“Something that starts soon and looks good.”
“Okay, so what’s the plot?” Anybody who has ever recommended any work of fiction has surely been hit with this question, likely quite immediately following one of their suggestions. It’s a fair inquiry, too: most people who engage with art need something familiar to invest in, and what better place to start than the sequence of events of that drives the narrative forward? “Well, it’s about a 44-year old flight attendant who smuggles cash into the country, until one day she finds herself caught between the vise grip of law enforcement and the vengeful wrath of a dangerous gunrunner. Along the way, she meets a bail bondsman who takes a liking to her and offers to help her out.” “Wait, is that it?”
Yes, that’s basically it. Post-1994, the world was Quentin Tarantino’s oyster. Following an electrifying debut in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction shotgunned the doors off of any expectation as to what independent cinema could do or be, netting Tarantino the Palme d’Or, a screenwriting Oscar, universal critical acclaim, box office glory, film school nerd exaltation, and an endless wave of imitators, for his troubles. “What’s next?” became the inevitable ask, and for his third feature, Tarantino took a left turn down an avenue he’s amazingly not ventured since: adapting a novel for the screen. Namely, Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, later retitled to Jackie Brown. Narratively speaking, the film hews close to the novel: there’s a flight attendant, embroiled in a criminal underworld, and when things go bad she must use her wiles if she’s to have any hope of making it out alive. But the pleasures of Jackie Brown the film do not stem from the plot. Sure, it’s actually a more intricate piece of narrative than it initially seems, and there’s even a riveting third act money-swapping sequence that is integral to the entire operation, but character, dialogue, and soundtrack all take precedence — and shine. Regular readers of the Internet Movie Database will be quick to point out that Tarantino’s favorite film is Rio Bravo, primarily for its status as being a superb “hangout movie,” and in that regard Tarantino finds himself channeling his inner Hawks: Jackie Brown is a terrific picture, but more specifically, it’s a marvelous hangout picture, content to let incident take a back seat while we invest two-and-a-half hours in the lives of richly drawn characters, headlined by a pair of co-leads delivering career-best work.
Pam Grier plays Jackie Brown — herself also a rename, having originally been called Jackie Burke in the novel, but now sharing her name with Steven Keats’ memorable gunrunner in The Friends of Eddie Coyle — introduced in the first of Tarantino’s many liberal “homages” on an automated airport people-mover that recalls The Graduate, except Simon and Garfunkel have been supplanted by Bobby Womack’s impossibly groovy “Across 110th Street.” (That memorable beat when the film title drops as soon as the chorus kicks in? It’s outstanding stuff.) Jackie is our aforementioned flight attendant, smuggling large scores of cash for the aforementioned dangerous gunrunner, Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). When Jackie is busted as part of an investigation conducted by ATF Agent Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton, who reprised this role one year later for Out of Sight, another Leonard adaptation), Ordell enlists the services of bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) to bail her out. Also playing a part in all this are Louis Gara (Robert De Niro), a close associate of Ordell’s who’s been recently released from prison, Beaumont Livingston (Chris Tucker), a hapless chum of Ordell’s who finds himself on the wrong end of the gunrunner’s gun, and Melanie Ralston (Bridget Fonda), Ordell’s quietly duplicitous mistress.
Much like Grier in her own introductory shot, Jackie Brown as a whole exudes a supreme amount of confidence. Formally speaking, Tarantino is at the top of his game, teaming up with cinematographer Guillermo Navarro (a Robert Rodriguez and Guillermo del Toro regular, who would only work with Tarantino this one time) to capture the vibrant and sumptuously sun-soaked hues of California’s South Bay area. But more compellingly, Jackie Brown boasts the confidence to scale back the crackerjack plotting of Leonard’s novel and let the characters just spend time together. Jackie Brown was not viewed as favorably as Tarantino’s prior work upon its release, but its esteem has only climbed in the decades since, rising to the rank of preferred project in his filmography for many, and the the secret sauce lies in the electrifying alchemy between Grier and Forster. Having enjoyed their own heydays in the 1970s, Jackie Brown revitalized both actors’ careers, and for good reason: their performances are utterly tremendous, distinctly tender and passionate but also laced with a lingering trace of melancholy. Indeed, every performance in Jackie Brown is top-notch — Jackson standing perhaps a cut above the others as Ordell — but Grier and Forster are the film’s center of gravity, and perhaps even the heart and soul of Tarantino’s entire oeuvre. It’s the closest he’s ever come to making an outright romance; who needs a plot when you can take in the beauty of Max silently observing Jackie’s release from prison? In this moment, Tarantino single-handedly boils down cinema to as good an argument for its essence as any: it’s about falling in love with Pam Grier.
And then there’s the music of it all. Those Delfonics are pretty good, Mr. Cherry, as is every other needle drop Tarantino deploys. This is nothing new: Reservoir Dogs would feeling lacking without K-Billy’s “Super Sounds of the 70s,” and who among us doesn’t feel the juices flowing when “Miserlou” kicks on in Pulp Fiction? Here, Bobby Womack commences Jackie Brown with a burst of life, only to be recontextualized into complete tragedy during the film’s closing moments as Jackie and Max part ways. Elsewhere, Ordell make great use of The Brothers Johnson’s “Strawberry Letter 23” as a cover for Beaumont’s murder, while Jackie and Max also enjoy “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” over coffee, prompting the latter to pick up his own cassette. The money-swapping “heist,” meanwhile, is deftly orchestrated to Randy Crawford’s “Street Life.” It’s nothing new to say that Tarantino is a whiz with incorporating music into cinema, but nowhere else in his filmography does it feel so vitally important to a film’s excellence as it does in Jackie Brown.
One of best films released in the past year (from the time of this writing) is Carson Lund’s Eephus. For those unfamiliar, Eephus is about a single baseball game that takes place over the course of a single autumnal day in Massachusetts. The cast is largely a group of unknown, primarily middle-aged men, all looking to enjoy themselves one last time before their local baseball diamond is demolished in favor of constructing a new art school. “Wait, is that it?” It is indeed, but the joy of Eephus isn’t about seeing which team wins the game; it’s about enjoying the company of this particular group of people and soaking in the atmosphere as they stave off life’s endless list of responsibilities for one last throw. Tarantino, so known as a purveyor of maximalist, understood this lesson of restraint early in his career, and as in many great adaptations, the director used Leonard’s work as a spring board to make Jackie Brown his own. Hanging out with Jackie and Max might not seem like the stuff that Tarantino’s dreams are made of, but the experience of their inevitable separation and belated realization of love is among the most gratifying and soul-crushing in modern cinema. More filmmakers should embrace the power of the hang. The plot will take care of itself.
Part of Kicking the Canon — The Film Canon.
Comments are closed.