Once Upon A Time in… Hollywood is important and, at the same time, discerning, a feat, a belfry of surreal impressionism just a tad higher than its cause (as if the viewer were gazing inwardly), catching aesthetic decomposition at just the right turn, doing a kicking backflip off myth and parable, and deploying the ignominious catch of great beaming mugs—normalization of the Herculean—just to string and dilapidate neighbourhood laundry, to etch existence in its wrongful place. Pacino, for his short part, is a canned diplomat par excellence, and DiCaprio, whose elliptic role-portage succeeds like an endorphin, must be at his utmost censorial, categorically denying his hands in so many pots.
Once Upon A Time in… Hollywood is betrayed and shuttled, full of pulsations and palpitations, a heroic sublimation eroded by harsh object-relation. It is mirrored eruptively where language is weakest (probably somewhere between the basal ganglia and brain stem), showing that the self-ideal is, indeed, Real, and more, is just a simple autological prism, but what tainted reticence it takes. It pits and piles pieces under impromptu oaths just to skim the nervous ‘geal off of outliers, throwing unconscious virtualization versus instantiation and energizing an anachronistic, practically co-morbid friendliness, and blending desire and egoism into quintessential Substance, whose inveterate nesting acts like preconscious avowal, whereas its aggression is sensitive—more so, at least, than its masochistic response-set, its denatured dialectic. Finally, sharing its story as alternately matter-of-fact and colloquial, skin-raising and slippery, its narrative sidebar at the hippie ranch, riddled to heart with the sorts of pitfalls formerly known only to deep alcohol, is the single best depiction of neurological anxiety in cinema history.
