“Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood” is entertaining but empty

By N.B. | CANNES

EVERY ONE of Quentin Tarantino’s films has been a love letter to pop culture in general and to cinema in particular, but none of those odes has been as explicit or as gushing as “Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood”. A two-and-three-quarter-hour tribute to Tinseltown, the film is a loosely bound anthology of vignettes extolling the charms of the dream factory as it was in 1969: the cars, the clothes, the on-set camaraderie. It’s a sleepy and ultimately happy comedy—too happy, perhaps, given that it stirs fact and fiction together, and features the Charles Manson cult and the murder of Sharon Tate. Mr Tarantino is so deeply in love with the movie business that he can’t peer at its dark side for long before returning to its sunlit swimming pools and studio backlots.

The film begins with a fun black-and-white clip of an actor and his stunt double being interviewed in the 1950s. The actor is Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), the earnest, buffoonish star of a hit TV series about a sharp-shooting bounty hunter in the Wild West. The stunt double is Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Rick’s easy-going best friend. When the audience sees the duo again, a decade has passed—and what a difference a decade makes. Rick has been reduced to humiliating cameo appearances on variety shows. Cliff, meanwhile, hasn’t had any stunt work for a while, but he sticks by Rick as his driver, handyman and drinking buddy.