Happily Ever After

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – 2019

When I see “Quentin Tarantino, Director,” I proceed with caution. The violent nonchalance of Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012) so stupefied me that I swore off The Hateful Eight (2015). Given six years of a Tarantino respite, when Once Upon a Time in Hollywood rolled in, looking both ways and over my shoulder, I slid way down into the theater’s recliner and settled in for two hours and forty minutes of Tarantino trepidation.  It wasn’t exactly a kinder, friendlier Tarantino film but it was far more fantasy than savagery. Rick (Leonardo Dicaprio) and Cliff (Brad Pitt) are evenly matched as actors and a ton of fun to watch going up against each other in this Hollywood period piece full of classic jargon and memorabilia. If you lived through the Helter Skelter 1960s and the terrifying 1969 slaughter of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) by the psychotic, sociopathic Manson Family, this film kept you on edge wondering when and how a combined Tarantino-Manson bloodbath would blow up the big screen. Then in a stunning reversal, what didn’t happen did. What we, the entire cringing auditorium audience, were expecting was over…kind of. Personally, the ending left me flattened in my movie house lounger, swindled, bamboozled by a slick Hollywood makeover. Tarantino trickery taming the carnage was so unexpected that I couldn’t even begin to appreciate the fantastical story twist towards vengeance. In fact, sometimes a moment in history is so sadistic, so brutally horrible that it’s etched into sacred space and can never be repackaged as entertainment.  Mea culpa. My bad. I should have known better. Sigh. I sense this Tarantino respite may be permanent. But give me another six years or so. You just never know. 

Author: Rev. Peggy Bryan

I was ordained an Episcopal Priest in 2009. View all posts by Rev. Peggy Bryan