Every­one, just let Quentin Taran­ti­no cook

Charles Fos­ter Kane com­plained that he couldn’t buy a bag of peanuts with­out some­one writ­ing a song about him; Quentin Taran­ti­no lives with a less adu­la­to­ry ver­sion of this atten­tion-curse, unable to sneeze with­out incit­ing at least twen­ty-four hours of impas­sioned dis­course com­plete with back­lash­es, back­lash-to-back­lash­es, and per­haps a cou­ple of front­lash­es. When you’re one of the most well-known film­mak­ers in the world, every­thing you do makes the news, for bet­ter and for exhausting.

Case in point: just last night, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter set the world of Film Twit­ter atwit­ter when they broke the news that Taran­ti­no has begun work on his tenth and, as he has con­tend­ed for many years now, final fea­ture. He’s com­plet­ed a script for the project titled The Movie Crit­ic, and has begun putting out cast­ing feel­ers for a female lead who’ll fit with the ​’70s Los Ange­les set­ting. That’s all the gen­er­al pub­lic knows at present.

Taran­ti­no schol­ars were quick to make a con­nec­tion between this col­lec­tion of vague intel and the filmmaker’s oft-stat­ed fond­ness for crit­ic Pauline Kael, who raised eye­brows in the ​’70s by tak­ing tem­po­rary leave of crit­i­cism for a con­sul­tant job at Para­mount, per per­son­al request of War­ren Beat­ty. How­ev­er brief, the time she spent inside the indus­try she’d always cri­tiqued from a dis­tance formed a sig­nif­i­cant peri­od in her life, and could very well pro­vide the sub­stance for a movie treatment.

And so began the spec­u­la­tion: who would play Kael? Would the actress be Jew­ish, like Kael her­self, and does that mat­ter? Might Taran­ti­no turn to his best gal and con­stant col­lab­o­ra­tor Uma Thur­man? At 5’11”, is she too tall to truth­ful­ly por­tray the diminu­tive Kael? Would Taran­ti­no be upfront about Kael’s many poor­ly-aged opin­ions, for instance, her jaw-drop­ping take on the inter­sec­tion between act­ing and race? With­in the hour, users were post­ing screen­shots of ​“kael” join­ing their mut­ed terms list, already exhaust­ed with the back-and-forth about a movie at least a year away.

But Taran­ti­no has cul­ti­vat­ed a less lit­er­al rela­tion­ship to his­to­ry than this, and the hasty assump­tions that he’s ren­der­ing some kind of straight­for­ward Kael biopic feel mis­placed. Think back to the loud­ly-tout­ed cer­tain­ty that Tarantino’s ​“Man­son movie” Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood would end with a venge­ful Sharon Tate get­ting one over on her would-be killer; Man­son bare­ly appears, Tate spar­ing­ly pops in to run some errands, and most of the film fol­lows two fic­tion­al guys amal­ga­mat­ing aspects of sev­er­al dif­fer­ent his­tor­i­cal figures.

Besides, Taran­ti­no likes to play it fast and loose with the fac­tu­al record, to the point that ding­ing him for lib­er­ties or inac­cu­ra­cies has lit­tle use. Hitler didn’t die in a movie the­ater, and of course that’s the point, the artist exer­cis­ing his free­dom to rewrite the past to suit his cre­ative pur­pos­es. The weary­ing squab­bles in 2019 about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s depic­tion of Bruce Lee should’ve been a learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty, an object les­son that Tarantino’s only inter­est­ed in real peo­ple inso­far as they can be turned into char­ac­ters an arm’s length from reality.

This isn’t to dis­cour­age wild the­o­ry-bandy­ing, far from it. Guess­ing what bat­shit­tery Taran­ti­no will cook up next should be a source of fun, not dread, the empha­sis being on all he can do rather than what he shouldn’t. In any case, there’s still so much run­way before any­one sees a sin­gle frame of this movie. For our own health, let us all unclench and de-brace, and delight in the not-know­ing while we still can.