In this feature our writers defend films they feel have not received their due.
After name-checking the style in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino made a full-on blaxploitation movie with Jackie Brown, complete with a legend of the genre (Pam Grier) and an actor who, if he’d gotten his start two decades earlier, could have been one of its biggest stars (Samuel L. Jackson). But Jackie Brown, made by reworking the white cast of the Elmore Leonard novel and toned down from Tarantino’s usual levels of hyperactive reference, scarcely feels like the film one might have expected the director to make of a blaxploitation throwback.
Elegantly melancholic and nocturnal, Jackie Brown is the odd man out among Tarantino’s freewheeling genre travesties, the patiently paced action and dialogue only occasionally betraying the mark of its maker. Yet it is also this film, more than any other, that speaks to the true artistry of Tarantino, not merely as a stylist but a moralist as well. People die for nothing in this movie, and the director highlights the senseless waste of these murders with a maturity that demands reevaluation not merely of this somewhat neglected feature, but of Tarantino’s entire filmography.
The stakes of Jackie Brown are pathetically low, with the has-been or never-were characters engaged in conflict and deceit over the matter of $500,000. It was an unimpressive amount of cash even in 1997; hell, even in 1992 when Leonard’s Rum Punch was published. And yet, because that number is, in the scheme of things, so minuscule, the film acquires more dramatic intensity through a kind of overarching tragedy. These people have been bypassed by society to the point that they still think this kind of money is some significant sum.
That modest foundation reveals the film to be less a mere homage to blaxploitation than a study, even critique, of that genre. Pam Grier does not play one of her ass-kicking vigilantes but a flight attendant for some prop-job Mexican airline. There’s still a fire in her eyes, but it’s burned out by a life of troubles. Jackie Brown is a shell of the heroines she’s meant to symbolize, and the actress who once portrayed women sick of the corrupting influences within their own communities is now reduced to running gun money for a black arms dealer named Ordell Robbie (Jackson).
Tarantino’s films get a lot of credit for revitalizing certain forgotten actors, but that’s never strictly been true. Part of what makes his usage of falling stars is how he incorporates that same shift in fortune with their general screen image. Grier gets this better than anyone else who has yet worked with the director, and she strikes the perfect balance between fierceness and broken will. When the ATF busts her for smuggling cash and narcotics, Jackie is still full of enough anti-establishment piss and vinegar to put up a fight, but there is a terror in her eyes that never would have crossed Coffy’s face.
Grier isn’t the only person in the film playing a has-been irrevocably out of step with the rest of the world. Robert De Niro, then just about to fall into his terrible twilight career, offers one last smoldering, sad sociopath in Louis, Ordell’s old cellmate. Even Bridget Fonda, too young to be a burnout, is so static in her depiction of habitual pot use that she scarcely seems like a functioning human being. Best of all is Robert Forster as bail bondsman Max Cherry, whose chemistry with Jackie is one of the more touching examples of middle-aged romance in the movies. Forster’s limited range makes his dealings with Grier reserved, believably blunt but endearingly earnest. When Max responds to Jackie’s slightly embarrassed admission that her ass has gotten bigger with, “Ain’t nothing wrong with that,” he says it in a way that communicates world wisdom, light teasing, and a smitten desire that seems to shave 20 years off both of them.
Their relationship, along with the film’s dejected, even disgusted view of violence, marks Tarantino’s first real showing as a morally complex filmmaker. Much as he loves to stage ludicrous kills and revel in kitsch, Tarantino also has a capacity for nuance, and it’s never more clear than when Forster’s minutely longing and weary face looks over Jackie’s equally weathered, but still beautiful, physique. In fact, Ordell, whose psychotic posturing is mainly fueled by his TV and movie binges, may be something of an auto-critique, the filmmaker admonishing the childish machismo that so often drives him.
Not so much propelled as gently guided by the soundtrack of ‘70s soul and R&B, Jackie Brown sounds as smooth as it looks, bathed in cool blues by Guillermo Navarro, one of the great cinematographers of night. And though Navarro casts a tone of regret and sadness over the whole film, he gorgeously captures the “black is beautiful” assertion of blaxploitation, be it in his graceful evocation of Grier’s coffee-colored skin or in the deep shadows he uses to make Jackson darker and more imposing. Jackson has browner skin, but to see him in Jackie Brown’s night shots, you’d think he was made of onyx.
The stereotypical Tarantino fan, the attention-deficit pop-culture junkie, may not find much to love in Jackie Brown. It takes its time, makes its references less showy and generally criticizes the very idea of basing one’s identity on television and genre movies. Yet Jackie Brown is the key to unlocking any deeper appreciation of the director; by seeing its mature handling of violence and romance, one can better spot the way the more audacious Kill Bill movies actually critique revenge while indulging in it, or how the wish-fulfillment of Inglourious Basterds is flecked with commentary on what is spiritually lost when one becomes evil to fight evil. Tarantino always utilized other people’s work in his writing and directing, yet it was by outright adapting another artist that he truly made a case for himself as an original, great filmmaker.
