Maybe that’ll change the way you feel about Cliff, maybe it won’t.
The novel only wades deeper into the moral/political thicket of the era. He considers the record number of Japanese soldiers he killed in WWII a karmic counterbalance against the murder of his wife. At one point Cliff shoots two Italian gangsters point blank because he knows he’ll get away with it. In the book, Cliff (and Rick, for that matter) stands proudly against the flower children while showing off some casual racism and misogyny. When the film came out in 2019, its seemingly somewhat reactionary cultural politics were both criticized and celebrated, and Cliff-who, in addition to killing his wife, brutally murders some female Manson followers and gets into a fight with Bruce Lee after mocking him-is the main symbol of them. Cliff, on the other hand, is constantly served up as a badass man of action and, improbably, a man of impeccable cinematic taste.īut if we get some clarity on the death of Cliff’s wife, that only reinforces the ambiguity around his character. Though Rick Dalton (the aging western actor played by Leonardo DiCaprio) gets plenty of pages, he’s mostly there as a platform for Hollywood lore and occasional comic relief. In that sense, the spirit of the book is the same as the film, even if the content differs slightly.īut the biggest difference between the two versions is that the book is very much a Cliff Booth story.
#Once upon a time in hollywood novel movie#
Tarantino uses the novel to dish out a treasure trove of classic Hollywood trivia-old watering holes for acting legends, movie stars who pivoted to porno, theaters that closed down years ago. The movie’s climactic final sequence in which Cliff brutally shuts down a Manson family home invasion is barely covered, but we do get a scene of Cliff buying a Tom Jones cassette and riffing on his favorite songs of the sixties.
Tarantino’s novel doesn’t strictly follow the plot of his movie. It’s a fun four hundred page read designed in the style of a vintage mass market paperback, and it’s chock-full of new information about your favorite hunky-but-problematic stunt double, Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth. Quentin Tarantino’s novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is out today, nearly two years after the film hit theaters.
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