Sharon Tate Going to See Her Own Movie
Sharon Tate goes to a movie theater to watch herself in a film. She’s incognito, more or less—hat, sunglasses—but when she tells the ticket seller who she is, there’s a flicker of pure delight on her face that Margot Robbie plays without any irony at all. She watches her own face onscreen and laughs when the audience laughs. The scene has nothing to do with the plot of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and everything to do with what Tarantino is actually building, which is a film about what it felt like to be alive in Los Angeles in 1969, right before everything broke.
Rick Dalton, played by DiCaprio, is the kind of actor who peaked on television and has been sliding sideways ever since—taking bit parts as the villain in other people’s westerns, trying to read the room of an industry he no longer quite recognizes. Brad Pitt plays Cliff Booth, his stunt double, driver, and errand man, and quietly the more interesting of the two: calm the way men are calm when they’ve stopped worrying about their own futures, possibly because there’s something he did on a boat once that resolved that particular question. They’ve been together long enough that they don’t need to explain themselves to each other. It’s the warmest relationship in the film.
And then there’s the other part. The Manson family is out at Spahn Ranch, and we know what they were building toward, and Tarantino knows we know, and the whole film carries this ambient dread that never releases into what you’re expecting. Sharon Tate lives next door to Rick Dalton. The killers are in the dark at the edge of the garden. Tarantino lets you sit with that tension across two and a half hours of otherwise sun-drenched nostalgia.
What he does with it in the end gets called wish fulfillment by people who hate it and something closer to grief management by people who don’t. He lets his characters save the night. Burns down the historical outcome and replaces it with a version where Cliff Booth, stoned and accompanied by his pit bull, is simply better at violence than the Manson kids. It’s funny and brutal and the catharsis lands, even knowing it didn’t happen.
His previous few films had felt like Tarantino performing Tarantino—the stylistic tics intact, the material thinner underneath. This one is looser, more in love with its own atmosphere, less interested in mechanism. It’s not as tight as Pulp Fiction or Jackie Brown, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a film about Los Angeles the way certain songs are about a summer—not describing it, just emanating it.
Luke Perry is in it. He died before the film came out. You watch him in a movie about the last good hours before the world changed, and you feel exactly the thing Tarantino was reaching for.