Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood opens with consecutive images of its two villains. Neither are Charles Manson, despite what the marketing claimed. The first is wanted poster of a Wild West outlaw. The second, in a whip zoom back, is Jake Cahill, Wild West lawman extraordinaire, a nasty renegade backed by Manifest Destiny who knowingly nods at the camera and who dishes out justice with an unforgiving grimace and little interest in the formalities of legality or the niceties of compassion. A marker of a time in the American imagination when retribution required little justification and morality was Manichean and measurable rather than mysterious and muddy, it is no wonder, we’re soon told, that Rick Dalton, the actor who once played Cahill in the early ‘60s TV boon as an unbending arbiter of goodness, has been reduced to momentary turns as a weekly walk-on heavy on budget Westerns and other TV shows dedicated to newer, younger, more ambiguous stars worthy of the murky waters of the late 1960s. The kind of justice he represents, a mixture of unbridled individualism and cosmic force, casts a dubious presence in a world where pretensions of moral purity backed by national predestination are increasingly threatened by recalcitrant forces of social unrest laying bare previously concealed realities and shrouded conflicts.

Two villains I wrote, but although Dalton is now reduced to playing villains on television, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood interrogates the possibility of giving him the fantasy of hero-dom he so desperately craves. When we cut back to a scene from Bounty Law, the show on which Dalton made his career playing Cahill, it’s to the shadow of a man, who falls dead into the frame, before Cahill covers him in the shot with his own image on a bounty poster. The shadow becomes flesh becomes print, illusion into reality into the legend. By the end of Once Upon a Time, Tarantino’s film will have helped Dalton fill out his shadow by giving him the chance of becoming a real-life Cahill, to embody a cowboy in the flesh. But the cost for turning dream into reality is a reminder that reality is a game of smoke and mirrors. Whatever else it is, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is a love letter to a time that, the film acknowledges, never really existed on the terms Tarantino wanted it to. Tarantino’s most recent film is a critical paean, and a wistful eulogy, for a hope that the film seems to recognize, but cannot fully admit, is a delusion. Which is to say: in aspiring to salvage the late 1960s, Tarantino also realizes he can only really be a pallbearer at its funeral.

When we cut from the show to Rick Dalton’s real world for the first time, it’s to a smash-cut of an amorphous, abstract, grotesque shape that eventually reveals itself as a drawing of himself that Dalton has had anointed in his own driveway, a far cry from a wanted poster but a droll reminder that this man used to be desired. It also suggests his desire for necromancy, or at least taxidermy if that’s all he can get. This is an image of his past that Dalton wants, and that Tarantino allows, to figuratively swallow him up every time he returns home and pulls back into his driveway. This is a man reckoning with something that the camera can’t lie about: the demise of the personal protection of your own illusion, the arrival of reality in the form of career mortality. When the Manson family is first shown, they not only traipse across the screen but cut in front of an ad for a fictional cowboy film, invading Hollywood’s grand deception of a valiant America like a Native American war-party, a frame the movie will make quite a bite more literal by its end. In this moment, Dalton and his driver/only friend Cliff Booth stop for them, a somewhat obvious metaphor for the passage of time and their own impotence in the face of changing social conceptions that Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood tries to abate but can only mobilize the forces of cinema to mystify and obfuscate. Tarantino’s film, finally, is the story of reality and fantasy coming together, of two old Hollywood cowboys pursuing survival through role-playing and Tarantino’s willingness to mobilize the power of cinematic mirage in their favor, for the time being. This film is an act of imagination and duplicity arrayed against the dim fade of reality.

It is, then, when all is said and done, unsurprisingly, but not unsophisticatedly, A Tarantino film, and thus a love letter to fabrication, to an identity carved out between the limits of belief and the horizon of possibility. Tarantino’s world-view is a dense and dizzying collage of references and nods, an open canvas for his own imagination that is also a mental prison. More than his other films, Hollywood is also the story of people who need this prison to live with themselves, who understand it as the funhouse through which they can achieve self-actualization. Here, Tarantino’s two arbiters of self-fulfilling fabrication are Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Dalton is the aging star. Cliff is his stunt double and, seemingly, his life companion, a carbon-copy of the man who simultaneously embodies Dalton’s narcissistic tendencies and secretly hides his own more self-amused, nasty streak and cheerful, or cheerless, distance from the realities of show business. Largely, Hollywood is a mood-scape as the two men go about the business of finding themselves, in Rick’s case, and simply existing, in Cliff’s, with Tarantino deliriously, if elliptically, granting them a gentle passage into the Hollywood dreamscape of the past.

If Once Upon a Time is heavy with the passing of an era, it also feels delightfully unalloyed to any particular narrative, even any particular theme. Its meaning accretes gradually and with an uncommon grace for this most impish of filmmakers. Tarantino’s films are so wound-up in their own mythologies that they almost always risk being wound-down by them. Yet Once Upon a Time returns to the leisurely, laconic territory sketched by Jackie Brown and loosens it further. Its greatest pleasures are not in doing but seeing, following figures whose most singular joy is watching themselves on the screen, existing within the turbulent possibility of pure cinematic weightlessness, a kind of self-derangement that reflects the pleasure of an odd kind of relationship with images of oneself, of being nonsingular and multiple, of resonating with many versions of one self on camera. That is, of course, a kind of vicious egotism, but Tarantino wonders if it isn’t also a peculiar form of freedom while it lasts and when the world lets you down.

Not that any of this is uncomplicated. Soon enough, Dalton is preparing for his lines over a recording of himself doing all the other parts in a particular episode, metaphorically indulging in a prismatic sense of self even as he is literally talking to only himself, a fun-house that is also an echo chamber. Tarantino seems dimly aware that his salvage act can only be a thorny and incomplete one shot through with its own limits. Whether his film is meant to be ironized, to self-consciously reflect back on its creators own moral limits and insecurities, depends on one’s willingness to indulge Tarantino’s pop post-modernism as a subversion or a mere reification of these dominant scripts. Once Upon a Time is an embodiment of cinema’s power to self-actualize, but it may also be a self-aware meditation on its power to self-delude, just as Tarantino inserts Dalton into Steve McQueen’s part in The Great Escape while framing it more as a fabrication of Dalton’s own imagination. How else to countenance a film that revels in Booth beating up Bruce Lee, and later gives us a scene of another character enjoying a scene in a film where she beats up an Asian woman, remembering her training by Bruce Lee. Is this Tarantino just being a provocateur? 

What about when they doll Dalton up in what they call either hippie or Hell’s Angels and “1869 meets 1969” but they admit is really just a dyed George Armstrong Custer jacket? Here is Dalton playing a villain in a show while wearing the outfit of a famous Native American killer hopped up on his own ego, who himself will soon “save the day” in a scene the film treats as an aborted Native American raid? What of the fact that Tarantino is implicitly revealing how the Native American killer now looks suspiciously like “modern” social types – hippies – who purport to reject the status quo and America’s racial violence only to exoticize Native Americans? How can this be anything other than a suggestion that the future Dalton hopes to avoid is really just a refolding of the American past that he seems to endear himself to and enact on screen? At least in this respect, Hollywood emerges as a particularly textured exploration of a particularly American form of identity, one in which you fashion yourself through a denial of, rather than reckoning with, the past that only ends up reinscribing that past. But this is Tarantino, so he twists and torques things to provide a perspective amenable to a wide variety of readings, a veritable Rorschach of American identity that both functions for, and ideally troubles, any particular interpretation without exactly committing to any of them. With a densely metatextual underbelly and a playful-melancholic orientation, Once Upon a Time recognizes history not as a puzzle to be resolved or a compendium of facts to be recovered and ordered but as a grain to continually consider, and which continually scrapes against us.

But what truly saves the film’s egotism, much as Shosanna saved cinema from the retributive, masculine machinations of the Hollywood-style American soldiers in Inglourious Basterds by fashioning a plan to kill the Nazis without the brutal American-male glee, is the presence of Dalton’s new neighbor Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), an ingénue who seems largely unaware of the subterfuge around her, and who inhabits the gap between illusion and reality as a home you can relax in rather than a hell you have to keep pretending is heaven. She alone seems basically able to enjoy herself on screen without having to doom herself to that enjoyment.

It is thus that the most beautiful moment in this film and Basterds alike involves a younger woman observing herself, enraptured in what her image on a screen can do, while the men around her engage in the fantasy that the historian Richard Slotkin once called American “regeneration through violence,” the need to garrison one’s body and revivify one’s soul on the frontier – either Los Angeles or Germany, for Tarantino  – by taking joy in the murder of those that threaten to reveal that their violence will expose your own.  Just as the racial violence of Nazi Germany drew from American idioms of racialized eugenics and was tangled in the imperial violence of all the Western powers, the Manson Family’s own murders expose inextricable layers of social violence – the Vietnam War, most of all – and the blinkered responses many Americans take toward them. What, the film asks, really separates the Manson Family, who play-acted as cowboys and lived on an abandoned ranch that bred Hollywood horses and once served as a movie set, from Dalton and Cahill, who seem all too willing to define their identity through an act of sudden violence when the opportunity strikes?

Yet Tarantino resists himself, is at war with himself, fighting to tame the ungovernable forces his film acknowledges but is afraid of. Near the end of the film, Tate will, of course, become the (intended, but not completed, in this film) target of Charles Manson, which leads to a series of events in which the assailants target Dalton’s house. In what the film figures as a parody of an Indian raid, the two ironic heroes of the film save the day by weaponizing their Hollywood talents to preserve the status quo. The fraudulent cowboys self-actualize through adopting the mantle of modern-day frontier justice, pacifying the Manson Family as Native-Americans (and as zombies, traditionally coded as racial others, and like Native Americans seen as a collective “horde” threatening the cult of individuality). They’re archetypal cowboys past their prime, old Hollywood past its prime, confronting fugitive newness. But Tarantino wants to turn an end into an occasion for endlessness. In Inglourious Basterds, cinema becomes, literally, the means by which the Nazis are decimated even as other forms of cinema (WWII American films to this day) emerge as hopelessly complicit in the violence they seemingly resist. In Once Upon a Time, when Dalton mobilizes a flamethrower from one of his past World War II films to murder one of the Manson gang, he dons the very weapon of Tarantino’s own past cinema to salvage himself as cinema. Whatever else Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is, it is also, finally, an ego-trip, a celebration of the very post-modern classicism that Tarantino made his career on. It is, finally, a kind of lullaby for himself, a nightmare about America that he admits but wishes to make a dream.

Score: 7.5/10 (but just read the review, the score is irrelevant)