Tarantino: adrift at the end of the '60s

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt excel in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but not everything about the movie clicks.

A preview screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was preceded by a contest. Members of the audience, many in costume, were asked to decide who had done the best job of representing their favorite character from director Quentin Tarantino's previous eight movies. I bring this up because the costumes (and the effort that some members of the audience put into them) suggest something particular about Tarantino, something that seldom applies to other filmmakers: Tarantino has a committed, devoted, and demonstrative fan base.

It's no small thing for a director to generate that kind of enthusiasm and it has been a long time since I've been at a screening where the pre-movie atmosphere was so contagiously upbeat. Normally, I disdain promotional efforts, but I have to admit that, after some initial dismay, I enjoyed all the anticipatory zeal.

So, in my view, did the movie meet expectations? I wish I could answer that question with an emphatic yes or no. But for me, the answer turns out to be blurrier. Put another way, parts of the movie are enjoyable and parts -- shocking considering who made the movie -- drift toward dullness.

Let me break it down:

Tarantino builds his movie around two major characters, a once-popular film and television actor (Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton) with a fading career. Dalton's stand-in and stuntman (Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth) functions as the actor's devoted aide. Cliff provides Dalton with friendship and support.

At the same time, the movie rubs shoulders with real-life events of 1969, the shadowy operations of the Manson family as it makes its way toward the now-famous Tate/LaBianca murders. The Manson family hovers like a putrid cloud over the counterculture, waiting to unleash a bloody, destructive rain on its purported sweetness.

These two parts of the movie eventually must intersect. As it turns out, Dalton lives on Cielo Drive next door to actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and her husband, director Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha).

Among his many skills, Tarantino has been a master of creating movies with moving parts while, at the same time, energizing each narrative thread, wheels within wheels or something like it. This time, not all of the parts move, some stagnate, and I wouldn't say that Once Upon a Time offers Tarantino's sharpest dialogue.

The major performances in Once Upon a Time do, however, stand out. DiCaprio infuses his portrait of a narcissistic actor with deep pathos. Not only is Dalton trying to salvage a sagging career, but he's also desperate to prove to himself that hasn't totally lost his acting chops to alcohol, indulgence and the industry's increasing indifference to him.

Pitt's work as Cliff represents another triumph. Less ego-driven than his boss, Cliff has a loosey-goosey spirit that's underlined by toughness. When the screenplay raises questions about whether Cliff murdered his wife, we're not sure what to make of this guy. Pitt delivers a comic classic when his character smokes a joint that has been dipped in LSD. And a scene in which Cliff confronts Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) on a studio backlot comes close to justifying the price of admission.

Not surprisingly for a sprawling movie, Once Upon a Time has a large cast. The actors who register include Margaret Qualley as Pussycat, one of Manson's followers, a teenaged harpy who projects levels of bravado she couldn't possibly have earned. At the same time, her street-kid pluck catches Cliff's eye.

Robbie's Sharon Tate emerges as a blithe presence, a starlet floating wide-eyed through her life, either partying or reveling in the small parts she's played in movies. She seems a bit vacuous, a woman happy in her world.

Tarantino also dots the movie with references to the kind of '60s flotsam for which he presumably has some fondness. These are embedded in the movie when characters listen to the radio, watch TV or drive past movie marquees. They become tiresome, self-conscious in-jokes.

Although Once Upon a Time in Hollywood doesn't have much of a story, its atmosphere -- LA in the '60s -- surrounds the characters. It's the air they breathe.

Now, it's impossible to talk about the movie's ending without spoilers. I'll say nothing, except to say that it allows Tarantino to indulge his taste for comic violence, something at which he has few peers. One other aside: Tarantino knows movies, but I wouldn't turn to him for historical interpretation.

What to make of all this? I saw the movie as a grab bag of episodes, some well-constructed, others slack. And I wouldn't call the movie an endorsement of the counterculture. Both Dalton and Booth are contemptuous of hippies. They live in show-business isolation. If anything, the movie displays more affection for bygone TV (shows like Mannix than for other aspects of the '60s.

There's also something disturbing about the fact that the movie draws most of its tension from what we know about the looming Manson crime. When Cliff visits the Spahn ranch where the Manson family resides, the movie becomes intensely creepy.

What I've most enjoyed about my favorite Tarantino movies (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill movies) is their audacious desire to entertain on their own terms. I guess that leads to my last word. I found Once Upon a Time a movie to be savored in pieces, sketches that never amount to a fully realized painting.

Tarantino may have wanted to flood a single movie with jaded savvy and affection for parts of the culture he once avidly consumed, all topped with fairy tale flourish. Does the approach work? Sometimes, but not for all of the movie's two-hour and 40-minute running time.

'Django Unchained,' also unhinged

A different setting, but it's the same old Tarantino.

Having taken vengeance for the horrors Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino shifts his attention to blacks in Django Unchained, a wild assault on the antebellum South: land of plantations, slavery, sexual perversity, leering sadism and bloody violence.

If you're wondering -- as I am -- why Tarantino has assumed so many vengeful burdens, I'll wonder along with you. I leave it you to decide whether Jews and blacks should be grateful, offended or indifferent to revisionist fantasies conducted on their behalf.

I wasn't a total fan of Inglourious Basterds, but I'd rank it above Django Unchained, another Tarantino exercise in genre eclecticism that twists the past into something as lurid as an exploitation movie -- only one in which the comic elements have ceased being inadvertent and clearly were intended.

Django Unchained borrows from Spaghetti Westerns (notably 1966's Django by Sergio Corbucci), rap music (I'm not kidding), Blaxploitation movies of the '70s and even other Tarantino movies. In assembling the movie's several acts, Tarantino creates a work that's wanton in its excessiveness -- and that includes its two-hour and 46-minute length.

That's an awfully long time to tell a relatively simple story about Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave who's freed by a bounty hunter and who develops into a kind of laconic cowboy hero with whom no one would want to mess.

Those who know Tarantino's movies (and who doesn't?) won't be surprised to learn that Django Unchained lets the N-word flow freely, includes a surfeit of vividly mounted violence and splashes its way through the kind of old-fashioned southern racism that looks indistinguishable from sadism.

Tarantino fans probably won't mind any of this, and those who don't count themselves among the director's devotees may be consoled by performances that include tasty turns from the incomparable Christoph Waltz (as the bounty hunter who frees Django from slavery and makes him a partner) and Leonardo DiCaprio (as a genteel southern slave owner and monstrous example of humanity).

In many ways, Django is a tonal free-for-all, even boasting a scene that may remind you of Mel Brooks. Tarantino depicts a gathering of Klansman as a convocation of dimwits who complain about not being able to see through the eye holes in masks that have been crudely and ineptly made by the wife of a Klansman.

Other scenes seem to transpose familiar Tarantino tropes (exchanges of dialog that play like gunfights) into new settings.

The story seems nothing more than an outline onto which Tarantino grafts numerous riffs. Waltz's Dr. King Schultz, a former dentist turned bounty hunter, liberates Django in the early going. Schultz's motives aren't entirely altruistic; he knows Django can identify a couple of hoodlums he's been hunting. He wants to collect the reward money.

Django and Dr. Schultz work together before heading to Mississippi to rescue Django's wife (Kerry Washington), who was sold to another slaver after the couple was caught trying to run away. Washington's Broomhilde even speaks a little German, a skill that the screenplay makes use of later.

During this phase of the movie, Foxx pretty much holds himself in reserve, saving Django's blossoming fury for a finale in which it emerges with explosive force.

But Foxx carries a big -- and perhaps impossible -- burden here: He's not only playing a character, he's illustrating ideas about the ways in which blacks have been portrayed on screen with a view, one supposes, toward ultimately subverting such stereotypical images.

To rescue Broomhilda, Django and Dr. Schultz must invade the preposterously named Candieland, a massive planation owned by DiCaprio's Calvin Candie, a plutocrat who enjoys watching dogs tear apart runaway slaves, has a black mistress and forces strapping black men to fight to the death for his personal amusement.

Schultz and Django concoct a ruse that gains them entry into Candieland. They pretend to want to buy a fighter of their own. They hope that Candie will include Broomhilda as an add-on, someone with whom the German-born Schultz can enjoy chatting in his native tongue.

Once in Candieland, Django and Schultz also encounter Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), a house slave whose speech and inflections recall Jules, the character Jackson played in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Stephen, who has served the Candie family for years, isn't outwardly subservient, but he knows where his Big House bread is buttered. He remains loyal to his master.

Tarantino builds tension, and some of the scenes in Django Unchained are beautifully executed, DiCaprio, Waltz, Foxx and others at a tense formal dinner in Candieland, for example.

Enjoyable in bits and pieces Django Unchained is another off-the-hook helping of Tarantino. If you want to take the movie seriously, you can argue that Tarantino is playing around with film iconography from several generations of "B" and mainstream movies, although that may make Django Unchained a tough talking entertainment for cinema geeks. You also can look at it as a full-blown exercise in absurdity or as a simple revenge saga.

But whatever it aspires to be, Django Unchained felt a little old hat to me, Tarantino strutting his stuff in another genre playground. And by now, Tarantino movies have acquired an almost clubby aura in which cinematic in-jokes, outré slices of violence and ample helpings of the "MF" word act as signifiers of a brand of movie "cool" that forgives every indulgence and all manner of cruelty, so long as the tables eventually are turned.

But the trouble with revisionist revenge sagas is that they don't really loosen the grip of the past; they take aim at images and play with situations we know from other movies, often standing them on their heads. The whole business is a bit like shooting at ghosts. You make a lot of noise, but, in the end, you have to wonder whether you've actually hit anything.