Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

directed by Quentin Tarantino

Salvatore Pane

I never liked Tarantino. I tried, but I was in fourth grade when the R-rated Pulp Fiction hit theatres, and I only even heard about it because one of my then-favorite TV shows—Margaret Cho’s criminally underrated All-American Girl—parodied it in an episode entitled “Pulp Sitcom.” Like most folks my age, I was introduced to Tarantino’s oeuvre in college. Kill Bill: Volume 1 came out during my first semester, and the magic of that film was simply watching something transgressive alongside the kind of artsy outcasts I’d longed for in working-class Scranton. A friend bought me Reservoir Dogs that same year, and we watched it in his dorm room, wowed by the blood and lightning-quick dialogue. Months passed, and I settled on what has long been my general opinion of Tarantino’s work: in the words of Alabama from True Romance, “You’re so cool,” but there was little under the surface in his films for me. What was Pulp Fiction really about when you stripped away the posturing and faux-hip conversations? What did it ask you to feel? Nothing, I’d tell my stunned and annoyed classmates.

As an adult, I pushed this further—Tarantino is just ‘70s Scorsese with the emotional complexity stripped out. That maybe reveals more about me than Tarantino, but it’s easy to make that argument once you know that Tarantino admitted Reservoir Dogs was very much inspired by Scorsese’s 1973 Mean Streets—Harvey Keitel starred in both. Across all his films, Tarantino constantly borrows from Scorsese while simultaneously purging his attempts at human connection and earned sentiment—even the famous scene from Pulp Fiction when John Travolta plunges a needle into Uma Thurman’s heart is lifted beat-for-beat from Scorsese’s deeply affecting 1978 documentary American Boy.

Like Tarantino, I too adore Mean Streets. While Scorsese’s earlier Keitel vehicle—1967’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door—was his first significant attempt at rendering the Italian-American experience on the big screen, Mean Streets goes deeper, framing the exploits of Keitel and De Niro against a violent backdrop like the one Scorsese witnessed during his own dangerous youth. Mean Streets possesses that elusive authenticity that rings true for Italian-Americans like myself, but there’s an emotional undercurrent that’s missing in Tarantino’s homage in Reservoir Dogs. Scorsese’s film grounds the violence and hip musical choices with the affecting friendship of Keitel and De Niro, not to mention the protagonist’s knowledge that the best thing for him would be to simply leave his neighborhood and never look back. That particular concern rises in so much of Scorsese’s work. Do I stay within the rigid confines of my community, or should I break away toward freedom—we see this in everything from Goodfellas to Age of Innocence to Gangs of New York.

When asked about Mean Streets, Scorsese admits it too is an homage to a beloved film from his own youth, in this case Federico Fellini’s incredible I Vitelloni from 1953. Released well before Fellini’s most famous masterpieces—La Dolce Vita and 8½—the autobiographical I Vitelloni tells the story of five Italians who long for the world outside their hometown but can’t bring themselves to leave. That must have spoken powerfully to Scorsese, growing up in Queens, immersed so deeply in street culture that he almost joined the priesthood just to escape. Mean Streets, then, is I Vitelloni pushed through the meat grinder of ‘70s New York. It adds guns and blood but maintains the emotional core that makes I Vitelloni such a striking picture 70 years removed from its release. But Reservoir Dogs then is a copy of a copy, and unlike Mean Streets, there’s no emotional foundation, the youthful trauma and concerns of Fellini and Scorsese completely jettisoned.

As a result, Reservoir Dogs feels like Tarantino at his most immature and indulgent. He pays homage to his Italian elders but purges the work of the emotional depth that provided those earlier films their power. But finally, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino has produced a film that’s actually about something deeper. Finally he’s made a film that honors Italian films of old without sacrificing the qualities that make them singular.

At last, Tarantino is asking you to feel something. 

*

My family doesn’t speak anymore. There wasn’t some climatic explosion. It felt more like crossing a series of tiny fault lines, one after another, year after year, rivalries and constantly shifting alliances built around incidents that occurred decades before my birth, probably stemming back from when my family first traded Italy for America, leaving disparate places like Naples, Sicily, Torino, Calabria, already entrenched in centuries-old disagreements. I GChat with my parents once a week and see them at least a few times each year, but they’re my last connection between that northeastern Italian family I grew up with and my adult life thousands of miles away in frozen Minnesota. This is my fault as much as anyone else’s, and even now I feel deeply responsible and could just pick up the phone and call my aunt or uncle or anyone else. But my fear, what keeps me from typing a simple hello and pressing send, is that no one will reply, that finally I’ll have confirmation that I’ve been permanently and irrevocably forgotten.

It’s been almost five years since I’ve seen anyone in my family other than my parents, and, in that time, I’ve become obsessed with Italian culture. In my twenties, I downplayed my name—Salvatore Pane, or “savior bread” in Italian—and any connection between myself and the obvious Italian stereotypes so prevalent in movies and TV. I avoided Scorsese. I ignored The Godfather. I even steered clear of Italian restaurants. But that all ended after the slow disappearance of my family. I read and reread Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking and rolled gnocchi from scratch, spent hours standing over pots of red sauce, broth, risotto. I read Elena Ferrante, Italo Calvino, Domenico Starnone, Primo Levi. I binged The Sopranos and Sergio Leone and nearly every single one of Scorsese’s films, none more so than Goodfellas, which for a whole summer I watched twice a week, sometimes back-to-back, memorizing every shot, every line of dialogue. My wife and friends asked why, why, why, what was this sudden fascination with De Niro and Liotta and clam sauce and Dante, and I wouldn’t say even though I understood it so clearly. Each new connection to my homeland briefly filled the hole left behind by my missing people. And I constantly needed more, more, more.

When my job asked for candidates to run a study abroad program in Rome, I immediately applied and leaned heavily on the fact that I was Italian, that I understood Italian art and culture as well as any fourth-generation Italian boy could, that I already had a pathetic grasp of the language through my daily fumblings with DuoLingo. They hired me, and I spent the run-up researching my family on Ancestry.com, painstakingly narrowing down which villages they came from, which ports they left from. I flew to Italy and rode trains up and down the peninsula retracing their steps, but I never felt much of anything in terms of a deeper connection to my family. I was bowled over by the pizza in Naples, floored by the National Cinema Museum in Torino, stunned by the calm and clear blue waters of Calabria, but never once did I come to some new and compelling understanding about my family. Instead, I retreated into media like always, spending more time reading Cognetti, Di Pietrantonio, Jhumpa Lahiri’s astounding anthology of Italian short fiction. I paid to see Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood twice before leaving for Italy, and then I dragged my wife to see it in Italian during a weekend getaway to Genoa. Like Goodfellas, there was some half-buried quality in Tarantino’s latest that kept me coming back again and again. Only this time, it wasn’t the presence of Italians onscreen that reminded me so fiercely of the hometown I’d surrendered. This time it was the presence lurking behind the camera, the half-Italian Tarantino conjuring up art about loss and regret that eventually sent its protagonist to Italy in search of a midlife reinvention. It called out to me, and I wandered the streets of Orvieto, Subiaco, and Reggio Calabria with the film’s soundtrack and images swimming in my brain.

Near the end of my stay in the homeland, I co-led a group of students to Naples, where my grandmother’s people lived for generations. The thirty of us squeezed through the increasingly narrow streets of the city center, and I thought of my grandmother, my great-grandmother, as we came across street vendors selling cheap braided bracelets. If you’ve ever been to Italy, you’ve seen these persistent men, how they will follow tourists and press their wares into your open hands, and each time I see one and say, “Non grazie,” I’m filled with a deep and humbling shame. This vendor looked about my age, my height, my complexion, my hair color. We might as well have been cousins, and the only obvious difference was how we dressed. I wore a sports coat and tie, and he had on a ratty windbreaker and jeans. He stopped in front of me and when I tried to sidestep past him, he blocked my path. “Hello!” he said in the telltale singsong of Italians learning English later in life. “Non grazie,” I said, eyes down, trying to move past him to catch up with my students. But before I could, we locked eyes, and it was the reunion I’d been anticipating for years and years and years. “You are arrogant,” he said slowly, very clearly. “You are arrogant.”

*

Although Tarantino borrows liberally from Scorsese, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood lifts its title directly from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time trilogy. Leone is most famous for his Man with No Name westerns starring Clint Eastwood, but it’s the Once Upon a Time trilogy released between 1968 and 1984 that most critics prefer. While the Eastwood films are slick, postmodern westerns without much emotional content, the Once Upon a Time films swim in the emotional undercurrents that Fellini and Scorsese explore in both I Vitelloni and Mean Streets—a career move we must remember as we consider Tarantino’s evolution in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Leone’s trilogy comprises two westerns and a Jewish gangster story, but what connects all three are the motivations of the protagonists. In the Eastwood films, we never get much of a backstory for the iconic Man with No Name. That’s part of the appeal. He’s the classic mysterious gunslinger, and side characters played by actors like Lee Van Cleef or Eli Wallach are the ones who enjoy satisfying character arcs rather than Eastwood. Leone flips that in the Once Upon a Time trilogy, where every protagonist is working to avenge the death of a young friend or family member. In Once Upon a Time in the West, the protagonist’s brother is murdered decades earlier by the film’s heavy. But in the later Once Upon a Time… the Revolution and Once Upon a Time in America, it’s the protagonists who are responsible for these deaths. In the latter, a young mobster accidentally gets his three beloved friends murdered while trying to save them from lifetime prison sentences. In the former, the backdrop is the Mexican Revolution, and our protagonist is an Irish freedom fighter played by a grizzled James Coburn. But the skirmishes that play out bear a striking resemblance to the battles waged in Italy between the anti-fascists and the Nazis at the end of World War II. Even Once Upon a Time… the Revolution’s antagonist, Antoine Saint-John, resembles a Nazi plucked straight out of the Indiana Jones playbook—he’d go on to play an evil German soldier just four years later in The Wind and the Lion. Strip away the historical backdrop and imagery that must have deeply affected Italian moviegoers just three decades removed from World War II, and you’re left with the story of Coburn, who the audience learns personally pulled the trigger on his best friend in Ireland. The protagonist carries this wound with him to the very end, when he sends a Mexican revolutionary who turned on his own comrades to a fiery grave.

Now consider Sergio Leone, only fourteen years old when the Nazis occupied Italy. Despite the horses and sand-swept gunslingers, Leone has always maintained that his films are deeply personal and that’s part of what gives them their power. Although he hasn’t elaborated on what exactly that means, it’s not hard to draw conclusions when his final three films all center on protagonists haunted in adulthood by the loss of friends or family. That Once Upon a Time… the Revolution draws so heavily on imagery from the German occupation of Italy only makes this through line clearer. Like Scorsese in Mean Streets and Fellini in I Vitelloni, Leone has put his youthful trauma onscreen. Beneath Leone’s top coat of violence and postmodern playfulness are stories of wounded adults who never truly find what they’re seeking—forgiveness from the missing. And it’s this painful and almost meditative yearning that Tarantino has extracted and capitalized on in his latest film.

The first thing that struck me about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was that even though it goes to painstaking lengths to create a historically accurate 1969, very little in the film feels historically accurate. Instead, it conjures up a specific sensibility—not what ‘69 was actually like in LA, nor what that time and place has come to symbolize for those of us born afterward. No, the LA of Once Upon a Time feels like the fairy tale of a child from the ‘60s. Green Hornet. Lancer. Brad Pitt—a true boy and his dog—lives behind a drive-in movie theatre in a trailer filled with pulpy comics and action figures. For dinner, he eats Kraft macaroni and cheese. This is the iconography of a certain kind of ‘60s childhood, and the entire film is bathed in this golden sheen of nostalgia. The adult characters of Once Upon a Time again and again act like children, and it’s no coincidence that the wisest character in the film is played by who else but an eight-year-old TV actor on a cowboy show aimed at least partially at kids. Even the soundtrack underscores this half-remembered childhood quality. Instead of opting for the musical shorthand films have used for decades to signal that we as viewers have landed ourselves in the chaotic ‘60s—“Fortunate Son,” “Sunshine of Your Love,” and “The End” immediately come to mind—Tarantino layers his film with quasi-hits that have long been forgotten by the mainstream. When Vanilla Fudge’s “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” hit during the climax, I kept thinking I recognized this song, but not this particular version—it’s actually a cover of a significantly more famous Supremes number from 1966. Like everything else in the film, the Vanilla Fudge track feels like a memory, but it isn’t.

If we remember that Tarantino was nine years old and living in LA in 1969, then it’s easy to make the reductive leap that Once Upon a Time is simply a love letter to his childhood, similar to films like Stand By Me, Dazed and Confused, or Mid90s. But Tarantino doesn’t populate his childhood reminiscence with children. Our protagonists here are two middle-aged Hollywood vets fretting about their dwindling careers and relevancy. And yet, Tarantino has cast Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt—two of the biggest stars on the planet—to play these has-beens while surrounding them with characters who are much bigger stars in the world of the film but portrayed by actors who never got their due in real life—Luke Perry, Dakota Fanning, Timothy Olyphant, Emile Hirsch, James Marsden, Scoot McNairy, the list goes on. The alternate history that Tarantino plays up in Vanilla Fudge’s “Keep Me Hangin’ On” carries through even in the casting. But to what end? Why send middle-aged avatars back into a film about your childhood? Why use casting and the soundtrack to prime the audience for the ending’s already infamous reversal?

In the end, Tarantino—just like in Inglorious Basterds a decade earlier—alters history for the better. During a first viewing, the film is charged with menace. We’ve seen the trailers. We know the history. We understand the film must end with the Manson Family brutally slaying the pregnant Sharon Tate. The audience is almost made complicit when, moments before the Mansons pull up to Cielo Drive, a TV host tells the audience, “And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for.” As for the Mansons themselves, Tarantino has cast a number of famous Hollywood offspring. Here’s Maya Hawke, daughter of Ethan Hawke and Tarantino’s one-time muse Uma Thurman. Here’s Harley Quinn Smith, daughter of fellow enfant terrible of ‘90s cinema, Kevin Smith. Here’s Margaret Qualley, daughter of Andie MacDowell. And aside from the briefly shown Manson himself, the family seems to be led by Lena Dunham, face of a new Hollywood that never truly came to pass. That the middle-aged anti-heroes of Tarantino’s film are opposed by a new generation of Hollywood kids shouldn’t be swept under the rug. Here we most clearly see Tarantino wrestling with the end of his career and inevitable fade into irrelevance. That he stages this familiar middle-aged drama in a story saturated by his own Angeleno childhood only makes it all the more interesting.

The film loosely follows historical events until DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton leaves his mansion to yell at the Mansons in their idling jalopy a mere hundred yards from the Tate-Polanski residence. This is the moment when the timeline diverges, when everything from this point onward is reversed. The Mansons quickly shift tactics, choosing to target Dalton instead, and one of the would-be murderers makes the case that everyone who grew up on TV also grew up on murder and they therefore have a moral imperative to “kill the people who taught us to kill.” On the surface, this means Rick Dalton, star of Bounty Law, the long-running cowboy show of the 1950s, similar to Clint Eastwood’s Rawhide. But on the meta-level, this criticism could just as easily be lobbed at Tarantino himself. How many times have we heard this argument against his work, stretching all the way back to True Romance and Reservoir Dogs, that his movies are too violent for a civilized society? In this light, Tarantino is Rick Dalton. Tarantino is Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth. He is the manifestation of the violent fantasy Hollywood has always promised. And the Manson Family—portrayed by the sons and daughters of Hollywood’s biggest names—is the inevitable next generation that will turn Tarantino, Dalton, and Booth into dust.

And yet Booth and Dalton defend themselves and brutally kill all three attackers, unwittingly saving Sharon Tate in the process. But if everything we’re seeing is actually the truth reversed, then it’s not the young Mansons who should be burned alive in Rick Dalton’s swimming pool, it’s Dalton/Tarantino himself. The climax of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a textbook middle-aged fantasy where two fifty-somethings somehow defeat youth and are finally granted acceptance and acclaim. Earlier in the film, Dalton claims he’s a pool party away from starring in the next Polanski film, and, in the end, he’s finally invited inside his famous neighbor’s home. This last scene is a direct reversal of the famous conclusion to 1956’s The Searchers, a touchstone for Sergio Leone as well. In that western, John Wayne’s character has at last returned the damsel home, but he himself is not permitted to enter the homestead. He remains outside, forever cast out, and returns to the wilderness that has scarred him. Tarantino’s version is the opposite. Dalton has unwittingly saved Tate and is granted entry at last to the world of dreams, the world of high Hollywood. But again, this is the inverse of reality. Dalton/Tarantino did not, could not rescue Tate. The missing are not coming home. The buoyant ending is upon reflection bittersweet—in reality, no one got out alive.

In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino has, like Leone and Scorsese and yes, even Fellini, taken the trauma of his youth and reconfigured it for the screen. But because we’re discussing Tarantino—perennial trickster and lover of all things postmodern—that trauma isn’t his own. It’s the national trauma of the Sharon Tate murders, a schism that divided new Hollywood from old, that altered the Los Angeles of Tarantino’s youth forever and ever. Whether the slaying of Sharon Tate—like the long-lost friends of Leone’s epics standing in for those slaughtered during the Nazi occupation of Italy—is meant to represent something specific from Tarantino’s childhood remains unclear. But even in this regurgitation of trauma, Tarantino pushes things further. He inserts middle-aged doppelgängers into his story of childhood loss, and, when they eventually persevere against youth and prevent a tragedy, we in the audience realize everything we’re seeing is false. Before it left theaters forever, I watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in a rundown theater in the back alleys of Genoa, land of my people, where they lived and loved and bled and died. Rewatching the film for a third time, I was struck by the obvious fact that no matter what happens in the neon images onscreen, the real Sharon Tate is never coming back. Like all our ghosts, like Leone’s and Scorsese’s and Fellini’s, like mine and yours, she will remain forever beyond our reach. There is no going back, and there is no undoing what has already been done. That reunion we’re all looking for in one form or another will never, ever occur.

Salvatore Pane is the author of three books. His shorter work has been featured in Indiana Review, American Short Fiction, Hobart, and many other venues. He teaches creative writing at the University of St. Thomas and can be reached at www.salvatore-pane.com.