Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film is a slow-burn hangout picture that spends two hours and forty-two minutes wandering 1969 Los Angeles before it decides to do anything. That sounds like a complaint. It is not.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Rick Dalton and the Fading Western
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a former Western TV star now reduced to guest spots as a villain. His agent, Marvin Schwarz, pushes him toward spaghetti Westerns in Italy, which Rick considers beneath him. Dalton is fragile and insecure about his own obsolescence, and DiCaprio plays that insecurity as a physical thing — the stammer, the sweat, the trailer breakdown after he fumbles his lines on the set of Lancer.
Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth is the other half of that dynamic. Booth is relaxed about the same decline that terrifies Dalton. He lives in a trailer with his pit bull, Brandy, and can’t find stunt work because of a past altercation with Bruce Lee and rumors he killed his wife.
Margot Robbie and Sharon Tate
Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate as a person, not a victim. The best scene in the film is small: Tate slips into a theater to watch herself in The Wrecking Crew, delighted by the audience’s reaction. Dan Schindel of Hyperallergic noted that the moment humanizes her rather than reducing her to the tragedy that looms over the whole picture.
The Threat of the Tate Murders
The film never stops reminding you what is coming. Charles Manson arrives at the Polanski residence asking for Terry Melcher. Cliff drives a hitchhiker called Pussycat out to Spahn Ranch, where he forces a hippie named Clem to change a tire and nearly fights the ranch’s leader, Tex. The menace builds without ever tipping into the horror the audience expects.
A Revisionist Fairy Tale
Critic Raphael Abraham argues that Tarantino’s nostalgia reaches past character into history itself, turning the Manson murders into a kind of fairy tale. That is the film’s real project. It reimagines 1969 so Dalton can find symbolic redemption, and it gives Tate a fate the real one never had.
Luke Perry’s Last Role
The film is dedicated to Luke Perry, who plays Wayne Maunder and died on March 4, 2019, before release. It is his final screen credit. Tarantino also appears as the director of Dalton’s Red Apples cigarette commercial, and the extended theatrical cut from October 2019 added James Marsden as Burt Reynolds.
Key facts
– Runtime: 162 minutes
– Release: 2019
– Director/writer: Quentin Tarantino
– Cast: DiCaprio, Pitt, Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Julia Butters, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Mike Moh, Luke Perry
– Score: 8.4/10
What Actually Matters
The film’s weakness is its patience. Two hours of hangout before the payoff is a real ask, and the Sharon Tate storyline is thinner than the Dalton-Booth spine that carries the picture. But the payoff lands, and the performances hold the long middle together.
This is Tarantino’s first film without Bob and Harvey Weinstein as producers, made after he ended that partnership following the sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein. That context matters less than what is on screen.
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is a movie about obsolescence that refuses to accept it. Worth the runtime.
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