director/screenwriter
Quentin Tarantino
based on
the novel Rum Punch by
Elmore Leonard
producer
Lawrence Bender
cinematographer
Guillermo Navarro
editor
Sally Menke
cast
Pam Grier (Jackie Brown)
Samuel L. Jackson (Ordell Robbie)
Robert Forster (Max Cherry)
Bridget Fonda (Melanie)
Michael Keaton (Ray Nicolette)
Robert De Niro (Louis Gara)
Michael Bowen (Mark Dargus)
Chris Tucker (Beaumont Livingston)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 151m
u.s.
release: 12/25/97
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other quentin
tarantino films
reviewed on this website:
- kill
bill: volume 1
- kill
bill: volume 2
- pulp
fiction
- reservoir
dogs
- true
romance (script only)
see also:
- out
of sight
|
If
there absolutely has to be another movie about guns and
stolen money, it might as well be drawn from the work of the
master -- Elmore Leonard, whose novel Rum Punch is the
basis for Jackie Brown, the long-awaited new film by Quentin
Tarantino. How is it as a follow-up to the hallowed Pulp
Fiction? Don't think of it as that. Consider it a superb
Elmore Leonard adaptation by a filmmaker who knows how to serve
someone else's material while making it his own. Neither a razor-sharp
black comedy like Reservoir
Dogs nor a pop-culture encyclopedia like Pulp,
this is something new for Tarantino: a leisurely and compassionate
character study in which the guns and stolen money seem almost
incidental.
Despite the central presence of Tarantino favorite Pam Grier
and the blaxploitation tone of the ads, this isn't the Quentin-a-go-go
vanity project some of us feared it would be. Tarantino, it turns
out, has done for Grier what he did for John Travolta in Pulp:
pluck a good actor out of obscurity and restore his/her dignity.
As Jackie Brown, a 44-year-old flight attendant for a last-resort
airline, Grier is earthy, funny, smart, and often touching. Here,
finally, is a Tarantino woman who offers more than just diversion
or danger for a Tarantino male (even if she began life as an
Elmore Leonard woman named Jackie Burke). Grier eagerly rises
to the challenge of a complex role; she takes the screen like
a lioness.
Jackie is running money for a gun dealer named Ordell Robbie
(Samuel L. Jackson), a ruthlessly pragmatic criminal with an
efficient way of dealing with employees who've been nabbed by
the cops: he bails them out and then kills them (so they won't
rat on him). When Jackie herself is arrested by two feds (Michael
Keaton and Michael Bowen), she knows her options: go to jail
for a year and start her life over at 45, or end her life in
a car trunk. There's also a third option, brilliantly laid out
by Leonard in the novel and faithfully followed by Tarantino.
It involves Jackie's bail bondsman, the weary Max Cherry (Robert
Forster in an authoritative comeback performance that equals
Grier's), and an elaborate scam that Tarantino, in a nod to The
Killing, shows us three times from various viewpoints.
Although not an actor (he stays behind the camera this time,
thank God), Tarantino is indisputably an actor's director. Not
merely a rehash of Pulp Fiction's Jules, Samuel L. Jackson's
Ordell is a calculating sociopath with a short fuse. Jackson
makes Ordell quietly deadly where Jules was oratorical (Ordell
wouldn't waste time quoting Ezekiel 25:17). Ordell's flunky Louis,
just out of prison, is played by Robert De Niro in his subtlest,
funniest performance in years. At first glance a harmless, run-down
stoner (he gets high constantly with Ordell's girlfriend Melanie,
played by a hilariously lackadaisical Bridget Fonda), Louis eventually
reveals his own short fuse. When De Niro gives the ditzy Fonda
a long, silent, furious stare, he's scarier in that one moment
than he is in all of Cape Fear.
By now, Tarantino has gone through so many shifts in public perception
(he's a genius, he's an overexposed geek, he's a one-hit wonder)
that Jackie Brown is bound to disappoint some people who
want to be disappointed -- who want Tarantino to take
a dive in a big way, and shut up and go away. Jackie Brown
proves he's not going anywhere except further in his career.
The movie is nimble and more quietly funny than Tarantino's other
work (it may benefit from a second viewing). Even if it's not
"original" (and, really, what Tarantino film is truly
original?), it's the ideal match of author and director; Tarantino
is the first filmmaker to get Elmore Leonard on the screen, and
not just Leonard's plot and zesty dialogue. Get Shorty
got his plot and dialogue but missed his spirit. Tarantino, who
once got busted for shoplifting a Leonard paperback, understands
and loves Leonard's marginal losers, grungy milieu, and decent
people trying to keep their heads above water. Pulp Fiction,
after all, was the best Elmore Leonard novel Leonard never wrote.
Jackie Brown continues and expands Tarantino's basic ongoing
theme (actions have consequences), and its black comedy is leavened
by a new, more humane outlook. The abrupt sick humor of the past
("I just shot Marvin in the face") is gone, replaced
by genuine shock. Only four people get whacked in Jackie Brown,
but their deaths have weight. Tarantino is maturing, and the
sensibility of this film is miles away from the bouncy sadism
of Reservoir Dogs. With Jackie Brown, Tarantino
restores his own dignity and his status as an artist to watch. |
