director
Tony Scott
screenwriter
Quentin Tarantino
producers
Gary Barber
Samuel Hadida
Steve Perry
Bill Unger
cinematographer
Jeffrey L. Kimball
music
Hans Zimmer
editor
Michael Tronick
Christian Wagner
cast
Christian Slater (Clarence Worley)
Patricia Arquette (Alabama Whitman)
Dennis Hopper (Clifford Worley)
Val Kilmer (Elvis)
Gary Oldman (Drexl Spivey)
Brad Pitt (Floyd)
Christopher Walken (Vincenzo Coccotti)
Bronson Pinchot (Elliot Blitzer)
Samuel L. Jackson (Big Don)
Michael Rapaport (Dick Ritchie)
Saul Rubinek (Lee Donowitz)
Conchata Ferrell (Mary Louise)
James Gandolfini (Virgil)
Anna Thomson (Lucy)
Victor Argo (Lenny)
Paul Bates (Marty)
Chris Penn (Nicky Dimes)
Tom Sizemore (Cody Nicholson)
Maria Pitillo (Kandi)
Ed Lauter (Quiggle)
mpaa rating: R or unrated
running
time: 121m
u.s.
release: 9/10/93
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other tony
scott films
reviewed on this website:
- domino
- the fan
(1996)
- spy
game
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Is it heresy to prefer True
Romance to everything else Quentin Tarantino has had a hand
in? I certainly find it the most repeat-viewable: It plays out
like candied noir, with a classic dialogue scene at least
once every ten minutes. The movie, which a young Tarantino wrote
and Tony Scott directed, contains scenes that hungry actors both
old and new can glory in. Tarantino was a struggling actor at
the time; he sort of fell sideways into writing and directing,
deducing that the only way he would get to act would be in his
own movies. (True Romance contains two Struggling Actors
-- Michael Rapaort's Dick Ritchie, a sweet-hearted if talentless
guy who gets all jazzed about a bit role in a T.J. Hooker
movie, and Bronson Pinchot's Elliot Blitzer, whose gig as assistant
to an abusive, coke-snorting producer has coarsened him. Tarantino's
sympathy obviously lies with Dick, though Pinchot occasionally
shows you the simpler aspiring actor that Elliott used to be.)
Like no other Tarantino film, True Romance embraces actors;
the entire movie is a marathon performance, enacted by a large
cast of eager stars and character actors. It is Tarantino's valentine
to who he used to be -- the comics geek and movie geek who went
on fruitless auditions and maybe hoped to meet a firecracker
like Alabama Whitman at a triple bill of Streetfighter
flicks.
Clarence Worley (Christian
Slater, giving full play to his Jack Nicholson voice) is a romanticized
and cooler version of Tarantino, a loner who lives in an apartment
above the comics shop where he works. Alabama (Patricia Arquette)
falls into his lap at the aforementioned triple feature, and
the two have sex and fall in love in record time, this being
a movie. (In the Tarantino-verse, True Romance is probably
a "movie-movie" like Kill
Bill, the kind of movie one of his "real" characters
from Pulp
Fiction or Jackie
Brown might go see.) Like Tarantino, who once played
an Elvis impersonator on The Golden Girls, Clarence fetishes
the King, who, in the blurry background person of Val Kilmer,
visits Clarence in bathrooms in times of trouble and imparts
the kind of harsh wisdom you'd expect to hear from the Elvis
of Bubba
Ho-Tep. (Hipster writers always indulge in a bad-ass
fantasy of Elvis, not the reality of Elvis as the crooner your
mom remembers fondly.) What would Elvis do? Well, he'd take off
after Alabama's erstwhile pimp, Drexl Spivey (Gary Oldman), and
pop a cap in his ass.
As Drexl, a white pimp who
fancies himself black (a description that won the actor over
to the project without his even reading the script), Gary Oldman
might have stolen many a lesser movie. As it is, he's merely
an appetizer -- and that's saying something, considering Oldman's
quotable performance ("Now I know I'm pretty. But
I ain't as pretty as a couple of titties"), marinated in
an almost exotic menace. Drexl is your early indication that
both the good and bad guys like to wag their chins before pulling
the trigger; in a brief scene that passes for character set-up,
Drexl defends the act of cunnilingus before shotgunning a few
drug associates and swiping a suitcase full of cocaine. That
cocaine becomes the movie's McGuffin, changing hands and coveted
by nearly everyone in the large cast. (Interestingly, only the
characters who evince no interest in the coke -- Dick Ritchie
and his stoner roomie Floyd, played in an amiable daze by Brad
Pitt -- escape this narrative unscathed. At heart -- particularly
given Tarantino's original, more tragic ending -- True Romance
is as moralistic as any Hayes Code flick.)
Both Clarence and Alabama (in
a wincingly brutal hotel-room scene that gave James Gandolfini
his start as a mob killer with quirks) take hellacious beatings,
the only instances of realistic pain in this flashily violent
movie. Tony Scott keeps the proceedings appropriately light --
the movie has a party atmosphere, as if you were moving through
rooms in Tarantino's head and encountering various lively strangers.
The film's highlight, defiantly protracted and probably containing
far more talk than a pre-Pulp Fiction audience was comfortable
with, is the sit-down between Christopher Walken's Vincenzo Coccotti,
who wants to locate the thief of his cocaine, and Dennis Hopper's
Clifford Worley, who wants to conceal his son Clarence's whereabouts.
The mockingly solicitous, casually hostile dialogue -- it could
be a post-punk rewrite of drawing-room comedy -- covers Tarantino's
three main preoccupations: lying, loyalty, and lineage. In Tarantino's
original script, Coccotti, provoked by the father's leering anecdote
about Sicilians, flies into an immediate rage; but Walken (and
he was wonderfully right to do so) plays the scene amused at
Hopper's sheer balls -- "I love this guy. Beautiful"
-- and the result is a tete-a-tete that transforms itself
into an actors' classic as you watch.
For fans of that scene, everything
after it may come as a slight downer, but there's more fun to
come, including Pinchot's dead-on turn as a sarcastic toady and
Saul Rubinek playing scummy producer Lee Donowitz with a caustic
yet affectionate relish that only actors who've dealt with producers
(Dustin Hoffman in Wag
the Dog, Kevin Spacey in Swimming
with Sharks) seem able to muster. Chris Penn and Tom
Sizemore show up, too, cranked up to the max as two L.A. detectives
(amusingly named Nicholson and Dimes) who lean on the rapidly
crumbling Elliott to wear a wire and entrap Lee during his purchase
of Clarence's coke. "You're an actor, motherfucker, act!"
screams Sizemore at the absent Elliott, and that could be True
Romance's mission statement -- everyone in it is acting out
a role, the bad-ass heroes of their own matinee movies. It's
easy to forget about the contributions of the stars, given all
their onscreen competition, but Christian Slater always helps
you believe in what Clarence thinks he's doing -- steeped in
movies, like his creator, Clarence gets in deep over his head
but prevails by calling on scenarios he's probably seen in the
cinema of Elvis or John Woo. Likewise, Patricia Arquette sells
the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold ("I'm a call girl,
there's a difference, you know!"), a sweet girl with a romantic
soul. Even the callous James Gandolfini, who now kills people
"just to see their expressions change," has to stop
and admit to Alabama, "You got a lot of heart, kid."
So does the movie. True
Romance is really less a noir than a bubbly road movie;
fairly quickly, we give up on the idea that Alabama might be
a bad dame (especially since her lovestruck narration -- heard
only at the beginning and end -- kick-starts the credits) leading
Clarence down the road to ruin. Tarantino means us to see these
two as a couple of kids who are crazy about each other, skimming
restlessly over the surface of violent pop culture. True Romance
is explicitly a young male geek's fantasy, but it feels like
undiluted, this-is-everything-I-love Tarantino in a way that
none of his films until Kill Bill quite did. It is, indeed,
a "movie-movie," seeking not to plunder the movies
Tarantino adores but to sit on a shelf with them.
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