Let me start by admitting I am not a Tarantino fan -- I find most of his movies overly mannerist and unnecessarily gory, especially Sin City and Django. I first attempted to watch Once Upon a Time In Hollywood when I was day drinking and after an hour was bored (I'm somewhat impatient when impaired) and stopped watching, writing it off as just another schlock QT movie.
Fast forward a year and having watched nearly every other movie available on my streaming service during the COVID lockdown, I watched this flick again sober, and with a clear head I appreciated the nuance that I missed when I was three sheets to the wind. It was vastly entertaining.
First, I liked how it built the sense of the magical in a place -- Hollywood is itself a character in this glittering fairy tale of LA (of all places). Anyone who is familiar with the Manson killings and the time period should sense the building tension as we see the "hippy" women flitting around Hollywood like hungry ravens after the close up shot of the infamous Cielo Drive. As a former resident of the LA area I appreciated the way the city is depicted both in its dusty architectural dreariness and yet the shiny veneer of tinsel town that sums up so much of the Hollywood experience. Showing the beating pulse of a town isn't easy, but Tarantino does a masterful job here.
Second, I enjoyed the small details which ordinarily would have been boring segues into other more substantive scenes but with expert pacing and ironic humor QT makes them interesting, especially the early scene early on where Brad Pitt's character is feeding his dog in his ramshackle trailer. Nothing was wasted and the series of fast clips make the scene both amusing and relatable (especially if one has ever fed canned food to their dogs).
I loved the way the menace of the Manson clan was wonderfully highlighted in the scene where Brad Pitt's character was at the ranch, from the creepy rat in the house, the grime on the walls, and the way the zombie-like "sisters" appeared seemingly out of nowhere as Pitt refused to take no for an answer. There was a real sense of the sinister behind their hypocritical "flower-power" rhetoric that felt cult like and genuinely creepy. I was left with a sense of real danger from these characters and it wasn't hard to imagine this may have not been far from the truth. (Although for some reason the racist underpinnings of Manson's motivations was skipped and I'm not sure why, instead the film seems to bash "hippies" in general which to me felt somewhat political, as did the odd scene with a fictional Bruce Lee.)
To me the scene that didn't work was the overall ending -- QT seems to like to fictionalize history in a way that may please a certain element of the audience, but to me felt like lazy scriptwriting. It reminded me of the end of Inglorious Basterds (a disaster in my opinion), where the horror of actual history is glossed over with an adolescent fever dream of "wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-THIS-happened-instead" ending. Although the action may be fun, its disrespectful to the people who actually lost their lives. I think there could have been betters ways to depict a more realistic ending rather than departing entirely from reality. And he just happens to have a flamethrower. Really?
Generally, though, I found this flick to be entertaining and much more engrossing than most QT movies, I hope he continues to mature as a film maker.