Rick gets a get-out-of-obscurity card from a well placed admirer but it's so radically different to his path that he considers is a kind of resignation. A later scene has him receive wisdom from an eight year old colleague who learns of his plight through fiction: he summarises the Western novel he's reading and realises it's about himself. His stunt double plays out a Western for real which takes him into the heart of darkness and violence. Margot Robbie watches rapt as her character takes pratfalls on screen, played by the real Sharon Tate as the people around her fill her ears with the joy of cinema and flashbacks to her martial arts training with someone playing Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee as a character has already had his arse handed to him by Cliff in a needlessly controversial scene in a backlot. This is a Quentin Tarantino film and all of this forms the same cosmos. But an indication of why I think this is the first Tarantino film I've cared much about since Jackie Brown is that as part of the Manson murder timeline we see Charlie once and very briefly. That's not a spoiler but saying more would be. My point is that, despite the sensory overload of imagery and the near three hour running time, this film feels tight and restrained in all the right places. That's not something I'd say of anything from Kill Bill to The Hateful 8.
Some authorial marks appear early (Rick's old tv show will be mentioned and you live through a few sequences of it that could easily have been referred to in dialogue, a character mentions seeing a film at home on 35 mm and we see the projector loaded and working) and made me shift in my seat. Has QT gone so far as to provide self-parody as part of his auteurism? These do settle down, though. Later iterations are meaningful as they do fill narrative gaps with massive style. Otherwise, we get some of his better traits. Process, as in Rick learning his lines with a reel to reel tape machine, Cliff driving smoothly through the streets or Roman Polanski as a character driving his hot MG like he's in a race. Cliff picks up a hitchhiker and its playful progress is undercut by a mounting dread. Sharon picks up a woman hitcher who could be a Manson girl but its friendly and fits with her Disney princess exploration of the streets and lanes. Rick might call for lines during a scene but he learns them and works on his performance. Cliff gets home to his trailer, behind a drive-in screen and beside an oil derrick, feeds his well-trained dog, makes up some instant mac and cheese, and lounges in front of the tv. If we didn't understand they were Manson's followers, the dumpster diving girls play at their tasks like teenagers, laughing and larking. Around all of this day to day the gentle sunlight of an old time reminds us that it's about to be bruised by crime, shattered by industrial cataclysm and drawn irrevocably away from its Beach Boys harmony pleasure. This is not the love letter to old genre cinema that Kill Bill was, there are real things happening on screen, I mean real emotionally and culturally and historically. There really is a purpose in what we are shown.
On that, the contested fight scene between Cliff and Bruce Lee does have resonance in later moments as we see him instruct others professionally. Does it misrepresent Lee as an arrogant windbag who could be beaten by a much older man? Maybe, but that's a charge for a documentary (I know how tired that is as a joke but I'm not joking). The scene has far more to do with the passing of batons and the hubris of an older hand not ready to give up his place. The man he doubles for is going through his own career comeuppance, it's just one that feels the effects of alcohol and personal perdition rather than fists and throws. This is at the thematic centre of the film and expresses it variously with blunt force and subtlety but does express it. The content that I had trouble with was the flashback to Cliff's past which features an incident left open. Personally, I think it's up to your ethics whether you indulge the wink from the film itself or assume the lack of definition is supported by the potential redemptive violence later. It's troubling either way.
Troubling in a warmer way is Tarantino's fluid presentation of film production. We've already seen him digitally replace Steve McQueen with Leonardo DiCaprio in a scene from The Great Escape and mock up a 60s style war movie for Rick Dalton (though it's far more stylish than it would have been if genuine). But in scenes of Rick performing in his bad guy role in the tv show we are given the kind of cheat that used to be standard in movies about movies from the days o' yore. As Rick plays the scene in the saloon it is presented as assembled from different takes with seamless audio right up to the point where he calls for his line. I wasn't counting setups but that isn't how it's done. A later scene involving a stand-off does the same. The most annoying case of this is in the 1980 film The Stunt Man where a fugitive turned film actor is put through a kind of performance rollercoaster made of hundreds of shots as though he's playing it and getting roughed up for real in one pass. In this film there is no apology for the conceit, we're meant to believe it and empathise with how rattled the actor is. It's done that way for the plot but it still feels contemptuous. When Tarantino does it here it's because he knows you know (and it speeds the plot point and it is more fun to watch); it's a point of celebration for the film's title with its cross of Disney and cynical studio industry.
This reminds me not so much of the retrograde art direction that helped make Tarantino famous, a kind of perennial cool mixed with nostalgia, as it does a more recent outing by another standalone figure in contemporary cinema, Sion Sonno. Sonno's Why Don't You Play in Hell is a kind of farewell to the cinema of film stock, attended projection, and plucky filmmakers. In a plot Tarantino would love, a gang of aspirant moviemakers inadvertently get caught up in a Yakuza war and solve it by making both sides finance a movie made which will feature both in the ascendant. There is a mass of Japanese cinema history on the screen but also an increasing sad smile at its passing. Tarantino celebrates what we now call (but no longer watch) appointment tv as well as the movies of money men with a chapter close both satisfying in its violence and heavy-hearted in its signature.
I was worried about the length of this movie as the past month's film festival had given me lower back pain (retro cinema seating, indeed! ... argh it's something I've had since my twenties) and the thought of sitting still for two hours forty-five was bidding me wait until I felt better. But as the movie took flight I recalled something. When I was a kid I used to love going down to the Strand, having a lime milkshake and a burger at the Ozone Cafe, and going and playing with the old train engine and canon on the lawn by the beach. There was a stretch of parking shaded permanently by big shaggy banyan trees and, for a while, weekend after weekend, I would marvel at the sight of a jet black E-Type Jaguar parked there among the dowdy Holdens and Fords. There was such alluring mystery to it. I imagined a James Bond or The Saint (the stick figure from that title sequence was graffiti-ed on the side of nearby Castle Hill). The big sleek shark-like car really got into me, so much that I knew that seeing the owner would just be another Townsvillite plonker like me. I never found out and never will. The thing is that now I leave the warmth of that in the childhood file and only get it back out of the dust when something as exciting happens, something like this movie. Both of these are memories with falsehood (i.e. nostalgia) and it's what we can read in the space between the plain event and the fantasy. It can rend your heart. It can exhilarate you. It didn't last but I got out of my seat as the lights came up without any pain at all.
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