s nothing to hate, here, and a surprising amount to genuinely love.

WEATHERING WITH YOU

★★★1/2

Measuring up to the towering instant animé classic Your Name was never going to be easy, but with Weathering With You, Makoto Shinkai has made a worthy successor, if not a veritable companion piece.

Again: teenage lovers whose union is threatened to be torn apart by mystical powers. Again: slipping back-and-forth in time, and between ‘realms’. Again: Radwimps jams. Again: an eye for the contemporary landscape, an ear for the rhythms of dialogue, and a fondness for depicting digital devices in animated shades. Again: fireworks literal and figurative. Again: awe for the forces of nature and grand ecological catastrophe. Again: an animated film that uses its medium, messes with perception, and feels as ‘big’ as some tentpole blockbuster.

With Weathering With You, there’s — again — notions of fate at play, but its central love story is more concerned with the state of our weather. Runaway Hodaka lands in Tokyo, and ends up crossing paths with Hina, a modern-day ‘Sunshine Girl’: a young woman who can pray the rain away via a mystical/spiritual connection with the clouds. Only, in these near-future climes, it’s raining all the time; the city routinely dumped in super-storms, anyone hoping to make a break in the clouds having their work cut out for them.

Whilst there's all manner of characters, sub-plots, and narrative wrinkles across its bright, busy, bustling two hours, when you peel the plot strands back, it’s basically a love story about two young people symbolically grappling with climate change: Hodaka weighing up whether his own personal desires should take precedence over the greater good, Hina whether she should sacrifice herself to fight the waters that — just as with real rising sea levels — threaten to cause chaos in Tokyo.

In such, Weathering With You is, like Your Name, a film that plays on many levels, and can be different things to different viewers; a work of wild ambition and animated maximalism that still feels heartfelt and, somehow, simple.