Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

The Glow of the Setting Sun

Los Angeles has a particular late-afternoon light that flatters everything in its path. It softens edges, turns the city golden, and lets you believe for a minute that the place is gentler than it really is. Quentin Tarantino’s *Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood* lives inside that light. I went in expecting the usual Tarantino mischief and bloodletting. What I got was something looser and sadder: a hangout movie about people sensing that their world is already starting to disappear.

Tarantino usually likes to drive hard and fast, but here he lets the engine idle. The setting is 1969, right when the old studio-era version of Hollywood was giving way to something hairier and less polished. That shift is everywhere in the film. He isn't just rebuilding old marquees and radio chatter from memory; he's preserving a whole ecosystem on the brink of obsolescence. Peter Bradshaw at *The Guardian* wasn't wrong to marvel at the "crazy bravura" of it all. Still, for such a sprawling movie, it often feels surprisingly intimate.



Leonardo DiCaprio gets a lot out of that intimacy as Rick Dalton. After years of playing men who dominate a room, he lets Rick physically deflate. The man is a former TV Western star who can feel his shelf life ticking down. In the *Lancer* scene where Rick blows his lines and melts down in his trailer, the comedy comes easily, but so does the fear. He shouts at himself, throws a fit, threatens to kill himself if he blows another take, and DiCaprio makes the panic under all that bluster feel painfully real. Rick knows the one thing he's built his life around may no longer be enough.

Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt, moves through the movie in the opposite register. Pitt uses his natural ease so well here that it almost looks effortless. Cliff drifts. He doesn't seem burdened by the future because he never looks that attached to the present. Tarantino wisely leaves the question of whether he killed his wife hanging in the air, which gives all that relaxed charm a permanent shadow.



The stretch at Spahn Ranch is where the movie's sweetness curdles. Cliff picks up a hitchhiker, wanders onto the old movie set now occupied by the Manson family, and Tarantino shoots the whole thing like daytime horror. Nothing overtly explodes for a while, which makes it worse. Every stare, every floorboard creak, every false note in the conversation tightens the mood. The people onscreen don't know what August 1969 will bring. We do. That gap keeps the dread humming the whole time.

Sharon Tate is the movie's gentlest presence. Margot Robbie doesn't have much dialogue, and I know that bothered some people, but I think the performance works precisely because it refuses to turn Tate into a martyr before her time. She feels open, buoyant, alive. The scene where she slips into a theater to watch herself in *The Wrecking Crew* and lights up at the audience response is so simple it almost catches you off guard.



I'm still a little torn on the ending, though maybe that's the point. Tarantino rewrites history again, shielding the innocent and unloading grotesque, cartoonishly violent punishment on the people who deserve none of our sympathy. You could call it a cheap move. He's used revisionist fantasy before. But here it plays less like victory than like a filmmaker trying, just this once, to force mercy into a story that never had any. When the noise dies down and Rick is finally invited through the gates of the Polanski house, the title clicks into place. It's a fairy tale, yes, but a wistful one, told by someone who wanted to give the good people one last impossible break.