In the Flesh: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood clocks in at a meandering two and a half hours, following an ensemble of freaks, goofy film industry old-timers, and burnt-out B-listers as they circle the uncomfortable truth of their own growing irrelevance. Tarantino's discursive, lived-in dialogue is slightly pruned back here, the gripping intensity and lackadaisical whimsy it can summon exchanged for an equally roundabout visual language heavy on travel and period film clips both real and invented. The effect is lazily immersive, like floating on your back in a swimming pool on the hottest day of the year.

Tarantino's highway shots and driving sequences are comfortingly hypnotic. Brad Pitt's cool and collected former stuntman, Cliff Booth, spends an easy sixth of the movie just driving from place to place, sometimes sedately and sometimes at suicidal speeds he manages with easy, unaffected confidence. There's a fun in-joke later in the film when Tarantino drops in a driving clip from a fictional James Bond ripoff with lots of dramatic gear-shifting. Hollywood knows the real pleasure is in the drive itself. An early scene in which Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski drive to the Playboy Mansion is a particular joy, the wind catching at their hair as they barrel down shaded avenues in the deepening dusk.

Margot Robbie is heart-melting at Sharon Tate, her trip to the movies to watch herself on the big screen in The Wrecking Crew the film's undeniable highlight. Watching her squirm and grin in the theater in her big square specs, checking to see if anyone might have recognized her, is a pure delight. Pitt is the other standout, better by miles as a character actor than he ever was as a leading man, and DiCaprio's washed-up Western actor Rick Dalton is a neurotic pleasure constantly seesawing between he-man chest pounding and whining, self-loathing despair with genuine love for his work and, in some small way, real talent sprinkled in for good measure.

The stuff with the Manson family, especially the sequence at Spahn's ranch, is where the film comes closest to faltering. Tarantino's half-comedic scare shots don't inspire much in the way of tension outside the gruesome and upsetting image of a rat caught alive in a trap. Even there, though, the propulsive thunder of hooves as Tex Watson rides back to the ranch from the hills outside it and a riveting turn by Dakota Fanning as Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme keep Hollywood on track. Tarantino is a masterful craftsman of pulp entertainment, and this slower, more thoughtful outing is full of pleasures great and small.