As soon as my screening ended, the clean-up crew (which consisted of one besuited-and-bespectacled teenager) asked what we thought of the head. “What did you think of the part with the head? Most seniors get pretty upset at that part.” I was with my dad, you see, and he is no spruce goose.
I had kept pretty mum on reading spoilers but I knew there was critical talk of the ending you know, in that way I’ve mentioned before where critics get you all excited and say things like “The ending is shocking! It will divide audiences! It’s misogynistic!” And I will say that things definitely DO NOT work out for the lackeys sent by Charles Manson to kill Sharon Tate and end up deciding to kill her next door neighbor instead, DiCaprio’s beleaguered actor and drunk Rick Dalton. Instead, they find Brad Pitt’s stuntman and BFF Cliff Booth, and he smashes one of their faces, over and over again (like the gas station murder in the new Halloween) on every surface that is an arm’s reach away just, wailing on it! And yes, she is a female character. It’s particularly jarring too since there is barely any violence in the rest of the picture, but granted there was only 15-minutes left at that point. If someone 65-or-older goes to this movie and walks out after two-and-a-half hours because there is one scene of gratuitous violence, and it is in the climax of the film, I would feel a little disappointed for them, that they weren’t there to be disappointed with the rest of us at the screening when the movie REALLY ended.
Yes in expected, anachronistic Tarantino style, the evening of the real-life Tate murder becomes a fanciful guardian angel moment for Booth, who unknowingly elevates Dalton into an entertainment stratosphere that he could have only dreamed to achieve. That is, if it all turned out that way. QT doesn’t spell things out for the audience: he expects you to know going in about the history of the Manson Murders, or at least catch on quickly enough. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened to Polanski in QT’s alternate universe: would he have still derailed his career the way he did AFTER Tate’s death in our time? I mean, Hitler’s dead; Manson’s plans are shot; how could these easter eggs affect the outcome of QT’s tenth movie, presumptuously his last? Will Chris Pine’s Kirk be handed down Bruce Willis’ great-grandfather’s watch that Christopher Walken carried around up his ass?
Although these were very interesting hypothetical questions, the bottom line is that they had very little to do, ultimately, with where QT’s Hollywood period-piece/love-letter/fantasy story ends up. It seems most cinephilistic directors reach a point where they want to make a movie about movies (Altman’s The Player; Scorsese’s Hugo; most of Kiarostami’s work; etc) and this is Tarantino’s take. It’s a couple of days in the lives of these two bozos while they cruise the Hollywood hills of the late-60s, posturing and looking like they’re having as good a time on-screen as we do watching them off-screen. They are very charismatic, but very one-dimensional. Dalton is conflicted about the choices he’s made that led him to taking the “heavy” roles, but we don’t really know enough about him in order to empathize with him. And Booth is just along for the ride, getting paid to be an assistant but sticking around to be a friend, and he stays unwaveringly loyal to Dalton and a reckless nutcase the whole film. Like I said, this only takes place over a few days, so there just isn’t enough actual time going by to develop them enough to satisfy me that they weren’t desultory, despite the very-QT three-hour run time of the film.
And in the end, everything works out for everyone, in the usual ironic brew-ha-ha kind of way that we are used to from QT. Things just seem slighter here because of all the build-up and tension he employs. Make no mistake, this is Tarantino’s most aesthetically-interesting picture yet, with choices in-front and behind the camera that show his maturity and skill-building since Reservoir Dogs (the coffee cup Dalton discards on-set; Booth exiting a parking lot through a one-way road; the cigarette ad during the end credits; and all the sexy feet you can handle!). And for the pundits there are plenty of classic QT scenes that drown in his dialogue and go on FOREVER while time stands still in the theater (Dalton forgetting his lines during a scene on-set is a great scene that is long; Booth’s odyssey to the Manson Ranch to get laid is just long).
And the entire movie we are waiting for that payoff: that thing that puts it all together. Between the implied tension of the scene at the Manson Ranch and the strange acting choices for Tate from Margot Robbie that almost sanctify her, there is a huge amount of foreshadowing and foreboding running undercurrent to not be aware that it’s all building up to something. And I just didn’t feel the ending was good enough, perhaps not earned well enough, for what came before it. None of what happened really seemed to matter, and the story was not fleshed out enough to warrant QT’s usual over-bloated approach. We can continue to respect Tarantino and appreciate his choices and look forward to his next movie, without anticipating nay expecting him to deliver every time. I don’t need to see it again but it was funny and I liked a solid 70% of it.
//jf 8.1.19
theory of a daskeman 