You’re a good friend, Cliff.
I try.
Well, now that Tarantino’s ninth film is out, it’s time for everyone to go through and update their qualitative ranking lists of QT’s filmography. But whether it ultimately ends up at the top, the bottom or somewhere in the middle, it’s definitely Tarantino’s most inconsistent film and also a film that is radically different from anything he’s done recently. It’s a messy film and very episodic, as everyone has been saying, but I’m basically ready to sign off on the first two-thirds as being near-perfect, which makes the extremely dire final third especially disappointing.
In Pitt & DiCaprio, Tarantino has a pair of leading men well able to handle having an entire movie hung around their charisma and he does it. Pitt has the easy, affable charm of his least studied performances and, if he doesn’t do anything particularly revelatory, he’s a rumpled, charming protagonist. DiCaprio has the flashier part as the aging actor Rick Dalton and he rises to the occasion with some of his finest work ever. An extended sequence revolving around him playing the part of a villain on TV western Lancer is Tarantino at his most relaxed, in all the good meanings of that word and none of the bad, as he just lets the film unspool at a slow pace and lets us really live in the multilayered world of DiCaprio’s Dalton. Young actress Julia Butters, a precocious actress playing a precocious actress, is absolutely brilliant during this section of the film and both Timothy Olyphant and the late Luke Perry also get off great cameos. Another sequence involves Pitt’s character slowly becoming involved with Pussycat, one of the wastrel girls of the Manson family, played with endearing scruffiness by Margaret Qualley. A lengthy scene of Pitt visiting the Manson family’s hangout on the outskirts of LA is a slowly tightening exercise in tension. As the screws tighten and the air gets thick and filled with menace, you’re watching Tarantino at the height of his powers as a filmmaker, operating on a level close to real technical perfection. In terms of performances, Dakota Fanning is wonderful as the hard-bitten Squeaky Fromm, a chilling, hammer-blow of a cameo. Margot Robbie is kind of a perfect cast as Sharon Tate and I kind of wish she’d had more to do, but Tarantino is mostly interested on having her float through the movie as a quasi-angelic figure, a ghost while she’s still alive; Robbie has the easy charisma and beauty to make that part really land. A lot of actresses would have been kind of at sea with so little in the way of actual concrete on-screen action, but Robbie nails it and she gets one genuinely stand-out scene where Tate attends a screening of one of her own films and revels in the joy expressed by the other movie goers; it’s a scene of real happiness and beauty. And while I’m wrapping up my notes on performances, chilly as I am on that ending, I do have to give a shout-out to Sayuri, by turns adorable and terrifying as Cliff’s pit bull, Brandy. Sayuri has the misfortune to give this performance in a year with a John Wick movie; Halle Berry’s dogs, on the strength of that insanely choreographed action sequence that features them, may just edge Sayuri out for my Dog of the Year award for 2019.
But as the film winds its way into its third hour, though for the flaws of that third hour, the first two absolutely fly by, things start to slowly go awry and then completely go off the rails with an ending that I didn’t like at first, grew to dislike quite a bit and currently kind of loathe. Spoilers, obviously. Tarantino has always been a referential director, even a self-referential one, but for all the grousing about tropes and the way he brings cast members back over and over or has a singular tone, the one thing Tarantino’s never really been is repetitive. But he is here. He takes a page from Inglourious Basterds and essentially slaps that film’s ending on here; in a way, it’s a kind of “this worked before” trick that feels cheap and lazy. And it is, in every way, a lesser iteration of the “rewriting history” trope from Basterds. It doesn’t really flow out of character or feel like the closing of a character arc as it does in Basterds; the deaths at the end of Basterds are deeply felt because of Shoshannah and her quest and they’re both emotionally cathartic and deeply satisfying on a character level. Here, aside from a couple of asides from one of the Manson girls, there’s no real connection between Rick & Cliff on one side and the Manson family on the other. It doesn’t feel like a closing of a character arc for either Rick or Cliff for them to brutally kill the would-be murderers. And it’s a cheat in another way; Tarantino explicitly uses the looming menace of Manson as a way to give heft to the film, some weight and menace, but Tarantino doesn’t want to really explore that darkness at the heart of the Hollywood that he’s so vividly recreated here – he only wants to use it as a way to get at the audience. At the close of the film, he has the opportunity to make us really feel something and really wrestle with the ugly death of this fantasy world he’s conjured, but instead he chooses to indulge in a slapstick scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a Looney Tunes cartoon. Some people say he’s always been cartoonish in his use of violence, but I’d disagree, not the way he is here. His violence has always meant something and served a purpose. Well, okay, not in that one scene in The Hateful Eight. Yeah, you know the one. You know. Yeah. For those reason and more, I find the ending to the film really disappointing and lazy and, ultimately, entirely without weight or consequence. And I understand it’s a fairy tale; I get the title. But have you read those fairy tales? There was cost in those things. Stakes, even. And there just aren’t here.
Still, it’s a movie that I recommend. When it works, it really, really works and the first two-thirds can stand up there on the shelf proudly next to just about anything Tarantino’s done. And if he loses focus near the end in a way he typically doesn’t (even in The Hateful Eight, he gets things back under control in time for the climax, like the magician he is), well, it’s still deeply personal. He doesn’t lose it by going generic, anyway; he fails as only he would. It’s a movie that showcases Tarantino at his most precisely brilliant and at his most sloppily self-indulgent; in the final estimation, both of those things are worth exploring. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – problematic final third detracts from the brilliant first two-thirds, but not in a crippling way; features Tarantino at his most cinematically masterful & at his sloppiest and self-indulgent. 3 1/2 stars.