“If we take him at his word that Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is indeed to be Quentin Tarantino’s penultimate picture, one could hardly find a fonder farewell to the industry he’s been rocking since the early 1990s. I find it the most emotional of the writer-director’s work, suffused with a twilight longing and affection unguarded by irony. Indeed, for those of us who came of age with Tarantino films, there’s perhaps an extra-texual level of poignancy to the movie’s middle-aged resignation. (The director himself got married and had a kid upon completing it, American cinema’s enfant terrible surrendering at last to the adult domesticity that he’d long held at bay, a similar fate perhaps not coincidentally looming at the end of the road for our washed-up TV cowboy Rick Dalton.)
“The alcoholic, has-been actor and his erstwhile, unemployable stuntman are relics in a town and a time that have passed them by. The streets are full of ‘goddamn hippies’ and their careers remanded to ‘Eye-talian Westerns,’ a longtime partnership soon to be scuttled by plans to sell the house and move to a condo in Toluca Lake. And then there’s Sharon, a beacon of goodness and light next door – one we all know too well is about to be snuffed out in the cruelest way imaginable.
“Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Bruce Lee, James Stacy, Roman Polanski, Steve McQueen, there aren’t many happy endings for any of the real-life figures depicted herein. The most moving moments for me are the film’s evening montages, whether it’s the sun going down to the sound of Jose Feliciano’s ‘California Dreamin’’ or the achingly lovely parade of neon signs clicking on at dusk while the Stones sing ‘Out of Time.’ All good things will soon come to an end, and probably sooner than you think. Yet this time it’s a surprisingly ridiculous, unexpectedly cathartic and ultimately melancholy finale. Because that’s what happens in the movies.” ~ Sean Burns
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