In Tarantino's world, cowboys can still be heroes. Quentin Tarantino isn't afraid to rewrite history. He's done it multiple times.
In Inglourious Basterds , he gave a few American and French Jews the chance to deliver Hitler the painful, bullet-riddled death he deserved. In Django Unchained , he conceived a story in which a Black slave in the 1850s is given the opportunity to exercise an entire history's worth of racial rage and pain on some of the worst white racists ever rendered onscreen. Righteous anger is the prevailing emotion of both films — and it burns so hot it almost melts the celluloid they were captured on.
In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood , rage is still present, but it isn't given center stage. Instead, that spot is reserved for a feeling much more slippery but no less gripping: melancholy. It's a film in which Tarantino reimagines one of the most infamous moments in modern American history: The Charles Manson-ordered murders of Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and her friends: Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent, and Jay Sebring.
But Once Upon a Time in Hollywood doesn't just avenge them. Through Tarantino's unusually mournful eyes, it also looks back on a pivotal turning point in American culture and wonders what might have been had things not gone so horribly wrong. Perhaps that's why, even five years after its release, the film's hold on its admirers hasn't slipped, but rather tightened.
In her essay, The White Album , Joan Didion famously wro.