Editor’s Note: Freeline Media welcomes our newest critic, Milan Paurich, to our Movie Talk discussions. Milan gets the ball rolling by revisiting the best picture nominee Once Upon A Time In … Hollywood, a film he considers “wonderfully unreasonable.” Read on!
By Milan Paurich
There’s something wonderfully unreasonable about Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood. It’s a movie about a Hollywood that is already disappearing, made by a filmmaker who knows that the Hollywood he loves may never have actually existed. The joke — and the poignancy — is that cinema has always been partly a memory of itself. Movies preserve things that were never quite real: the perfect sunset, the heroic entrance, the fearless leading man, the city where every stranger might become a star. Tarantino understands that Hollywood was always a dream factory, but he also understands something more complicated: dreams, even artificial ones, can be emotionally true.
The year is 1969, and the old mythology is beginning to collapse. The studios are losing their grip. Television has changed the relationship between audiences and performers. The New Hollywood is arriving with its restless young turks and its distrust of the old formulas. The western hero, once the embodiment of American confidence, is becoming a museum piece.
Into this moment walks Rick Dalton, an actor who once played the lead in a popular television western and now finds himself uncertain whether he’s a leading man, a supporting player or yesterday’s news. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick as a magnificent contradiction: a man whose ego is enormous because his fear is enormous. He’s vain, insecure, funny, pathetic and strangely lovable. When Rick worries that he’s becoming known only as the villain of the week, he isn’t simply worried about employment. He’s confronting the terrifying possibility that the audience has stopped seeing him.
The miracle of DiCaprio’s performance is that he allows us to laugh at Rick without laughing him off. There’s a scene in which Rick, alone in his trailer, berates himself after forgetting his lines on set. It’s both hilarious and heartbreaking because we recognize the nightmare beneath the comedy. Every actor, every artist, every person who has ever wondered whether they still matter understands that moment.
Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth exists on the other side of that anxiety. Cliff has no ambition left to betray him. He’s the film’s great fantasy figure: the man who moves through the world effortlessly because he has nothing to prove. Pitt plays him with a kind of anti-performance. The muscles, the smile, the confidence; all of it seems nearly accidental. Cliff is the guy who would have been a movie star if he’d wanted to be, which is precisely why he probably never could have been.
Tarantino has always been fascinated by people trapped inside movie genres, and Once Upon a Time might be his most complicated example. Rick is a western hero who cannot remain heroic. Cliff is a stuntman who looks more like the star than the star himself. The entire film is built around the gap between image and reality.
The Sharon Tate sections are where Tarantino’s gamble becomes most daring. Margot Robbie doesn’t play Tate as a tragic symbol waiting for history to arrive. She plays her as a young actress enjoying the simple pleasure of being alive: going to the movies, dancing, laughing, watching herself onscreen. The scene in which Tate sits in a theater and watches herself in The Wrecking Crew is not just nostalgia, it’s a director asking us to look at a person before we look at what happened to her.
Tarantino’s revision of the Manson murders has understandably been debated, but the emotional impulse behind it is surprisingly tender. He isn’t merely changing history, he’s arguing with the cruelty of history and asking whether movies — which have spent more than a century creating fantasies of rescue — can finally offer one.
This is where the film becomes something larger than a Hollywood fairy tale. It becomes a movie about our desire to return to moments before we knew something terrible was coming. Everyone has a version of 1969 that exists in memory as a paradise before the fall. Tarantino’s fantasy isn’t that the past can be restored, it’s that cinema can briefly allow us to revisit it.
The danger of nostalgia is that it can turn the past into a postcard. But Tarantino’s Hollywood is too strange and messy for that. He fills it with aging actors, cheap television pilots, forgotten performers, declining careers and people who exist on the margins of fame. His affection isn’t really for the golden age, it’s for the people who survived after the gold started fading.
That may be why the movie’s strangest and most touching image isn’t a glamorous one: Rick Dalton standing outside his own era, wondering if there’s still a place for him. Hollywood has always promised immortality, but actors age, studios disappear, audiences move on. What remains is the strange miracle that for two hours in a dark room someone’s manufactured dream can become your own memory.
Tarantino has spent his career rescuing discarded genres, forgotten actors and damaged reputations. In Once Upon a Time he attempts something even more impossible: rescuing a feeling. Not the feeling that everything was once better, but the feeling that movies mattered because they could make the impossible feel briefly, emotionally real.
The old Hollywood ending was always a lie. But sometimes a beautifully told lie becomes its own kind of truth.
Movie-crazy from an early age, Milan Paurich grew up in Northeastern Ohio at the tail end of the Movie Palace era. Some of his earliest memories involve sitting in the balconies of downtown “Cathedrals of Cinema” and watching “Mary Poppins,” “In Search of the Castaways” and “The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze” for the first time. Milan ultimately took his incipient cinephilia to N.Y.U. where he graduated with a double major in Cinema Studies and Journalism. Milan has been reviewing films professionally for decades: at daily newspapers, alt-weeklies and on local television stations where his reviews appeared three times every Friday–on two separate channels!–for more than a dozen years. Since 2001, Milan has been a voting member of the Critics Choice Association (Film Branch), and won three individual S.P.J. (Society of Professional Journalists) awards as “Best Critic in Ohio.” Updated weekly, his film/home video reviews currently appear online at: https://movieswithmilanmix989.com/
