The Beautiful Lie of Hollywood’s Last Golden Summer
The thing about 1969 Los Angeles is that it was already ending before anyone noticed. The counterculture had curdled, the studios were hemorrhaging money on films audiences had stopped wanting, and somewhere in the canyons above the city a group of people were getting ready to do something that would close the decade’s optimism with extreme prejudice. Quentin Tarantino sets his ninth film right in the middle of all of it, and from the trailer alone it’s clear that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is going to be the most elegiac thing he’s made.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a TV actor watching his star dim as the industry reinvents itself around him. Brad Pitt plays Cliff Booth, his longtime stunt double—a man who has spent his career standing in for someone else’s glamour. It’s a quietly perfect pairing for a film about Hollywood mythology, which has always been a story about the gap between what the movies show you and what the business actually is. Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate. The shadow of what happened to Sharon Tate in August 1969 falls over everything.
The ensemble is enormous—Al Pacino, Kurt Russell, Dakota Fanning, Timothy Olyphant, Damian Lewis, what appears to be half of working Hollywood—and in another filmmaker’s hands that would be a warning sign. Tarantino has always been better with ensembles than with two-handers, though, and the material here seems to suit him in a way the recent work hasn’t. The last few films have been technically accomplished but slightly cold, like he’s been demonstrating craft rather than feeling anything. Django Unchained had its pleasures. The Hateful Eight felt like a locked-room exercise. I want to know if he can still make a film that actually moves.
1969 is the right year to find out. It’s a year American cinema has returned to compulsively ever since—the moment the old system finally broke and the younger generation took over, briefly, before the blockbuster decade swallowed everything. Tarantino grew up on those films. The question is whether he’s making a love letter to the era or an autopsy, and I suspect—from the tone of the trailer, from that specific casting, from Sharon Tate standing in bright Los Angeles sunlight—that he doesn’t quite know yet either.