Quentin Tarantino has created the best movie of the summer, pretty much the only one that isn’t a spinoff, sequel or Marvel mashup.
“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” about the Manson Family murders and starring the three hottest stars in the world, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, is even killing it at the box office. It has pulled in almost $300 million worldwide in less than six weeks and delivered Tarantino the biggest opening weekend of his career.
But, instead of being thanked for singlehandedly breathing life back into the rotting corpse of grownup movies, the writer-director is being damned for alleged sins of sexism and misogyny that threaten to tarnish his body of work.
Why? Not because of anything he’s actually done, but because his female characters are violently killed on screen. Because they don’t speak enough.
Because 16 years ago, he made light of Roman Polanski’s predatory pedophilia.
And because he used to work with Horrible Harvey Weinstein. Guilt by association is Hollywood’s new McCarthyism, of a piece with Debra Messing’s attempt to blacklist President Trump supporters attending a Beverly Hills fundraiser.
But “wokerati” criticism of Tarantino’s masterpiece is worse than that.
It’s a worrying sign that the politicization of our culture is hellbent on taking the joy out of everything.
The criticism of “Once Upon a Time” started in earnest at a press conference in Cannes in May when Tarantino “snapped” at a loaded question from New York Times reporter Farah Nayeri.
Robbie is “a very talented actress,” Nayeri told Tarantino, before correcting herself: “actor.” She is “a person with a great deal of acting talent and you haven’t really given her many lines in the movie, and I guess that was a deliberate choice on your part and I just wanted to know why that was.”
Tarantino gave the question the respect it deserved: “I reject your hypothesis.”
But in the hyperfrenetic world of umbrage-taking, this was proof of his misogyny because, of course, the reporter was a woman.
Robbie tried sweetly to explain that the role “gave an opportunity to honor Sharon [Tate].”
Which is the point.
In real life, Tate was a beautiful, 26-year-old actress married to film director Polanski and 8½ months pregnant.
On Aug. 8, 1969, while Polanski was away, drug-addled members of Charles Manson’s cult broke into her Beverly Hills home and brutally murdered her and three friends. It was a cruel death: The naked Tate and her unborn baby were stabbed 16 times.
Tarantino’s movie is profoundly respectful of Tate. He has immortalized her as a lovely young woman, delighted with her budding career and imminent motherhood, freeing her from the role history had created for her as the dehumanized murder victim.
If Robbie’s character talked too much, you would lose that elusive reincarnation quality.
To underline the respect Tarantino showed to Tate’s memory, after spending five years writing the script, he then took the care to visit her sister and show her what he was planning.
Debra Tate told Vanity Fair she wept when she first saw Robbie playing her sister. She “was completely Sharon, and it just touched me so much that [I cried] big tears. The front of my shirt was wet. I actually got to see my sister again … nearly 50 years later.”
Tarantino calls Sharon Tate the “heart” of his film. Everything is about her. And — spoiler alert — he provides the happy ending that real life did not. She is not murdered. It is the Manson gang who meet a grisly end.
No wonder Tarantino dismissed the question.
But self-appointed moral arbiters now waste their time trying to find evidence of sexism in his movies, counting the number of lines a female character has and comparing it with the males’, or blaming him for the violence against the Manson women at the end of “Once Upon a Time.”
To express empathy with the Manson killers simply because they’re women, you have to go through the moral contortion of absolving them of their evil acts by pretending they had no agency of their own, which is more sexist than anything in the film, when you think about it.
Nicholas Hammond, who in the movie plays director Sam Wanamaker with brilliant comic flair, points out Tarantino never exploits women with nudity. “There is not a bare breast or full frontal shot ever” in his films.
In “Once Upon A Time,” Hammond says, Tarantino “actually bends the truth the other way in the Spahn Ranch sequence showing all the [Manson] women fully clothed.”
That’s despite the fact that every account of Manson’s “family” talks of their constant nudity and group sex, so Tarantino had a legitimate excuse to titillate if he chose.“But he is such a traditionalist, he believes in making movies in the classic style, relying on character and dialogue rather than nudity,” says Hammond.
Hating “Once Upon A Time” because of some real or imagined anti-feminist bent of its creator is akin to the attacking Lionel Shriver’s wonderful novels for “cultural appropriation.”
It’s akin to roasting comedians for making the sort of politically incorrect jokes that used to be their shock-in-trade.
Or the latest silliness, deploring Renoir as an irredeemable sexist because he painted nude women.
Art can’t be poked into little boxes according to the latest fad of identity politics. And dicing up the motivations of an artist instead of experiencing his creation on its own merits is a surefire recipe for impoverishing art and our own imaginations.
‘Err line’ beasts
A frequent-flier friend woke up the other day on an airplane to find a fat, farting Corgi lying on her feet.
She had to blink a few times to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. But, no. What used to be a rare exception that airlines would make for anxious people to bring an “emotional-support animal” onto a flight seems to be ballooning into an entitlement.
Now it’s horses — miniature, maybe, cute, sort of. But they shouldn’t be on a plane.
What if there’s turbulence? Suddenly you have 300 pounds of airborne horse flesh rocketing around the cabin?
Flying domestically is hellish enough without adding large, flatulent animals.
If you need an emotional-support horse because you’re too anxious to fly alone, try popping a Xanax. Or better yet, catch a train.
Can’t hide, ‘John Doe’
An anonymous associate of Jeffrey Epstein has asked a judge to keep his identity secret in sealed court documents relating to child-sex-trafficking charges the pervert financier was facing before he died in jail. But that’s not how justice works.
Sorry, John Doe. You deserve the presumption of innocence, but you don’t get to hide.