Good Try:Quentin Tarantino's ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD - A novel

 ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

by Quentin Tarantino, HarperCollins, 2021

In 1986, my best friend & I attended a sneak preview of Rob Reiner's STAND BY ME, which came free for buying a ticket to see RUTHLESS PEOPLE. As I remember it, we enjoyed RUTHLESS PEOPLE, but we did not laugh a great deal for 3/4 of the film. A chuckle here & there as we enjoyed the story, but no howls of mirth until the final 20 minutes, when a pair of pay phones drives poor Bill Pullman half-insane. Those last 20 minutes paid off a film I had begun to think would rate no more than a shrugged "Whatever," if asked about it later. That, I believe, marked one of my first experiences of gestalt, that condition wherein the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Quentin Tarantino's first published venture into writing fiction for the book market, the novelization of his 2019 magnum opus, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, makes another case, though far from the first, of the whole being more than its parts.

If you are one of those Tarantino fans who not only believe his films arrive without flaws but who bridle when the more agnostic film fans disagree, this would be a good time to stop reading and go put KILL BILL VOL. I in the bluray player. As I read a number of those fans' writeups of OUATIH following my first reading of the novelization I bridled quite often, myself, so know that I understand your feelings, whether or not I agree with them. I love Mr. Tarantino's films, in the main - though the appeal of DJANGO UNCHAINED eludes me - but that doesn't mean I think his work above critique. I don't know of any filmmaker whose work is without flaw, not even Saint Martin of Scorsese.

I have just finished my second reading of the novel. After this second time, my impression remains exactly where it did after the first. Mr. Tarantino fills in details movie viewers could only imagine, and a few dozen they could not. More important, particularly for fans, it gives an emotional closure to both Rick Dalton and his stunt double, Cliff Booth that the film did not.

Indeed, many of the characters receive fuller and more satisfying story arcs in the book, but that's what we expect of a 331-page novel vs. a two+ hour film. That includes Charles Manson, though his character, and that of Sharon Tate, has no resolution, which felt appropriate to me. In Mr. Tarantino's alternate timeline, where we know that a significant portion of his "Family" die at Cliff & Rick's hands, it's right that we can only speculate what might have become of Squeaky, Pussycat, Gypsy & Charlie, himself.

That said, Mr. Tarantino does not significantly alter our fundamental understanding of the main characters. Cliff Booth did, in fact, get away with killing his wife - along with a number of other folks - but what would seem a dealbreaker detail for his character becomes an unexpectedly poignant sequence in which we see Cliff experience the shame, regret, and remorse we never see in the film. If Cliff Booth has strong sociopathic tendencies, he's also a fully human, even sympathetic, character by the time his story concludes.

Better still, for me, Tarantino makes Rick Dalton a not only sympathetic but empathetic character, as it's revealed Rick suffers from bipolar affective disorder, which has also left its bloody fingerprints all over my life. While I liked both characters in the film, Rick came across to me as a drunken, self pitying horse's ass. Understanding him as a fellow traveler on the bipolar road didn't change his drunkenness or his self pity but it allowed me to feel for him as the film does not. One of the things Tarantino gives us more of here is Rick's burgeoning friendship with young Trudie Frasier (aka Mirabella Lancer.)

Without ever saying it, Tarantino does an excellent job of showing us that Rick is good with kids. As a man who spent most of a year babysitting a friend's 9, 6, & 4 year-old daughters, who showed me I'm good with kids, these sequences had me almost in tears. The 4 year-old, Ellie, as sharp and self aware as Trudie, was around the same age as Trudie the last time I saw her, so her scene in the movie, expanded to a few such in the book, has a powerful emotional resonance. Getting more of Trudie was, in a strange way, like getting more time with Ellie, whose family moved to Nebraska a few years ago. Obviously, few readers will make that kind of connection, but I doubt many will find themselves unmoved by Trudie & Rick's friendship.

Fine, I imagine you saying, but there's a huge "BUT..." coming, so why not get to it, Russ? Fair enough. Remember, you were warned.

The main problem I had with the novelization comes down to something I never expected: it's not particularly well written. Oh, it's structured well enough, and much more linear than any of his screenplays outside of JACKIE BROWN. It's emotionally resonant, and Tarantino builds the world of 1969 LA with more color and detail than is possible with a film. When I say the book is not well written, I'm spraking of pure mechanics. Of grammar and punctuation and of E.B. White's vital dictum: OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS.

Reading some fan-reviews, I get the impression few of Mr. Tarantino's acolytes majored in - or even liked - English. No review I saw noticed that most of Tarantino's sentences contain twice as many words as necessary. No review noticed that he italicizes the wrong word in a sentence, interrupting his narrative flow. None of these mentioned that italicizing, itself, makes for a kind of editorializing, telling the reader what/how to feel. A strong prose writer achieves that without italics - the emphasis is clear within the text, itself. Readers don't require spoonfeeding. We don't need an author to tell us how to feel about the story and, since we will ultimately decide that for ourselves, regardless, it's an exercise in futility.

It's clear to me that Tarantino's publishers, HarperCollins, either never assigned him a proofreader/copy editor or he had that lack written into his contract. Given Tarantino's ongoing "I never went to college and I'm rich & famous as a screenwriter, so what do I need to learn" narrative, I'm not too surprised that no one took him aside and said, "Mr. Tarantino, you shorten 'him' as 'im', not 'em,'" but I wish someone had. After a career of rule-breaking in his films, I'm also not surprised he would try for same in his fiction. To break rules successfully as a writer, however, one needs to know those rules with the same intimacy as a lover. When writing and directing films, Quentin Tarantino knows those rules with that intimacy and the results of his rule breaking speak for themselves. When it comes to prose, however, Tarantino does not enjoy that intimacy and the result also speaks for itself.

Standards change. The standard for much of the writing I encounter nowadays conforms to what a college professor told me a few years ago. "As long as people basically understand your point, you've done your job."

In the '80s & '90s, as both an English & journalism major, that "good enough is good enough" ethos would have resulted in strong encouragement from my academic advisor to consider another major. Writing is not easy. Not just anyone can do it well. It's a discipline. I've written something, even if only a few paragraphs, everyday for about 40 years and I consider myself a good, but not great, writer, and many days I'm not sure I've even achieved basic competency. The rules for writing make me a stronger writer, and when I do break them, readers are not confused or, worse, bored.

At times on both reads I was bored by Mr. Tarantino's prose. Worse than that, his refusal to write in a clean, close to the bone style and his cheerful refusal to acknowledge grammar and punctuation kept yanking me out of the narrative, as I found myself reading the same sentence two or three times, parsing the sense from the flab. With a very little copy editing, however, most of these problems would not exist for me to point out.

None of these issues prevents ONCE UPON A TIME, the novel, from being a great story, nor from being an emotionally richer and fuller experience than the film. Though some of Mr. Tarantino's disciples may disagree, this is not a bad, or even negative, review. It's a book worth reading, and more than once. This is a balanced review. This is me saying, "I want Mr. Tarantino's next book to surpass this one," which I do. In order to achieve that, though, Mr. Tarantino ought to consider checking his ego at the door and submitting himself to the indignity of editing. The cliche summation of a narrative work, which I've resorted to in less imaginative moments, says, "It's a good story told well."

I can't say that of ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD. The best I can do is, "It's a great story, told less well than could be." I devoutly hope Mr. Tarantino does (even) better next time. Without addressing the basic mechanical issues, however, his chances are slim.