Damian Lewis – Movie Musings

Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio have fun in Tarantino’s appalling Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Rick Dalton), Brad Pitt (Cliff Booth), Margot Robbie (Sharon Tate), Al Pacino (Marvin Schwarz), Emile Hirsch (Jay Sebring), Margaret Quailey (Pussycat), Timothy Olyphant (James Stacy), Julia Butters (Trudi Fraser), Austin Butler (“Tex” Watson), Dakota Fanning (Squeaky), Bruce Dern (George Spahn), Mike Moh (Bruce Lee), Luke Perry (Wayne Maunder), Damian Lewis (Steve McQueen), Brenda Vaccaro (Mary Alice Schwarz), Nicholas Hammond (Sam Wanamaker)

Spoilers: I’ll discuss the film’s final 40 minutes in detail. I mean when you watch it you can guess where it’s going. But those final moments are truly central to my visceral hatred of this film.

There seems to be three eras of Tarantino movies. The first (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown) saw him work with pulpy themes focused on strong stories and character development. The second (Kill Bill and Grindhouse) saw him indulge his fascination with the B-movie and low-rent TV of his childhood. His third (Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained) sees him making strange revenge fantasies on behalf of other groups. Once Upon a Time is a marriage between his second and third eras. And I hated it. I hated, hated, hated, hated it. I genuinely can’t remember seeing a film I hated more at the cinema (maybe Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen). It’s a self-indulgent, tasteless, overlong, smug, unbearable pile of pleased with itself shit. It’s grotesque and it left me feeling dirty.

The plot (such as it is) follows three days in the lives of fictional Hollywood-turned-TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Dalton’s best friend, chauffeur and personal assistant who can’t get a job in Hollywood due to his terrible reputation. Dalton lives next door to Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). On Feb 8^th 1969, Dalton is offered a role in spaghetti westerns and preps for his next episodic TV show. On Feb 9^thDalton shoots the pilot of Lancer a new TV western (and a real TV show) as the baddie, suffering a crisis of confidence about his career and talent. Meanwhile Booth does some odd jobs and has an odd encounter with the Manson family. Intercut with this are scenes of Sharon Tate going about her everyday life, including joyfully watching one of her films in the cinema. Finally we join the action after a time jump on August 8^thas, after returning from filming in Italy, Dalton and Booth get drunk and high and accidentally waylay the Manson gang on their way to Sharon Tate’s house and – this being now Tarantino’s thing – brutally and bloodily murder the three Manson family killers.

Sigh. I think a question now has to be asked about what Tarantino’s problem is. As I realised where this film was going, my heart sank. This sort of revenge porn is, I’ll be honest, revolting, demeaning, tasteless and, leaving all else aside, not Tarantino’s place. It also demeans and cheapens the actual tragedies that happened to real people. Just as shots of Hitler’s head being machine-gunned to pieces in Inglorious Basterds while Jewish-American paratroopers machine-gunned a room of Nazi’s seemed to be grossly inappropriate, lowered the victims to the level of the killers and cheapened the actual deaths of real people in the Holocaust, making them seem like weak victims (as well as hardly being Tarantino’s place being neither Jewish or having any connection to the Holocaust) so it’s equally tasteless here. He just about gets away with it in Django Unchained, a black revenge thriller from a director who is not black and has littered his scripts with the “n-word” as all these guys were at least fictional people. But here it’s just grotesque.

We pride ourselves now that we have left the Gladiatorial ring behind, or that we no longer gather round on a Bank Holiday weekend to watch a convicted criminal being hung, drawn and quartered. But as I watched the Manson killers being bludgeoned to death, mutilated by a dog, their Glasgow kissed skulls crushed against a mantelpiece and immolated by flame thrower, I thought we’re not that far off. It’s basically a pornographic level of violence, that the film excuses because the Manson killers were bad guys (don’t get me wrong they were) but asking us to take pleasure in killing, is basically what Manson himself asked his followers to do. I find watching this sort of stuff not only feels like it cheapens the actual brutal, tragic murders of an eight-month pregnant Tate and her three friends, but also lowers me the level of the killers themselves. Tarantino’s films increasingly feel like the director himself would be fully on board with that episode of Black Mirror (“White Bear”) – where a killer is tortured everyday by tourists, and then has her mind wiped so she can go through it every single day – being turned into a reality.

In fact Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a worrying voyage into the man’s soul, and what I saw there was partly this muddled vanity and obsession with revenge (I mean who gives him the right to take revenge on behalf of others? Someone please tell me? There is an arrogance to that I find deeply unattractive), partly the tragically boring geeky tedium of the video-store nerd, mixed with a loving regard for white men and a worrying lack of interest (bordering on contempt) for anyone different.

I loathed and despised the final forty minutes of this film, but to be honest the opening two hours are not a lot better. This film is almost three hours long and contains about thirty minutes of plot if that. What it mostly is, is a chance for Tarantino to indulge to a ludicrous degree his obsession with low-rent culture of the 1950s and 1960s. To show off his knowledge of obscure films of the age (he’s heard of The Night They Raided Minsky’s you know…) and recreate in painstaking detail pastiches of the type of TV shows he grew up watching. These sequences seem to go on forever and ever, with the odd good line and decent gag not suddenly making it anything other than increasingly tedious.

What he really, really, really needs is a collaborator to tell him when less is more and certainly when too much is too much. The first two thirds of the film seem to stretch on for an indulgent eternity, and their content reveals more and more of the director’s obsession. White men are idealised and the old-school values of Hollywood, the world of the studio and simpler non-PC times are looked back on with a fussy nostalgia. The film takes every opportunity for Booth and Dalton to lambast hippie culture and the growing anti-establishment of the era, and has every character we meant to like yearning for the good old days.

Bruce Lee appears in the film, here interpreted as a braggart arsehole, showing off to the stunt men, who is humiliated by Cliff in a brawl. It’s a scene that amuses for a second and then makes you uncomfortably realise you are watching the most prominent non-white person in the film being put into his place by a middle-aged white man. It’s got more than a hint of racism to it. And Tarantino claims to be a fan of Bruce Lee! By contrast, while the film brutally murders the Manson killers, James Stacy (played by Timothy Olyphant here) the chiselled white-male star of Lancer, a man later jailed for repeated child molestation, is treated with a laudatory romance. Guess there are different rules for white guys who starred in Tarantino’s favourite shows. Whither the revenge saga where his victims mutilate him eh?

Women don’t get a better deal in this film. Sharon Tate is essentially an elevated extra, although Tarantino gets one lovely sequence out of her watching her latest film – a playful swinging 60s spy caper with Dean Martin – in a cinema and gleefully enjoying both the film and the audience reaction with a childish, delighted grin. But then a lot of the success of this is due to Robbie’s marvellous performance. Tarantino himself does his best to ruin it with his foot fetish, throwing Margot Robbie’s naked feet into virtually every shot. Aside from this, the film shoots and treats Tate like a teenager observing someone they have a crush on, romantically idealising her without ever getting anyway near understanding her or scratching the surface of her personality, instead following her with doe-eyed devotion.

But at least she gets lines. Every other woman in this is either a slut or murderer (or both) from the Manson cult, a shrew (like Booth’s dead wife and Kurt Russell’s stunt manager’s wife) or a bimbo (like Dalton’s eventual Euro-wife). There is no in between. It’s a film for men, written by a man, where the men take centre-stage, and a smugly held up as never doing anything wrong, with the film uncritically indulging their vices as symptoms of their tragedy of being left behind by a more progressive and changing country.

Both Pitt and DiCaprio enjoy swaggering twists on their images. DiCaprio overacts wildly, in an overly mannered performance full of actorly quirks (he has a stammer so we know he’s a sensitive soul deep down!), that riffs on other performances of his and largely involves shouting and swearing. Even scenes of emotional vulnerability carry a method fakeness about them – but then Once Upon a Time is a film with no heart, so it’s not surprising that when one of its characters tries to show one, the film stumbles spectacularly into artificiality. Pitt fares better, with a performance of McQueen like-cool, even if the film seems to believe that even if Cliff did kill his wife (as many believe) it’s fine because she was clearly a bitch.

All of this is shot with a flatness and lack of visual interest that is surprising for Tarantino, usually a much more vibrant director. Maybe he was just echoing the TV styles at the time. Maybe he was saving the fireworks for his orgy of (what he would call) cathartic violence at the end. Maybe it’s just a pretty mundane film. Maybe if Tarantino wasn’t the film-buffs darling, more people would call out his flatness and lack of imagination behind the camera and the soulless flatness of much of the films shooting and pacing. Its mediocrity and smug wallowing in the culture of yesteryear is appalling.

Because Once Upon a Time is a teenager’s film, and worst of all, a teenage bore. It’s got a major crush on Sharon Tate, but barely any interest in her personality. It drones on endlessly about geeky knowledge and old film and television that no one else knows anything about so that it sounds interesting and cool. It takes a childish, immature, sickening delight in fantasising about killing bad people in the most horrific ways it can possible imagine. It thinks it’s really clever and profound, but it’s actually a horrible, horrible film that’s also really tedious and which leaves a deeply unpleasant taste in the mouth, while demeaning the real-life victims of a crime by spinning some ludicrous revenge fantasy around them. It morally offended me after two hours of boring me. I hated it. I hated it. I really, really, really, really hated it. I hated it so very much.

Stellan Skarsgård is the Russian traitor whose secrets pose a danger for the British elite in Our Kind of Traitor

Director: Susanna White

Cast: Ewan McGregor (Perry MacKendrick), Stellan Skarsgård (Dima), Damian Lewis (Hector), Naomie Harris (Gail MacKendrick), Jeremy Northam (Aubrey Longrigg), Khalid Abdalla (Luke), Velibor Topic (Emilio Del Oro), Alicia von Rittberg (Natasha), Mark Gatiss (Billy Matlock), Mark Stanley (Ollie)

John Le Carré’s works often revolve around a dark, cynical view of government agencies as corrupt, indolent and focused on petty or personal concerns rather than doing what’s best for the country and its people. Is it any wonder that there has been such a burst of interest in adaptations on film and television of his work?

Our Kind of Traitor is straight out of the Le Carré wheelhouse. On a holiday to save their marriage (after his infidelity), Perry (Ewan McGregor) and Gail (Naomi Harris) bump into charismatic Russian gangster Dima (Stellan Skarsgård). Perry and he strike up a surprising friendship – and before he knows it Perry is agreeing to carry information from Dima to the British intelligence services. This attracts the attention of MI6 officer Hector (Damian Lewis) who sees this as an opportunity to expose the corrupt links between Russian criminals and high-level British bankers and politicians. Dima, however, will only hand over the goods if he is promised asylum for his family – something the British authorities, aware of the mess his revelations could cause, are not happy to allow…

Susanna White, veteran of some excellent television series of the last few years, puts together a confidently mounted and generally well-paced drama, with many of the expected Le Carré twists and turns. If she leans a little too heavily on the murk – the green and blue filters on the camera get a big workout here – it does at least mean that we get a real sense of the twilight world the characters operate in, meaning flashes of wide open space and bright daylight carry real impact. She also really understands how violence is often more shocking when we see the reaction of witnesses rather than the deed itself – all the most violent and tragic events in the film are seen at least partly from the perspective of the reactions of those witnessing them. The sense of danger on the edges of every action, stays with us while watching this unjust nightmare unravel.

It also works really well with one of the core themes of the movie: our ability to feel empathy for other people and how it affects our choices. Dima is driven towards defection because of his distaste for the increasing violence of the next generation of Russian criminals, and their lack of discrimination about who they harm. He’s all but adopted the orphaned children of a previous victim of violence, and his motivation at all points is to insure his family’s safety. Hector, our case officer, is motivated overwhelmingly by a sense of tragic, impotent fury about his rival ensuring Hector’s son is serving a long sentence in prison for drug smuggling.

And Perry is pulled into all this because he has a strong protective streak – something that eventually saves his marriage. Perry frequently throws himself forward to protect the weak, with no regard for his safety, from his unending efforts to protect Dima’s family to throwing himself in fury at a mobster roughing up a young woman. His intense empathy and protective streak motor all his actions and run through the whole movie.

It’s a shame then that his actual character isn’t quite interesting enough to hold the story together. Nothing wrong with McGregor’s performance, the character itself is rather sketchily written. Aside from his protectiveness we don’t get much of a sense of him and – naturally enough – he’s often a passenger or witness to events around him. Similarly, Naomie Harris does her best with a character that barely exists.

Instead the plaudits (and meaty parts) go to Skarsgård and Lewis. Skarsgård dominates the film with an exuberant, larger than life character who never feels like a caricature and reveals increasing depths of humanity and vulnerability beneath the surface. Lewis matches him just as well, at first seeming like a buttoned-up George Smiley type, but with his own tragic background motivating a long-term career man to slowly build his own conscience.

Our Kind of Traitor handles many of these personal themes very well, but it doesn’t quite manage to tie them into something that really feels special. Instead this feels a bit more like a Le Carré-by- numbers. We get the shady secret services, government greed, good people trapped in the middle – even some of the characters, from the foul-mouthed spook played by Mark Gatiss to Jeremy Northam’s jet black Aubrey, seem like they could have appeared in any number of his novels.

There is a film here that is wanting to be made about the invasion of the UK by dirty Russian money – but it never quite comes out as this Dante-esque, Miltonian spiral. Instead the film too often settles for more functional thrills, a more traditional or middle-brow approach that works very well while you watch it, but doesn’t go the extra mile to turn this into something you will really remember.