Revisionist History.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: REEL WORLD - Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood - Movie review

QUENTIN TARENTINO has put--as is his wont--a provocative twist on history with "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" (2019). The film--which runs 189 entertaining minutes--evolves slowly, before closing in on the Charles Manson cult killings (August 1969)--the most-infamous element of the tragedy being the stabbing death of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four friends, while her filmmaker husband Roman Polanski was in Europe filming. However (spoiler alert), when it comes to Tarentino, who so enjoys tweaking history, bad things do not have to happen. This ranges from a Jewish World War II soldier taking out a Nazi with a baseball bat (such a nice American touch) and the finishing off of Adolf Hitler a year before he did it himself for a honeymoon in "Inglourious Basterds" (2009), or a slick-dressing slave/ cowboy killing assorted racists in the pre-Civil War days of "Django Unchained" (2012).

Plus, one must remember the title of Tarentino's latest exercise in altering history, "Once Upon a Time ..." are the words with which all of those ultimately happy fairy tales begin. Moreover, if you are Tarentino, such a title telegraphs the filmmaker's joy in spoofing a subgenre of movies--the Spaghetti Western, a la 1968's "Once Upon a Tune in the West." Indeed, these Italian productions had a revisionist slant, too. History was not so much changed but, prior to this, Westerns usually were a white hat/black hat affair, with no need for a rooting scorecard. The Spaghetti Western, though, was served in several shades of moral gray.

However, what I have yet to see is any "butterfly effect" applied to Tarentino's latest film. If you are changing history, you might as well go all out. The butterfly effect is when a minor change completely alters an already established complex series of events. (It is Basic Fantasy 101, if you are into that genre.) Regardless, the key point for applying the effect is that actor Steve McQueen had been invited to a small gathering with Tate that evening.

McQueen seems to hover over this movie. Its two stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt (who won a Best...