I’ll tell you what. The more I think about this movie, the more I think it’s Tarantino’s best. It really does come off like a big, hot mess at first, despite how absolutely entertaining it is. It only just struck me watching it a second time though, that Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is really only a classic Western movie with a modern spin. It has all the elements of a 60s Hollywood Western (with a little Spaghetti Western and grindhouse thrown in) set in the late 60s and early 70s.

It has the aging gunfighter (played as a guy who plays a gunfighter in TV and movies) and his sidekick trying their best to remain relevant as “civilization” encroaches on the frontier.

It has the slick business guys from back East in the form of an artsy director and a slick agent played by Al Pacino. They’re the face of the New West and the old gunfighter and his sidekick are doing their best to go along to get along.

It’s got the polite rich folks living just up the hill (Polanski, Sharon Tate, etc.).

It’s got the outlaw hooligans in the form of the Manson Family and when they ride into town to wreak havoc, the old gunfighter and his sidekick save the day in a classic Western showdown. When the dust settles they’ve found their place as heroes in the New West. They’ve found redemption. It doesn’t get any more classic Hollywood Western than this.

It’s clever as hell too with DiCaprio at one point on the set of a new movie, so we get a Western in a Western in a Western. There has been some criticism of Tarantino’s re-writing of the Manson story too, but I don’t see problems with taking liberties with history in this sense. Firstly, it’s in no way re-writing history to present as fact. Secondly, and more importantly, I think it goes a long way to what Tarantino has portrayed all along, that is that violence and insanity are a lot more random and directionless than we play it up to be in reality. Any number of very small, incidental occurrences could have re-written the Tate-LoBianco murders. Make a left instead of a right. A flat tire. Getting pulled over by a cop. It all could have very easily happened very differently.

But that’s my take. Film critique isn’t my purview. I do like Westerns though.