I like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood a lot for not emotionally connecting to what was happening for about 80% of its bloated runtime. What's really interesting about it is that the bloat, which is of course symptomatic of Tarantino revelling in how witty he is (debatable) how realized his sense of 60s California is (undebatable, as much as any one of us is an authority on what 60s California was "really like"), is necessary for the film to reach emotional heights totally unseen in any previous Tarantino movie.
But to understand why the ending is the best thing Tarantino has ever done, I have to talk about Sharon Tate first. I have always been fascinated with Sharon Tate because she was beautiful and her death was unimaginably tragic. You already know that. We knew Tarantino knows that, but did we trust him to be responsible and not sensationalize that tragedy? Evidently some people didn't and still don't, because there are already a ton of articles out parroting the opinion that "the movie is misogynist", the most prominent of which, called "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Not For Women" is very funnily enough written by a man, because another thing any smart woman knows is that the only thing men love more than telling us what's misogynist is telling us that we're not allowed to like something!
Anyway, I wasn't sure that I trusted him. But then the scenes of Margot Robbie, who I did not buy as Sharon Tate at all because I don't think anyone could really "play" her but chose to suspend my sense of disbelief for out of necessity, pile up and she doesn't talk a whole lot but there's this sense of...something about her. Something like magic or grace but something real. And then it clicked, that Tarantino intentionally films her in this mysterious quiet beautiful way because we will never know what she was really like. Because she never really had a chance to show "us", aka the public, the audience in her movies and in her life. What we know, what Tarantino knows, and what we see, is that she was beautiful, she was ambitious, and she was innocent. The people shrieking about how she's not yapping in every scene about Royales with Cheese or whatever should be so glad that Tarantino respected her enough not to put his annoying fucking dialogue in her mouth.
So we sit through scenes that are almost hilariously drawn out yet still compelling, if not purely in a "what will a tortured ambitious alcoholic in showbusiness do next?" way, until we finally get to that date card, and then we sit through 20 or so nerve-wracking minutes of Leo and Brad drinking, Sharon and Jay talking, the cult members talking, until it happens. And "it" isn't what you'd think. I honestly in my heart of hearts thought that Tarantino was going to show his two main characters kick down doors and fuck up the Manson murderers as they attacked the real Cielo Drive house, but as soon as I realized that wasn't going to happen I realized it would be a sadly futile display of cinematic vengeance but one too ham-fisted, even for him. "It" happens and you literally cannot believe your eyes as every punch and bite and stab and slam is so felt on physical and psychic planes that for once, Tarantino's violence is not just violence for the sake of violence (which, to be fair, I am not opposed to), it's his way of showing how much he fucking hates Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel. He is making them suffer through fiction because that's all he can do. They ruined Sharon Tate's life, they ruined the lives of so many people, they ruined the 60s, and this is his payback, futile as it is. To make us feel that hatred, and then to make us feel like, yeah, so what it didn't happen, but it's nice to think that it could. And what better way is there to make us live through someone else's fiction than through the movies? Even without Rick and Cliff's super satisfying emotional arcs, this would still be perfect. The fact that Rick starts to make it big and Cliff redeems...you know...maybe...?...are just empathetic cherries on the top of this overloaded messy delicious sundae of a movie.
But once all is said and done and the corpses are hauled away from Cielo Drive, you hear Sharon's voice on the intercom, asking Rick if he's okay, and you can't do anything else but cry.
So yeah, I never thought I'd show up for Quentin Tarantino, ubiquitous punching bag of distinguished film people such as myself, but with this movie he has reached what is probably the absolute summit of his capacity for emotional catharsis, and perfectly fuses his love for cinema with his underused capacity for being able to sketch real people amidist the one-liners. I look forward to rabidly defending it for the rest of my life.