The
Film: Jackie Brown (1997)
The Principals: Director: Quentin Tarantino. Pam Grier, Robert Forster, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert DeNiro, Michael Keaton, Bridget Fonda, Sid Haig.
The Premise: Jackie Brown is a 44 year old flight attendant who has never been able to quite get her life together. Max Cherry is a 55 year old bail bondsman unhappy with where his life has brought him. Together they have a chance at $500,000, but to get it they have to double cross gun runner Ordell Robbie and the ATF.
Is It Good: It could be argued that Jackie Brown is Tarantino’s best film. It’s certainly his most mature, but for my money the incredible cinemaphilia of Inglorious Basterds makes that film QT’s best. Brown came out after Tarantino was beginning to look like a one trick pony, and it proved that the writer/director had a lot of depth to him.
In Jackie Brown Tarantino isn’t relying on pop culture hipsterism (although it’s still there – the casting of Pam Grier says a lot to the discerning film fanatic) or crazy time structure (although non-linear storytelling makes its appearance in the third act) but rather on a good story and, more importantly, great characters. Max and Jackie are skillfully sketched, and the rest of the world – taken from Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch – is vivid and colorful. The story itself is deceptively simple, and the twists and turns are small and personal but no less thrilling.
There’s so much to love in Jackie Brown, but many viewers at the time were put off by the way it felt quite different from Tarantino’s previous two films. The movie got a bad rap, but the smart viewers understood that not only was the movie great, it was a milestone in the director’s career.
Is It Worth A Look: It’s worth looking at again and again. Every time I revisit Jackie Brown I savor something different. This last time it was Robert DeNiro; Louis Gara is probably the last truly great DeNiro performance. What’s amazing about DeNiro in this film is how much time he spends making you forget that he’s dangerous. For most of the running time Louis is a clown, a dope, a complete moron. He gets so high he can’t hang up a phone. DeNiro has a befuddled and bemused look that disarms us completely… which makes his last act turn to violence so shocking. But because there is no actor better at portraying roiling violence deep inside of himself, that turn is also completely believable. The look that he gives Bridget Fonda in the department store is fatally menacing… but also totally hilarious. It’s a marvelous feat on DeNiro’s part, and a nice capper to a strong career (we can pretend like most of the last fifteen years simply didn’t happen).
Random Anecdotes: Michael Keaton reprises the role of Ray Nicolette in Out of Sight. Couldn’t the character show up on Justified, which I understand takes place in the Elmore Leonardverse as well? I recently rewatched this as part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Rolling Roadshow tour and Quentin Tarantino was sitting a couple of rows ahead of me. He laughed and applauded more than anyone else at the screening. He went really wild for Sid Haig’s cameo as Jackie Brown’s sentencing judge.
11 comments
I dig the opening credits sequence, clearly lifted from THE GRADUATE, but translated through Tarantino's stellar choice of music.
I think for me, rather than maturation, this marks the point where Tarantino lost the ability to self-edit. Every movie he's made from JB onward has been too long or too jumbled or too plain in love with itself. The fact that QT laughs at this movie "harder than anyone else" should surprise precisely nobody.
JACKIE does something interesting: it works as a story. None of his other films do. They function as motors for cinematic fetishism. I suspect JACKIE is the only one that will be revisited when his name is forgotten – it doesn't ooze "cool". (I had high hopes for BASTARDS after that *terrific* opening sequence in France. Then it all went down his bowels. Again.) Piffles.
If you love cinema, you love Tarantino. And, in my humble opinion, Jackie Brown is his best film to date. Masterwork.
I'm one of those idiots who never gave this movie a chance when it came out. Then I saw it was available on Netflix Streaming so I gave it a shot. The movie is fantastic, and is even good at generating tension when the viewer knows what's going to happen (not an easy task). It's also good at making you guess how deep the games of double cross actually go.
Jackie Brown just barely edges out Basterds as my favorite QT movie, but it might just be my familiarity with it that pushes it over the edge. You're dead on about Deniro in this – he has (had?) this amazing way as an actor of making you feel his character's rage swelling just under the surface, and it's used to perfection here. Love this movie.
probably the coolest tarantino movie, even if it isn't his best. the cast and that music help immensely with kind of a weak story. i love that he himself laughed the hardest, it means he's actually trying to make movies that he himself would want to see. was there a Q&A at this screening?
This is, and always has been, my favoeite QT film. It also got me into "The Delfonics".
Unbelievable how much of a drubbing from "fanboys" and some critics Tarantino took for this movie. I agree with Devin…this may be his best film.
That's right. The movie that most successfully glosses over Tarantino's vicious misogyny (the treatement of the Bridget Fonda character) by his phony "look at me, I really LOVE women" worship of the Jackie Brown character is the favorite of Devin and others who are stuck-in-adolescent-resentment-of-women. mode. It's "mature" is it? Because it's got the balls to shock us with the random murder of a woman? Those enamored of that kind of "maturity" need to examine their own standards for "maturity" and maybe realize that they haven't left their teenage geek anger at being ignored by the girls in high school as far behind them as they'd like to think.
Is this going to be a regular thing? Devin gets invited to a Star Trek IV screening with Leonard Nimoy in attendance, and writes an article about how great the movie is … Sees Jackie Brown with Tarantino laughing his head off in the audicence, and suddenly it's a great movie too? Is there even going to be a pretense of objectivity any more?
Comments are shown as archived from the original site; new comments are closed.