The truth about Brad Pitt’s Cliff

Spoilers follow for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. 

Though Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton is the big TV star and Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate the rising starlet, it is Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth who is undoubtedly the hero of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. 

Cliff is the film’s resident badass, a stuntman who gets up to even cooler stuff off-camera than on. He spends his downtime on set sparring with Bruce Lee, and his days off picking up nubile young (too young, as it turns out) hippies. It is Cliff who gets the white-hot shirtless scene, Cliff who emerges victorious in not one but two face-offs against the Manson Family goons, Cliff who thus inadvertently saves Sharon and her friends from their grisly fates.

Yet writer-director Quentin Tarantino makes rooting for Cliff a complicated endeavor. 

Quentin Tarantino makes rooting for Cliff a complicated endeavor. 

As a humble nobody just trying to make ends meet among the rich and famous Hollywood elite, Cliff initially comes across as a sympathetic figure. (Though never a sad-sack one — he’s too cool and confident for that.) He lives alone in a tiny trailer, in contrast to Rick and Sharon’s lavish Hollywood Hills mansions, showers affection on his loyal dog, Brandy, and proves himself a true-blue pal to Rick time and time again. 

Midway through the movie, though, we learn why Cliff has such trouble finding work. In a flashback, we discover that stunt coordinators like Randy (Kurt Russell) are loath to hire Cliff because he is believed to have killed his own wife. A flashback within that flashback shows Cliff and his late wife on a boat, him seated with a harpoon gun as she towers over him and berates him for being a loser. 

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood never actually gets around to confirming if Cliff murdered his wife. The boat scene cuts away before we see Cliff do anything. And because the flashbacks are framed as Cliff thinking back (the sequence is bookended by shots of Cliff gazing off into the distance, and the second one has him reacting to the memories), it’s unclear how truthful they’re meant to be anyway.]

It’s not the only mystery surrounding Cliff. The flashback also has Cliff challenging, and apparently besting, Bruce Lee in a fistfight on set; depending on how truthful you assume the flashbacks to be, they are either accurate accountings of previous events or the exaggerated fantasies of an unreliable narrator. In conversations throughout the movie, Cliff variously implies he’s never been to prison and reminisces about his time in a chain gang; we don’t find out which it is, or if he did go to prison, why.

Pitt’s performance doesn’t clarify anything, either. His Cliff can be charming, he can be relaxed, he can even be goofy, but there’s a coldness to him, even at his friendliest, and he carries himself with a confidence that suggests he could dominate everyone in the room, even if he’s chosen not to at this precise time. 

Image: Andrew Cooper / Sony Pictures

All this ambiguity colors how we consider Cliff’s later actions throughout the movie. Does a subsequent scene in which Cliff punches the stuffing out of a Spahn Ranch goon lend credence to the idea that Cliff is violent enough to kill his wife for saying mean things to him?

Is it purely satisfying to watch him lay waste to Manson acolytes in the climax, or is there something sick about seeing a man who may have already killed one woman kill two more people? Are we to take Cliff defending Rick, Sharon, and the rest from the Manson kids as a redemptive act? Does his apparent glee register simply as a consequence of his acid trip, or proof that he’s a monster? 

I don’t have the answers, and I don’t think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is trying to offer any. The film is more interested in the space between what we know to be true and what we don’t, and our reactions to that unresolvable conflict. 

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is interested in the space between what we know to be true and what we don’t, and our reactions to that unresolvable conflict. 

There’s the entire Sharon Tate storyline, which relies on the contrast between what we’re seeing onscreen (i.e., a young woman living her best life) and how she’s most often portrayed in this day and age (i.e., as the victim of a notoriously gruesome murder). Sharon’s best scene in the movie is entirely about how she feels about how she’s seen, as she reacts to a crowd reacting to her own performance in The Wrecking Crew. 

(In a graceful touch, Tarantino lets the real Tate shine in the footage, rather than replacing her with Robbie — thus allowing Tate to define her own image for us, however briefly and imperfectly.)

And there’s Rick, whose anxieties about his fading career belie the glamorous star image he projects. He’s obsessed with how he’s perceived, and it’s hard to blame him. As an actor, his entire career is pretending to be things he’s not. 

The fact that Rick and Cliff are played by DiCaprio and Pitt adds another chewy layer to it all: Here are two of Hollywood’s most famous, most acclaimed, most enduring movie stars playing two guys on the decline. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood delights in mingling fact and fiction on all levels of its storytelling. 

But taking a meta view of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood‘s themes inspires some darker, less flattering considerations as well.

A scene in which Rick improvises by throwing his scene partner, an 8-year-old girl, to the ground, may bring to mind Uma Thurman’s story of being seriously injured on the set of Kill Bill when Tarantino pushed her to perform a dangerous stunt. Jay Sebring’s happy ending might provoke mixed feelings if you recall that the actor playing him, Emile Hirsch, was convicted of choking a female studio executive. Cliff’s flirtation with an underage Manson girl might sit oddly in a movie that also features Roman Polanski, who was convicted of raping a 13-year-old girl, as a minor character.

Less concrete factors come into play as well. Cliff’s taste for brutality could play differently depending on what you believe happened on that plane in 2016. For that matter, the very question of how Once Upon a Time in Hollywood treats its female characters may be impacted by what you think of Tarantino’s track record with women in general, based on his past films, the rumors you’ve heard about him, his evolving thoughts on abusers like Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski, and anything else he’s said or done in the past.

Image: Andrew Cooper / Sony Pictures

It is impossible to say how many of these echoes are intentional on Tarantino’s part, and to what extent. In a way, it doesn’t matter. They are part of the context surrounding this movie, whether we (or he) like it or not, whether we choose to engage with them or not.

Which brings us back around to Cliff. His wife’s death isn’t referenced again in the movie, and it’s not strictly relevant to any of the events that follow. But the fact of it, and the questions surrounding it, remain, lingering in the backs of our minds as we follow the rest of the story, shaping our understanding of who this man is and what we make of him.

Perhaps you’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, since his guilt is uncertain. Maybe you’ll figure he did it, and read the rest of his arc as one of literally getting away with murder. Or that even if he did it, that doesn’t necessarily make him an evil person. Quite possibly you’ll decide that you don’t really know, but the very question will leave an odd taste in your mouth.

The truth is unknowable, since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood declines to reveal it, and Cliff is a fictional figure that only exists within the confines of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But the rumor is in the movie for a reason. So is the doubt. Reasonable people can argue over how credible the accusation is, or what we should feel about it — just as reasonable people can debate how much of the real-life context surrounding a movie to dismiss or engage with while watching it.

Ultimately, then, the point is not whether any of Cliff’s biographical details are “true.” It’s what you make of them, whether you think they matter, how it frames your perspective of him, how you decide to use or discard all that not-quite-information. It’s an uncomfortable place to live — but as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood knows, it’s not an unfamiliar one.