* * * * 1/2
Quentin Tarantino’s ninth movie is a superb time at the movies, a languid, fun, exquisitely crafted “movie movie” that is best appreciated in the context of the whole career of this quintessentially American auteur. It references, plays with and draws comparison to other films of his; it builds on narrative conceits and structures that he either created from whole cloth or has wielded more successfully than any other filmmaker; it reflects – deeply – on middle-age and late career. It truly is the ninth movie from a man who has said he only intends to make ten. Sure, if this is your first Tarantino, you’ll have a great time. But it needs to be your ninth for you to “get it.”
Brad Pitt is at his very, very best as an ageing – yet supremely physically capable – stuntman, who has transitioned to being the factotum to an ageing, and semi-alcoholic, TV star (Leonardo DiCaprio). They represent what they represent – including Tarantino – and they do it superbly. If Brad Pitt is run in the Best Supporting Actor category come Oscar time, he’ll win. (If both of them are run in Lead, they will certainly cancel each other out). Their camaraderie forms the spine of the film, which is set very, very deliberately in Hollywood in 1969.
The bright, shining star of the film, however, the objet d’art and fulcrum of the plot, is (real-life up and coming movie star) Sharon Tate, played exquisitely by Margot Robbie. Her tragic real-life murder by followers of Charles Manson’s “family” has become a seismic semiotic turning point across popular culture and academia – signifying America’s death of innocence, the end of the ‘60s, the end of personal safety, etc, etc – and Tarantino fully embraces her iconography and cultural importance while also taking the radical and incredibly humane step of treating her as a proper person, and specifically a good one, full of joy, generosity, talent and integrity. In one astonishingly well-conceived sequence, he shows Tate watching one of her movies with a general audience and joyfully appreciating their appreciation of her performance, not egotistically but artistically. She is there to make sure she got the beats right; she’s there as an artist entirely aware that she’s at the beginning of something great but that she has a lot to learn. If only, Tarantino is saying, she had been allowed to.