In a recent conversation, a friend of mine explained his dislike of Quentin Tarantino’s newest film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “It just feels like a long episode of Seinfeld!”, he said to me, “except is has a really bloody ending.” Minor spoiler alert by the way.
I’ve seen the movie twice in theaters. The first time I watched it from start to finish, my hypothetical film critic notebook open in my lap. And I thought it was good. Maybe a bit slow, but good. The second time I saw it however, I showed up about 50 minutes late (making plans with friends during the summer can be a nightmare). And it was so much better than I remembered it.
Walking in mid-scene and mid plot put the structure of the movie into perspective for me. The two leads - Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt (named Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth, but we know everyone is just thinking Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt) - are the aging lead actor and stunt double for a once popular TV Western. The pair now take bit parts on other TV westerns, struggling to adjust to the changing landscape. It’s the 60’s: cowboys are out and Hippies are in. However, instead of following any linear conflict, Tarantino focuses on particular moments, episodes if you will, in the lives of these characters. Leonardo DiCaprio has an anxiety attack on set. Brad Pitt goes to an abandoned cowboy ranch overrun with hippies. Margot Robbie goes to a movie theater (regardless of how my opinion shifts, she is still criminally underutilized in the movie). The Manson murder sort of happen. Viewing #2 gave me the perspective I needed on these smaller stories, disengaging me just enough to put me in the mindset of watching something with lower stakes than a film, something like a sitcom, something like Seinfeld. And then I was hit with a distinctly passive revelation: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood works better as television than it ever did as a movie.
This tension between the big screen and small screen is not entirely new to Tarantino’s work. His last film before this was The Hateful Eight, a movie whose defining feature upon release was Tarantino’s decision to shoot exclusively in 70 mm film. It was a glorious return to a bygone format, and a defense of all that is good and holy about the theater going experience. Months later the film was released on Netflix, in an episodic format no less.
I think back through my own experiences of Tarantino, and this same tension seems present. I’ve only seen Reservoir Dogs in bits and pieces, I’ve only seen Kill Bill Volume 1, and whenever I think about Pulp Fiction I only remember the moments but never have any clue what order they happened in (Bruce Willis is freed and then John Travolta dies? I don’t know). Tarantino is an auteur filmmaker whose work, paradoxically perhaps, works best outside of the movie theater. It’s a phenomenon, but one that his fans have picked up on for decades (just think of the way people quote his movies). And with Once Upon a Time, I think the man himself is starting to catch on. The movie is unabashedly a love letter to Tarantino’s obvious obsessions with the 1960’s: hippies, cowboys, peace, love, dope, movies, and of course the music (the soundtrack is great during every viewing). It’s a Tarantino film that almost feels like a parody of a Tarantino film, forcing you to think about the man behind the camera just as much as the mid-century artifice so painstakingly recreated on screen.
I feel like everyone has their own personal biography of Quentin Tarantino, but mine reads something like this. Nerdy film buff kid who works in a blockbuster makes a few good connections, writes a movie, and suddenly becomes the golden child of American cinema from the 1990s onwards. However, the 90s were two decades ago, and so was Pulp Fiction (actually 25, but that almost seems laughably long ago). The landscape of cinema is changing. Cowboys are out and hippies are in.
It’s been two months seen I’ve seen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and these are the thoughts I am having as I crave to put it on in the background as I work on other things. Tarantino has famously said that he will only make 10 movies, and this was his ninth. The clock is ticking, but in some ironic way, the film that showed him most at peace with his aging role in Hollywood gave me the most hope for the future of his work. It’s a wink and a nod of a movie, made by an aging lover of the big screen who knows his work will be repurposed and redefined as the all-encompassing grasp of Netflix and Hulu closes the frontier.
I’m still not sure how good Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is, but it leaves me curious to see what the horizon holds for the new and old films of Tarantino…and that’s enough to keep me tuning in.
Nick Loud is a junior in Columbia College.