I've been helping my daughter put together a 6000-word paper on the abuse women take in Hollywood, both through the fetishisation of dead actesses and the Lolita effect in which young actresses are paired with much older men. I hadn't really thought about the former, but I read that a lot of women were very upset with the way Sharon Tate was portrayed in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Way back in 2019 when the film was presented at the Cannes Film Festival, Farah Nayeri dared to ask the vaunted auteur why Margot Robbie had so little screen time as Sharon Tate. Quentin angrily shot back, "I reject your hypothesis." It was Margot who tried to answer Farah's question by saying "the moments I was on screen gave a moment to honor Sharon." I doubt Quentin was very happy with that answer.
The film was almost universally praised at the time, but Nayeri's point was spot on. Viewers had been led to believe that Sharon Tate would be at the center of the story. The movie promos were just teasers. Margaret Qualley had a far more substantial role as a kittenish Manson girl than Margot Robbie did as Sharon.
This brings up the second recurring theme - playing a young actress, Margaret, off a middle-aged actor, as all her scenes were with Brad Pitt, 30 years her senior. At one point she offered him a blow job. Now, I suppose you could say Pussycat was just a two-bit whore, willing to do anything for a ride. However, Qualley played the fictitious Manson girl with all the Lolita-like charm of a precocious teenager, making it seem less like a quick score than a very awkward scene for poor Cliff. He didn't fall for the jailbait, but the cameraman looked like he was gong to crawl inside Pussycat's bootie shorts. However, Cliff did take an LSD-laced cigarette from her.
The 60s and 70s abounded in stories of underage groupies, so one can excuse Quentin for just trying to capture the time and place. Steven Tyler's notorious affair with a 16 year-old groupie had recently been in the entertainment weeklies. He adopted Julia Holcomb so that he could take her on the road with him. This is very much in keeping with Lolita. Fortunately for him she was above the age of statutory rape, but that didn't make the story any less appalling. He apparently told everyone she was 14 at the time, and liked to dress her up in school girl outfits. No one really seemed to care then, or so we are led to believe.
The feminist movement was in full stride in the 1960s, but you would never know it from this movie. Quentin assiduously avoids any references other than literally belittling the movement through a fictional child actor Trudi Fraser. This tells you a lot about Quentin. He seems to only be able to address serious issues through children, reducing them to the level of Walt Disney.
Meanwhile, Sharon Tate is shown running around town in little skirts and vinyl bootie shorts, gleefully watching herself in her latest movie, The Wrecking Crew, and trying to figure out what to buy Roman for his birthday. We don't really get any sense of time or Sharon's own questioning of her sexually exploitative roles. From interviews, she wanted to be something more than a "sexpot." At one point in this Carnaby Street interview with Merv Griffin, she even talks about how much she hated plastic clothes and the fashion trends in general. However, Toni Basil, who knew both her and Roman, said Sharon never really was anything more than an ingenue, always in the shadow of her older husband.
It was probably too much information for Quentin. This was principally a bromance movie about Rick and Cliff trying to figure out what to do with their lives as Hollywood became ravaged by hippies. Rick would eventually go onto make spaghetti westerns like Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood before him, and Cliff would just go on being Cliff, picking up whatever stunt work he could find.
Another problem surfaced when Rick did arrange for Cliff to serve as a stunt man on one of his friend's sets. It wasn't just the fight he picked with Bruce Lee, but Cliff's notorious past that caught up to him. People hadn't forgotten about the mysterious death of his wife, an obvious allusion to Natalie Wood, although her tragic death didn't occur until many years later. This pissed off the stunt coordinator, played by Zoe Bell, far worse than any harm inflicted upon her top stuntman, Bruce. Interesting side not, Zoe played Uma Thurman's stunt double in the Kill Bill movies.
On all counts, the women in Quentin's movie are diminished to the point of caricature. Not one of them had any strong lines or even strong presence other than the very short clip in which Zoe Bell admonished Cliff and kicked him off the set after his fictitious fight with Bruce Lee. It is only in 8 year-old Trudi that we find any depth to a female character, and this largely used to soothe Rick Dalton's bruised ego.
However, the biggest gripe remains Sharon Tate. Everyone was looking forward to Margot Robbie's star turn as the famous Hollywood ingenue, and all we got were just a few short clips of her prancing around like a teenage girl playing hooky from school. We saw nothing of her relationship with Roman, who apparently wasn't around much anyway. Her dearest friend appeared to be Jay Sebring, with whom she briefly had an affair before she met Roman, but remained close to.
Quentin thought he may have been "giving her life," but did so in such a stilted way that it is hard to form any kind of attachment to Sharon Tate, not that she gets killed in his white male fantasy. Instead, Quentin enacts his revenge on her would-be assassins in the most violent way possible, replete with Cliff high on his acid-laced cigarette, much to the audience's delight. It was interesting that he chose to spare Pussycat too.
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