Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood ★★★★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

This review may contain spoilers.

There's something deeply moving about the final moments of this, hearing Robbie-as-Tate's disembodied voice through the speaker in defiance of history, the gates opening to Rick as if he's been granted entry into heaven and out of the purgatory of faded glory and compromise, the otherworldly Maurice Jarre sound cue, strange enough in context for being non-diegetic, and finally the crane shot, so unusual in Hollywood filmmaking in 2019 as to have had something of its transporting feeling restored, soaring up and over the path to the house, only to rest looking down on the group of would-have-been victims coming out to greet their neighbor. This is an indulgence of the same sort of revisionism that characterized Inglourious Basterds (and following the same sort of over-the-top violence that courts comedy, revulsion and catharsis at once) but where the final image of that movie is all cheeky self-satisfaction - Pitt's Aldo Raine looking into the camera, appraising the swastika he's just carved into a Nazi's forehead as his "masterpiece" - the ending of OUATIH shows Tarantino imagining beyond brutality, even transcending it in his way.

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