Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
rewrite the past in line with his fantasies.
The 60s that engages Tarantino doesnt touch on the healthy and corrective elements of the counterculture.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a fading Western TV star with a star-size drinking problem.
Theyre both good dogs.
Be still my heart!
That the footage onscreen is of the real Sharon Tate makes the sequence even more poignant.
Marquees with titles likeThree in an Attic(what did the trio do up there?)
are tantalizing, and so are radio commercials for perfume and trailers for such movies asC.C.
and Companywith Joe Namath on a motorcycle (plus Ann-Margret).
An issue ofTV Guide(how umbilically attached we were to it!)
sits on Cliffs table.
Robert Goulet murders MacArthur Park on the TV screen.
The jam-packed soundtrack, chockablock with goodies, is its own love letter to the 60s.
Tarantino gives you the sense that he makes movies to be able to live inside them.
Theyre his time machines.
He has an exchange on a porch with little Julia Butters (a star is born!)
Theres a scene in his trailer (Youre a fuckin miserable drunk!
he screams at himself in the mirror.
Get the lines right or Ill blow your fuckin brains out!)
Cliffs big sequence is almost as amazing.
(This is another star-making turn.)
(Manson doesnt appear in this sequence.
and its droll bits of business, among them a devilish shot featuring a speargun.
Al Pacino doesnt have the fine-tuning for a Tarantino movie his generalized hamminess sticks out.
But on its own terms,Once Upon a Time in Hollywoodis a farrago of genius.
Theconvulsively brutal climaxI wouldnt dare to spoil.
The finale is a wonder.
Has there ever been a scene so simultaneously euphoric and heartbreaking?
