This article contains spoilers for “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”

With the arrival of each new Quentin Tarantino film, the mix of collective excitement and dread is palpable. There’s the feel-good anticipation of a guaranteed visual feast, quick-witted exchanges of dialogue, standout performances. And then there’s the concern about which explosive subject he’s depicting — like slavery, the Holocaust or rape — is most likely to detonate should he, a noted provocateur, flip the wrong switch.

The dominant discussion around his latest movie suggests that with “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” Tarantino got it mostly wrong when it came to the women who populate his script. It’s not quite so simple as that, confounded by the way the movie plays fast and loose with audience expectations and historical context.

A dreamy, meandering ode to Old Hollywood and a nod to what were perhaps the most infamous American deaths of 1969, the film weaves a fictional tale about a fading TV star, his stunt double and the Manson family murders. Margot Robbie plays the best known of those victims, the actress Sharon Tate, who flutters in and out of Tarantino’s picture like a gazelle in a nature documentary — she hardly speaks, but does dance and walk and drive around Los Angeles a lot in slow motion, the camera lingering on her presence in her natural habitat.

[Read A.O. Scott’s review of “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”]

Critics have seized on that characterization — or rather, lack of characterization. (She’s merely a “sexualized cipher,” as one review put it.) They’re not wrong — line-count aside, we don’t really glean much about who Tate might have been beyond her onscreen bombshell persona. In typical Tarantino fashion, the line between evoking the tropes and ideals of pop-cultural pastimes for the sake of “authenticity” and reinforcing those tropes and ideals is heavily blurred.