Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019)

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD  (2019)
    D: Quentin Tarantino                                 ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie,
    Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant,
    Dakota Fanning, Austin Butler, Bruce Dern,
    Luke Perry, Damian Lewis, Al Pacino,
    Kurt Russell, Michael Madsen, Zoë Bell,
    Mike Moh, Lena Dunham, Clu Gulager,
    Brenda Vaccaro, Rumer Willis, Harley Quinn Smith
"Once Upon a Time In Hollywood" is like Quentin Tarantino's "Sunset Blvd.": a lovingly twisted look back at La La Land in 1969, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a washed-up actor and Brad Pitt as his stunt double, who by chance find themselves in a dustup with the Manson family. It's a rambling, episodic movie, and a long one, but it's never dull, loaded with period cultural references, tangents and side trips that take off in whatever direction the director wants to go. You get a real sense it's a movie Tarantino had to make, and it's not a movie that could've been made by anybody else. Leo's part is the more demanding one: a TV star whose marquee value has started to slip, and whose outsized ego is matched only by his insecurity. It's the case of an actor who can really act playing an actor trying to prove he can really act, and his two long scenes with child actress Julia Butters are especially good. Pitt, meanwhile, glides through it with the sort of easy self-assurance that reminds you why some people are movie stars. He commands the screen without even breaking a sweat. You know where it's heading, from the way Sharon Tate and the Manson girls keep turning up, and you know it's going to be bad when it gets there, but then Quentin flips history, the way he did in "Inglorious Basterds", with the kind of revisionist climax that only he can seem to get away with. A make-believe movie set in the land of make-believe, with moments of grotesque violence and a title that begins "Once Upon a Time . . . ": That's gotta be a fairy tale, right?