Rating: D+
Dir: Quentin Tarantino
Star: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch
Not my idea to watch: one of Chris’s picks. Between this and Wicked, I have accumulated so many Good Husband Points this weekend. Curiously, both films have the same running-time of two hours and forty-one minutes. But I think Wicked will have some way to go, to be more meandering, self-indulgent and up its own arse than QT’s latest. It is a glorious recreation of late sixties Hollywood, no question. The production designer and their team did an awesome job. I was moderately amused by the finale. That’s the positives. But, jeez. If Tarantino was an annoying filmmaker before, he seems to have got worse with age, his windbaggery here taking a visual turn.
Previous Tarantino films have tended to excessive dialogue, characters flapping their gums about fast-food, comics or tipping. It’s less often the case here. Instead you get long scenes where nothing of relevance or interest happens. WATCH Sharon Tate (Robbie) go to the cinema! GASP at her… looking at the screen! SEE the actress clumsily inserted into old footage! You do know she’s married, Quentin: she’s not going to bang you. Something for the ladies? DROOL over stuntman Cliff Booth (Pitt), fixing a television aerial with his shirt off! It’s full of mind-numbing padding, unnecessary in a film this long. The actual plot involves aging actor Rick Dalton (DiCaprio), struggling to come to terms with a declining career. But it’s mostly an excuse to hear QT’s sixties Spotify playlist on random.
Just as in Inglourious Basterds, he faffs around with history. In this one, the Manson Family don’t get to kill Tate and her pals, eventually deciding to go after Booth instead, who’s in the house next door. It does not end well for them, with what’s likely the first appearance of Chekhov’s Flamethrower. But to get to this good stuff, you have to sit through a great deal of questionable history (Bruce Lee being an asshole, top), characters whose role is obscure (Charles Manson shows up, but is never identified or does anything), and scenes of Cliff driving around Los Angeles (So. Many. Scenes…). The ultimate “film‐maker’s film-maker”, making a film about film-making, is such a narcissistic concept, I wished my head would explode.
Perhaps if you were an active participant in the time depicted, it might have more resonance? I know Quentin wasn’t: he was aged five when the bulk of the film occurs. So what we have here is a fantasy view of the era – admittedly one copped to by the title. It offers a safe space in which murdering your wife is a minor career hurdle, black people don’t exist, and the evil of the Manson Family is basically defeated by one man and his dog. I’m not sure what Tarantino is trying to say with any of the above. More importantly, he is incapable of saying it in a manner capable of holding my interest. The sooner Quentin fulfills his pledge to retire, the better.