Review of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Review of Once Upon a Time In Hollywood

The Good, The Bad and the Careerists

“A longtime ago being crazy meant something, nowadays everybody is crazy” -Charles Manson, Interview with Diana Sawyer

“Going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on” Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

Quentin Tartentino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (OUATIH) is a paean to the entertainment business in Los Angeles in the late 60s. It would be difficult to think of a more perfect union of the director’s oeuvre with this era of tumult and violence. Now the creator of the martial arts styled Kill Bill could deliver Bruce Lee in the flesh. The auteur behind the WW II inspired Inglorious Bastards could show the star of The Great Escape poolside. The writer/director of the dystopian Pulp Fiction could give his portrayal of Charles Manson and his family roaming LA looking for prey. Ironically the burden of telling an inside story of his forebears clouded Tarantino’s vision. His brand of action requires taught storylines and moral clarity. OUATIH is an interesting 85 minute film buried in a meandering 2 hours and 41 minutes of gossipy sidetracks. Tarantino put a great deal of homework into this feature and it shows. There is a heavy carefulness to all the lightness and horror. Behind the wonderful acting, exacting set design and costuming is a script that never settles on a direction. Is this a film about Hollywood? Is this a buddy film? A commentary on the past? A parable about success and/or failure?

OUATIH is brimming with wonderful sequences that recreate the TV shows, promotions and tableaux of the era. Who doesn’t enjoy DiCaprio’s character yucking-it-up with the Hullabaloo Dancers or the recreated scenes of the nearly forgotten TV Westerns Bronco and Lancer. There are also many fun filled joy rides and walks through the airport while a superbly curated 60s soundtrack blares. He chooses the magical Jose Feliciano take on California Dreamin’ rather than the universally familiar original version. Unfortunately Tarantino tries to shoehorn a couple of actual linear narratives into the mix. For those who remember the times it is fun seeing Steve McQueen gossiping about Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. The director shot at the real location, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. It is all pitch perfect, yet somehow out of tune. How can anyone, connoisseur or novice, latch on to these colorful recreations? The conceit is that Tarantino wants to raise the offscreen shenanigans to the fever pitch of low budget melodrama.

In truth Hollywood in the 60s certainly had its share of “action.” Tarantino has adapted the darkest horror moment, the Manson killings, and replaced the senseless carnage with his interpretation of a “happy ending.” All the self-righteous justice of the TV cop shows and spaghetti Westerns is channeled to right the wrongs. The bad guys are the ones who are butchered and incinerated. The ingenue and her entourage, including her unborn child, are spared. The long-struggling B movie hero Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) is freed from the purgatory of commonplace stardom. He and his loyal companion, stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), now have entree to the A-lister, Polanski, whose wife they have rescued. The only problem is that Tarantino forgets that heroes or anti-heroes need to be heroic; or at least their journeys must include meaningful quests. The classic feature All About Eve, the definitive statement on reaching for the stars, has characters who put their “goodness” on the alter of fame. OUATIH, by contrast, brings to mind the Springsteen lyric, “its just winners and losers and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line.”

The most morally compelling figure is Pitt who, literally, takes the fall for DiCaprio. In addition to being a loyal sideman he, unlike the rest of the cast, shows his chivalry on many occasions. He refuses sex with an underage Manson devotee. He tries to come to the aid of an elderly friend he feels is being taken advantage of by the Manson crew. He puts an arrogant movie star, Bruce Lee, in his place by physically defeating him and never complains when he is fired for Lee’s transgression. Strangely, Tarantino includes a plot point that undercuts all the warm fuzzy admiration the audience feels for this embodiment of brute force and justice. We learn in a flashback that Pitt is guilty of killing his wife for being annoying. The fact that Dalton sees uxoricide as a small blemish in Pitt’s character plays out in his treatment of his trusted confidant. After finding redemption as a spaghetti Western hero, Dalton replaces his buddy with an Italian spouse. The new found financial security doesn’t spare Pitt a pink slip. This is a world where everything revolves around being on the right side of the “in” and “out” crowd. This attribute makes all the players unsympathetic pawns in an abusive hierarchy. It starts to narrow the divide between those who worship a sociopathic cult killer and those who build their lives around the whims of studio executives.

Everyone, from grimmest slovenly hippie to the slickest Kung Fu icon, is a hustler with an agenda. Tarantino’s fails to slide these misfits into the entertainment rubric of “good guys” and “bad guys.” The scenes at the Spahn ranch are supposed to evoke the white hatted cowboy against the mob. Despite wonderful performances from Bruce Dern, as the demented Spahn landlord, and a truly terrifying rendition of Squeaky Fromme by Dakota Fanning, the set up fails to inspire anything other than passing fits of horror and glee. Spahn is getting laid. Fromme is accredited leadership status by her guru. Pitt meanders on main street, a pale ghost of Charles Bronson in Once Upon A Time In The West. It is fun to see Pitt kick ass after his car is vandalized, but what is at stake? A creepy errand boy beating wayward cult member does not make for high drama. Sadly it doesn’t make for low drama either. Whose side are we on when Bruce Lee picks a fight over, literally, nothing. There is a quick burst of adrenaline while Cliff takes down the egotistical jackass but, like the rest of the film, it never grabs the heart. The zeitgeist of pulp fiction, Tarantino’s dramatic muse, relies on simple plots and clear victories.

The moment of where one feels a heroic note is when Dalton is struggling as a guest actor on the downhill slope of stardom. He interacts with a child actress. The little girl is a monster of the overly-efficient, almost robotic, future. She is ALL BUSINESS and mean beyond her years, almost a parody Sammy in the devastating indictment of show business, Bud Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? DiCaprio is vulnerable and brilliant as he digests the hard-core professionalism of the child-upstart. In spite of the endless banter and the unfortunate sharpness of the child, one feels the pain of the over-the-hill star and his outdated simplicity. It is worth the price of admission to watch Dalton tear up his trailer after woefully blowing his lines. DiCaprio’s recovery scene, in which he hurdles the child to the floor, shows the star (and the man playing the star) on the top of their game. After “cut” is called he apologizes for being rough with the she-devil of efficiency. She actually thanks him as she knows a good performance when she sees one. Dalton’s brilliance isn’t about money or status but…. dignity. He wears his own white hat and shows us how it is done.

Unfortunately even in this magnificent sequence one feels DiCaprio’s Dalton battling choices made by Tarantino. The interaction with the child could have been half the length and made twice the impact. The humiliating scene where he flubs his lines is carefully played opposite a nemesis, an actor who is rising in the ranks due to scoring the lead role. The comeback would have been more effective if DiCaprio’s brilliant retort was played against this spiritual rival. Instead Tarantino was locked into the original TV show script, which demanded a cameo. No doubt it was fascinating to see Luke Perry in his final performance but sticking to the other actor would have made Dalton’s recovery more poignant. Furthermore there is an odd amount of camera time spent on the fact that the lead actor leaves the set on motorcycle. This references the original star’s tragic motorcycle crash which left him without an arm and a leg. This fact is never covered in the film leaving yet another layer of clues for the experts of the era. All this extra padding works against the thrust of the action. It is as if Tarantino is a telling a story and constantly turning his head to gossip about inside-baseball minutia. The director sacrifices smooth clarity to the static of being cool and clever.

Tarantino is never is able to step over his narrow conceptions of the era. It is hard not to avoid the misogyny label when you make the good guy in your film a wife killer. But it goes further. Aside of the annoying child, the film is devoid of powerful actresses. That era had many important female leads, not to mention a burgeoning women’s rights movement, but Tarantino is only interested in a relatively obscure starlet whose fame is based on being butchered. Margot Robbie gives a great performance but her contributions to the films are limited to giggling in a movie theater while gauging the audience’s reaction to her work. More importantly she buys the novel Tess of the d’Ubervilles for her husband, Mr. Polanski. It is not covered in the film but he went on to create a much heralded feature based on the book. Of course that detail is exclusively crafted for those who have more than a passing interest in Hollywood.

OUATIH is not made for the general public but rather industry insiders who get the extra layer of jokes and messages. Tarantino’s denouement of the actual story, after exacting real-life detail for the first 2 1/2 hours, shows a strange defense of his own perceived demons. The Manson family descends on the house according to schedule but decides, rather than attack Tate, they will get Dalton. This affords the director to “righteously” focus his, much criticized, depictions of violence on a “just” cause. It might have been deemed tasteless to record the actual murder of Tate, her fetus and the friends. The real events included the painting of slogans in their blood all over the walls. The director, however, innoculates himself from criticism by turning the savagery on the demons themselves. It is hard to object to someone being roasted alive, or having their head bashed in, knowing the true life actions of these monsters. There is, however, a caveat to all the seemingly justifiable carnage. The director might be using this film as a way to erase his own morally dubious actions.

Tarantino’s Manson monsters have a confrontation with Dalton at the foot of Tate’s driveway. They recognize him as their childhood TV hero. One of them suggests perhaps they should turn their murderous rage on the TV god that “taught them how to kill”. In this light Tarantino might defend his own track record of onscreen violence as merely being the product of an apt pupil. All the gore in his own work has been past down from past masters. His Manson clan are abandoned on the driveway by the very member who made the suggestion to perpetrate VT violence against the TV good guy. The actress playing that part is Maya Hawke. She is the daughter of Tarantino’s former leading lady, Uma Thurman. During the filming his Kill Bill feature the director bullied Thurman into performing a dangerous car crash sequence. She was seriously injured. This obviously put a damper on their relationship as she went public about his abusive, nearly fatal, behavior. But she never took formal legal action against him. Furthermore she tweeted support for her daughter’s appearance in OUATIH. It is reported that her former husband, the actor Ethan Hawke, help secure the part for Maya.

Most people would have qualms casting their daughter in film by a director who nearly killed her mother, your ex-wife. Most children might avoid working for someone that put your mother’s life in danger. Most people would avoid praising the work of someone who nearly killed you. Many parents would think twice about their child being part of the production given Tarantino’s track record. Many people would feel squeamish about appropriating gruesome real life events to buttress personal demons. But these people will never make it Hollywood. It is a land peopled by those who play the parts of rescuers, Calvary riders and good people in white hats. But all this is ON SCREEN. Their real life actions are equally ambitious and shocking, but not melodramatically captivating. Audiences want Superman, not an in depth look at the process of become a cosplay Superman. Tarantino never fully understands that the off screen sourness cannot be excised with clever plot twists, fancy art direction and a wonderful soundtrack. He thinks that his formula of flash and violence will mask the hollow center. It might have worked for 85 minutes. But not for over two and a half hours. Note: more of the dreams; less of the dream factory.

Chappaquiddick (2018)

Review of Chappaquiddick (2018)

Profiles in Cowardness

Mr. Stoddard: You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott? Mr. Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.― The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

“In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.”― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“They fuck you up”― Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse

John Curran’s Chappaquiddick is the story of one of the great political scandals of the 20th century which began on the gateway to a small island off Cape Cod with this Native American name. A young Sen. Edward Kennedy drives off a bridge and leaves his passenger to die in the submerged car. It is a melodramatic plot. The married, sole surviving heir to a great political dynasty leaves the scene. He stays silent for nearly half a day while a beautiful, young, single woman dies a horrific death. Unfortunately the film is stagnant. This is an amazing achievement, in the worst possible way. One is given the grist of high drama and manages, through inept artistry, to produce the bland gruel of a public service announcement. Perhaps Curran, and the writers Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, would defend their stylistic choices with bromides about “honesty”. Unfortunately not even the realism is “real”. None of the formidable women in the family, the matriarch or the Senator’s sisters, play any role whatsoever in guiding the response to the events. There are numerous encounters that serve as opportunities for plot exposition rather than a honest rendering. Are we to believe that the Senator, reeling from guilt and shame, manages to quote pithy family historical exposition when faced with his enraged father? Does it ring true that the bulk of the Senator’s encounter with the ingenue is composed of maudlin self-pity?

No, these creations shoehorn the story into an easy-to-consume narrative rather than an honest attempt at recreating events. This leads to speculation about the creative team’s motives. Is this, as the authors claim, a daring attempt to dramatize a story that has been suppressed by dark forces? Or it is a masquerade of righteousness hiding the overt monetizing a sensational story? There is a tale to be told about Chappadquiddick that rights the wrongs. This isn’t it.

There are brave moments amidst the morass of wooden plot twists and contrived dialogue. Jason Clarke deserves credit for a wonderful performance that delivers a balance of pathos and revulsion. He has mastered Sen. Kennedy’s physicality and blend of confidence/vulnerability. This film would be unwatchable save for Clarke giving this tortured figure a strange combination of being BOTH a scared little boy and a sociopathic bully. The risk of undertaking this role should also be noted. There are scores of very powerful people who take offense at a theatrical drama that raises troubling questions about the integrity of a beloved friend and those who support him. As an example Michael Chiklis spent years in career limbo after playing John Belushi in Wired, which documented the SNL star’s decent into drug abuse. Clarke is not alone in taking risks. One can only imagine Bruce Dern’s confidence in agreeing to play the stroke-victim-patriarch, Joe Kennedy who has, literally, half a dozen WORDS in the entire film. His mastery of expression and gesture is every bit an equal to the rendering of the beleaguered son. Despite being nearly mute and completely paralyzed, Dern creates an unforgiving stern master who will except nothing less than complete obedience. This is the stuff of ancient Greek myth, brought to life on Cape Cod. Never has a son confronted such a disappointed father since Jack Nicholson, the out of work rough-neck, faces his wheelchair- bound, music-conservatory-director dad in Five Easy Pieces. Clarke and Dern are diamonds amidst a sludge-pile of tailings, which comprises the rest of Chappaquiddick.

The creative team makes the unfortunate artistic choice of focusing on Sen. Kennedy’s defense against an overbearing father and the legacy of his three dead brothers. The title sequence covers the exposition of the elder siblings, each who died a martyr for their county. Joe was killed in a volunteer mission while a WW II pilot. John died while serving as President and Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated while pursuing the nation’s highest office. Any one of the three would have been a tough act to follow. Now imagine our anti-hero, having blotted the family name, facing the ultimate taskmaster, his fiercely self-made father. It is a compelling story, except everyone already knows it. There have been hundreds of books and films about the family. What does Chappaquiddick add to the often told story? Nothing. It is true that the collective memory of the incident has faded. The ticker taker at the movie theater, a man in his early thirties, referred to the film as “Chap-AQUATIC”. I asked if he was joking and his response was he had no knowledge of the water-bound scandal. Given the general amnesia, is there a purpose in highlighting the character-flaws of this renowned politician? One might have made that argument in the decades the senator was active. Unfortunately digging up the horror after half a century delves into tabloid voyeurism, rather than an honest assessment of the event.

A better film might have drawn on the larger story of what makes people follow such men, rather than the minutia of the accident. It is interesting gossip to see how the powerful family closed ranks, but is this surprising? It is titillating to ponder the relationship between Mary Joe and the emotionally overwhelmed young senator. Does it do justice to her story? Does the creative team fall into the trap of exploiting the tragedy? The filmmakers have let it be known that the surviving relatives of Ms. Kopechne approve of the film. Certainly one can understand the anger of a the family in light of Kennedy’s official punishment. He served no jail time and was given a suspended sentence for leaving the scene of the accident. It is not surprising that those who guard her memory would welcome revisiting this tragedy and highlighting the Senator’s abominable behavior. But are the filmmakers capitalizing on the family’s need for vengeance in the process of hawking their movie? Is the film’s treatment of Mary Jo, in reality, yet more victimization?

The interaction between the politician and the opaque young woman focuses on the Senator’s troubles. The audience is led to believe their brief time alone was spent with Sen. Kennedy’s bearing his soul due to the difficulty of his station. Her record as an effective political operative for RFK and her good standing with the rest of the family are indicated through clumsy exposition prior to their encounter. Yet when the two are together she is merely a foil for the Senator’s self-pity. One assumes her career was anchored in the zeitgeist of idealism which was sparked by the Senator’s older brothers. But what did she think of the Senator? There is the prurient question of whether there was attraction but, more to the point, did she view him with pity or pride? Was he a pale imitation of his older siblings burdened by carrying the torch? Did she feel he had the ability to proudly uphold the legacy? She barely knew him but what were her gut feelings prior to the tragic encounter? What was her standing with the other women who had been key strategists in the RFK Presidential run? They were all gathered at the cottage for a party when Ms. Kopechne and the Senator casually left on their fateful journey. How did these women react when it became apparent that their co worker was left to die while the Senator failed to call the authorities? These questions are the stuff of drama. They would have given shape to Mary Jo’s tragic demise. Instead the filmmaker’s centered on the least interesting, and not coincidentally most famous, group of people, the enablers.

When the crisis heats up the father’s old guard of advisors plucked from the best of JFK’s team, McNamara and Sorenson, lock horns with Sen. Kennedy’s callow staff. Curran chooses this as the heart of the “drama”. Each “team” out-does the other in mendacity. Righteousness is squeezed through a public relations sausage machine that places the family’s political prospects as the primary concern. In the end a compromise is struck whereby the Senator’s idea of giving a nationwide address is accepted but his words will be carefully crafted by the father’s allies. Meanwhile all the local law enforcement and judiciary officials are cowed into giving the Senator a suspended sentence. The Kopechne family acquiesces to the situation. Certainly the filmmakers are right to point to the injustice of special treatment for a privileged chosen son. It is unfortunate, however, that their was no shading of the motivations of the boosters. The larger crime is clearly the corruption of the system to the detriment of an innocent. Everyone rushed into the breach to save the Senator’s career at the expense of justice for this young woman. Is the creative team guilty of the same crime?

The quality of this drama would have been relegated to limited TV distribution were it not for the star power of the principles involved. By giving short-shrift to the seemingly incidental characters, the writers and director harness the spectacle of Mary Jo’s death for their own ends. The hordes of people who came to the Senator’s defense seem at best toadies, and at worst, enablers in a criminal enterprise. Revealing this within a reasonable period after the fact might have stirred the pot enough to assess blame. Unfortunately dragging this story up from obscurity after half a century is an act of self-aggrandizement, rather than some bold call for “justice”. The filmmakers are engaged in the suggestion of ‘truth-seeking’ when in fact it’s merely watching a slow motion car wreck. This falls inline with the great Hollywood tradition of making a “bold statement” after the dust has settled. The indictment of McCarthyism was made years after that Senator had lost his power with Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd. Lest we not for forget Kazan had indulged in A DEFENSE of this monstrous person with ironically a better film On the Waterfront at the hight of that Senator’s worst abuses. During the Vietnam War Hollywood tapped John Wayne to star in The Green Berets, a hagiography to these group of American Special Force soldiers. It was only after hostilities had concluded that mainstream features questioned the fighting with features such as Coming Home and Apocalypse Now. Curran, Allen and Logan take up the mantle against Sen. Kennedy five decades after the event with many of the principles long deceased. The deeply flawed best friend, Joseph Gargan, who supposedly tried to inspire the Senator to “do the right thing” died of old age a few months prior to the opening. Interesting that the filmmakers didn’t seek out comment from his family during the advertising blitz. That would require bravery, something lacking in the movie’s opportunistic creators.

The irony is that Chappaquiddick might have had bearing on contemporary events. Had the film bothered to look at the poor woman in the car or her friends or the legion of small town officials we might have a better handle on the perils of hero-worship within the context of politics. What makes people compartmentalize criminal behavior? Is this phenomena an obvious evil? Should the private foibles of office-holders be of concern? Perhaps there is a double edge to the legacy of JFK. Did his Presideny creat too much mystic around an institution that is truly more than a sum of its constitutional provisions. It is the only office, save the VEEP, in which every single American, from Hawaii to Maine, cast the same ballot. The elasticity of the emotional attachment to government officials has grown exponentially with the rise of mass media. We are in endless elections with 24/7 waves of tales of malfeasance. How does this effect not only those in office but the loyalists who defend their candidate?

I was an intern for Sen Kennedy after the events that took place in this film. While I worked in his office I focused on the policies and never questioned the events of a decade earlier. At the time there was rampant speculation of a Presidential run. Strangely, I am now bewildered by many of the current President’s supporters, who seem immune to the revelations of his transgressions. Perhaps we share something that I refuse to acknowledge. Maybe a better film about the people around the event might have expanded an understanding of our current politics. The name of the film turns out to have resonance beyond the incident. The area was named after a Native American word “cheppiaquidne”, which means “separated island”. That is a wonderful shorthand for the Senator’s predicament, as well as the one we all find ourselves in. We are adrift in a never-ending sea of separation. Maybe we can be linked by finding courage to do what is right even when the weight of the world pushes us in a different direction. Perhaps we can all form an alliance based on the universal respect for those who chose righteousness over expediency.

In looking back let us remember the woman who left the comfort of her small town to embrace the tumult of political upheaval. Her mentor was murdered, but she contemplated returning to the fray. Let us also reflect on the scores of regular folks whose lives were suddenly thrown in the harsh spotlight of public scrutiny. The friends, the bystanders, the provincial officials, the first responders who were all suddenly cast, through no fault of their own, as a nefarious bit players in a national tragedy. Their lives were forever judged by what happened on a summer night in July 1969. These stories have more resonance than the tawdry conduct of powerful people trying to spin a false narrative for self preservation. The filmmakers were seduced by celebrity. They might have produced a great tragedy but instead drew upon the siren call of gossip. This project might be a wise career move. However contemplate the fate of the protagonist. He ended up as the Lion of the Senate, but at what cost?