director/screenwriter
Quentin Tarantino
stories
by
Quentin Tarantino
Roger Avary
producer
Lawrence Bender
cinematographer
Andrzej Sekula
editor
Sally Menke
cast
John Travolta (Vincent Vega)
Samuel L. Jackson (Jules Winnfield)
Uma Thurman (Mia Wallace)
Harvey Keitel (Winston Wolf)
Tim Roth (Pumpkin)
Amanda Plummer (Honey Bunny)
Maria de Medeiros (Fabienne)
Ving Rhames (Marsellus Wallace)
Eric Stoltz (Lance)
Rosanna Arquette (Jody)
Christopher Walken (Captain Koons)
Bruce Willis (Butch Coolidge)
Paul Calderon (Paul)
Bronagh Gallagher (Trudi)
Peter Greene (Zed)
Stephen Hibbert (The Gimp)
Angela Jones (Esmeralda Villalobos)
Phil LaMarr (Marvin)
Julia Sweeney (Raquel)
Quentin Tarantino (Jimmie)
Frank Whaley (Brett)
Duane Whitaker (Maynard)
Joseph Pilato (Dean Martin)
Steve Buscemi (Buddy Holly)
Kathy Griffin (Herself)
Alexis Arquette (Fourth Man)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 154m
u.s.
release: October 14,
1994
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other quentin
tarantino films
reviewed on this website:
- jackie
brown
- kill
bill: volume 1
- kill bill: volume 2
- reservoir
dogs
- true
romance (script only)
|
Late
in Pulp Fiction, the brutally witty new movie by Quentin
Tarantino, two hit men -- Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel
L. Jackson) -- find themselves rolling up their expensive shirt
sleeves to scrub up a sickening bloody mess. Vincent, you see,
had been talking to some small-time flunky in the back seat of
Jules' car, and Vincent's gun accidentally went off, reducing
the kid's head to a fine red mist. Is this funny? Not especially
(though Travolta's reading of his line "I just shot Marvin
in the face" is worth the ticket price by itself), but its
aftermath is, if only because movies don't usually make time
for this sort of candor. Vincent and Jules grunt and wince as
they scour the gore and brains off the inside of the car. "I
will never forgive your ass for this shit," says Jules to
Vincent. "This is some fucked-up repugnant shit." It's
as if Vincent had done nothing more serious than puking on Jules'
upholstery.
Pulp Fiction, like Tarantino's previous Reservoir
Dogs, is all jokes, all movie. It's about something serious
(the themes are loyalty and the consequences of one's actions),
but its tone is as far from serious as a film can get. The movie
turns its own genre on its head and examines what falls out of
its pockets. One of the things that fall out is the action genre's
hidden homo-erotic subtext (always there, always denied). Tarantino
fills the movie with gags about insertion, violation: a hypodermic,
a gold watch, a "dickless piece of shit" "keying"
Vincent's Camaro, even Pop-Tarts (which are shoved into a toaster
and then pop up, like an erection, prompting an ejaculation of
bullets).
Then, of course, there's the anal rape. In one of three stories
the movie tells, mob bigwig Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) is
after washed-up boxer Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) because Butch
refused to throw a fight he'd been paid to throw. After a comically
prolonged chase, the two antagonists end up in a pawn shop, whose
twisted proprietors lock them in their dungeon. The scene involves
a character called the Gimp, and ... well, let's just say it's
the best make-guys-squirm sequence since Ned Beatty squealed
like a pig. In terms of the action genre -- the apotheosis of
machismo -- the most undignified thing that can happen to a man
(taking it up the ass) befalls one of the captives. This,
Tarantino seems to be saying, is the bare bones of what action
movies are about. The guy with the biggest gun dominates. What's
so fresh about Tarantino, who is about to become the hottest
director since Scorsese, is that he giggles at the conventions
of pulp, but he giggles appreciatively. The numbing formulae
of action flicks amuse rather than offend him, and I prefer an
amused artist to an offended, condescending one.
Pulp Fiction, bless its postmodern heart, plays by the
rules of the genre. It's violent, it deals in stereotypes, it's
stuffed plump with machismo. (I love how Vincent backs down from
a confrontation with a powerful man he's never met before: "I
respect you an' all, I just don't like people barkin' orders
at me." How can Vincent "respect" someone he's
just met? Here, "respect" is code for "I'm scared
of you because you're tight with my boss," which Vincent
would never admit.) But you have to know the rules in order to
break them, and Tarantino does. The movie keeps galloping off
into wild, unpredictable areas. It's an intricate essay on popcorn
entertainment, and it's deeply funny. When Vincent accidentally
blows Marvin away (you can hear Tarantino cackling as he sets
up the scenario), the movie's thesis on violence snaps into focus.
The mess has to be cleaned up, and the two glamorous bad-asses
have to do it. "This is some fucked-up repugnant shit."
In another story, Vincent, who works for mob boss Marsellus,
is assigned to take the boss's wife Mia (Uma Thurman) out on
a date. "It's not a date," Vincent insists when
everyone reminds him of how violently possessive the boss is
of Mia. "I'm gonna chew my food with my mouth closed,"
he elaborates, "laugh at her fuckin' jokes..." On the
way, Vincent crests on a heroin high supplied by his dealer friend
Lance (Eric Stoltz, whose annoyingness works in his favor for
once). Tarantino gives us a dreamy montage of Vincent fixing
-- it's like a pro-drug commercial. By the end of the
evening with Mia -- a magical sequence destined to become a Tarantino
classic (Travolta dances again!) -- Vincent is reduced to lecturing
his reflection in Mia's bathroom mirror: "You're gonna finish
your drink, go home, jerk off, and that's all you're gonna do."
Meanwhile, Mia, rooting through Vincent's coat, finds what she
thinks is coke, and .... Well, Vincent never gets to finish his
drink. The action ends up back at Lance's rat-trap apartment,
and involves a hypodermic big enough to sedate an elephant. Tarantino
never shows needle entering flesh, but the sequence is excruciating
and harrowingly funny, viciously refuting the earlier romantic
image of Vincent's blissful heroin daze. Tarantino may not be
a boringly "responsible" director, but he's not irresponsible,
either. Actions have consequences. Pulp Fiction illustrates
the point again and again.
Tarantino's freshman effort, the notorious Reservoir Dogs,
came wrapped in controversy about its sadism. Here was a film,
a black comedy, in which a cop was tortured to the bouncy tune
of "Stuck in the Middle with You." The humor there
was in Tarantino's naked desire to film the ultimate torture
scene, wedded to an incongruous pop ditty. Many people got up
and walked at that point; they wondered what sort of sick mind
would dream this up and expect us to find it funny. Others, like
me, simply found it funny: At the crucial moment, when Michael
Madsen is about to slice the cop's ear off, the camera tilts
up and to the left, as if it couldn't bear to watch. Like Oliver
Stone, who used Tarantino's script as his blueprint for Natural Born
Killers, Tarantino anticipates our reaction to his work;
but because he's the most eager audience of all, he also reacts
for us -- he knew we were going to look away, so the camera
looks away. (I think what really upset people about the scene
was its aftermath, when the bloodied cop and the gore-drenched
Tim Roth have a long, agonized conversation.) Tarantino plays
with the very experience of watching a movie. His knowingness,
not his alleged sadism, is what gooses a laugh out of you. In
short, if you find Tarantino's work funny, you're not sick.
In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino even plays with our normal,
continuous sense of narrative. He must have read Syd Field's
Screenplay and then decided to break all of Field's boring
commandments. The three stories bounce off one another, comment
on each other, and Tarantino shuffles the plots. A major character
who dies in the middle story returns, healthy as a horse, for
the third story -- which turns out to take place, chronologically,
before the second story. The effect isn't continuity but
simultaneity. Characters from different storylines are linked
in ways they don't understand. (Tarantino's script for 1993's
True
Romance was also non-chronological, but director Tony
Scott put the scenes in order.) Tarantino is clearly the most
adroit young screenwriter now working -- his directorial style,
by contrast, isn't actually all that showy or original (there's
a heavy dose of Kubrick in those long, static takes) -- and he
has a fantastic ear for the music of words. The characters babble
endlessly about trivia, but the trivia turns out to be a key
to understanding these marginal lowlifes. (This gabby method
of characterization is what Whit Stillman generally succeeded
at in Metropolitan but fumbled in Barcelona.) Jules,
the righteous killer who likes to quote from Ezekiel 25:17 before
pulling the trigger on someone, comes to a greater apprehension
of the Biblical words near the end. Patiently, he explains to
some dumb thief (Tim Roth again) why he can no longer be part
of "the tyranny of evil men." It's a beautiful scene
without a scrap of unearned sentiment.
Sometimes Tarantino's reach exceeds his grasp. It still remains
to be seen whether he can write women. (Maria de Medeiros, as
Butch's oversensitive girlfriend, wears out her welcome in about
two minutes. It's not the actress's fault; Tarantino writes her
as a nuisance.) You may ask yourself why Butch, who risks his
life going back to his apartment to retrieve his precious gold
watch even though Marsellus' crew is gunning for him, wastes
time in the kitchen to pop in those Pop-Tarts -- is he that hungry?
Even allowing for visual hyperbole, I don't get the function
of the Gimp -- and why do his keepers leave him so vulnerable
by chaining him to the ceiling? If their captive gets free, what's
the Gimp supposed to do about it? When the hit men have to clean
up the mess, they call in a big gun -- "The Wolf" (Harvey
Keitel), who specializes in "solving problems." Marsellus
calls the Wolf in the morning, and he's in a tux, with elegantly
dressed people milling around his house. What kind of social
wingding is this guy throwing at eight in the morning? Must be
a really long, really good cocktail party.
But those are minor flaws, unlikely to occur to you as you're
watching. Pulp Fiction is great American entertainment,
a stylish and foxy comedy of errors, and Tarantino continues
his superb work with actors. As the cold but inquisitive Vincent,
John Travolta weighs in with his best adult performance since
Blow Out. Vincent's self-satisfied lightness (he always
seems to be in repose, even when aiming a gun) matches perfectly
with his partner Jules' righteous professionalism. Jules is a
guy who makes sure he washes all the blood off his hands
before he dries them, so that his host's bathroom towels "don't
look like no fuckin' maxi-pad." Samuel L. Jackson has done
many small roles in small movies (or small roles in big movies
like Jurassic
Park), at least one great role in a so-so movie (Jungle
Fever), but this is his arrival. He takes Tarantino's dialogue
and gives it both classical weight and street rhythm. Jules is
the best character Tarantino has written and possibly ever will
write, and Jackson bites into it like a Big Kahuna burger. Terrific
as these men are, they didn't surprise me as much as Bruce Willis
-- who's never been a bad actor, just recently a journeyman star
stuck in a lot of shit. Here, playing a man who's not nearly
as sly as he thinks he is, Willis looks more comfortable than
he ever has. There's still a little too much action-flick opacity
in his demeanor -- he must know that Tarantino is using him as
much for his blockbuster aura as for his talent -- but there's
no denying that he rises to the material and the company he's
in.
And Tarantino fills the screen with first-rate performers casually
slipping in for vivid cameos. Rosanna Arquette shows up as a
body-piercing devotee (her stoner friend is Bronagh Gallagher,
one of the Commitmentettes); her brother Alexis, in another corner
of his life a drag queen who appeared in Last Exit to Brooklyn,
plays the poor bastard hiding in the bathroom who comes out blazing.
Julia Sweeney drops in as Keitel's girlfriend (this is her real
future in movies, not It's Pat), and Peter Greene, the
villain of last summer's The Mask, is one of the hillbilly
rapists. The most talked-about cameo will certainly be Christopher
Walken as the Vietnam vet who delivers a solemnly hilarious monologue
setting up the gold watch. (Walken, who made similar magic in
last year's True Romance, should only do Tarantino scripts
from now on.) Tarantino also gives himself a funny cameo as Jimmy,
the nervous guy whose garage is the temporary haven for the bloodied
car. Watching Tarantino's Jimmy conferring with Keitel's Mr.
Fix-It is the best in-joke in the movie if you remember that
Keitel was the executive producer as well as the star of Reservoir
Dogs, and that without Keitel's name attached to that script
in both capacities, the movie -- and Tarantino -- might not have
happened.
Quentin Tarantino joins the ranks of international filmmakers
-- Pedro Almodovar, John Waters, Sam Raimi, John Woo, Peter Jackson
-- whose names guarantee a buffet of disreputable fun. Their
work will offend or dismay some people; you can't make an omelet
without breaking some eggs, and you can't make a hard-driving
work of art without bruising some sensibilities. Devouring the
movies he loves and spitting the mouthfuls onto his canvas, Tarantino
is a mesmerizing talent still in development. His best work,
I presume, is yet ahead of him. I'll be watching, and so should
you -- at the moment, Tarantino is the movies. |
