Old Yorker

  • Jackie Brown

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Quentin Tarantino (1997)

    Jackie Brown is Quentin Tarantino’s least characteristic picture and also his best.  His only adapted screenplay, based on Elmore Leonard’s 1992 novel Rum Punch, changes the location of the action, as well as the protagonist’s name and ethnicity, but the people in this film aren’t subjugated, as Tarantino people usually are, to a vision of life determined by movie history (a vision that’s often a distorting lens).  It’s true the characters in Jackie Brown may be less free of cinema-genre associations if you’re an expert in the 1970s blaxpoitation films to which this one reputedly pays homage or know Pam Grier, who plays the title role, from pictures such as Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974).  (Jackie’s surname in Tarantino’s version – Burke, in Leonard’s novel – obviously nods to Grier’s character in the latter.)  For the relatively uninitiated like me, though, Jackie Brown looks to be taking place in a real world – one that Tarantino brings to vivid life and shapes to strong dramatic effect but which doesn’t feel dictated by his cinephile preoccupations.  He gives the impression, rather, of enjoying being able to partake of this world.  He lets his audience enjoy it with him.

    Forty-four-year-old Jackie Brown works as a flight attendant for a third-rate airline based in Los Angeles.  To augment her paltry annual income (‘sixteen thousand with retirement benefits’) she smuggles cash across the exican border for an LA gun runner called Ordell Robbie (Samuel L Jackson).  When his courier Beaumont Livingston (Chris Tucker) is arrested, Ordell arranges bail through local bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster), before killing Beaumont for fear he’ll turn informant.  Ordell is already too late:  following a tip-off from Beaumont, law enforcement officers Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) and Mark Dargus (Michael Bowen) intercept Jackie.  In her travel bag they find Ordell’s stash of money and, to Jackie’s surprise, a supply of drugs intended for his cokehead girlfriend, Melanie Ralston (Bridget Fonda).  Declining to rat on Ordell, Jackie goes to jail and Max fixes her release too.  She devises a plan with Ordell that involves her pretending to help the authorities while smuggling $550,000 of his money.  Ordell meanwhile has hooked up with Louis Gara (Robert De Niro), an old criminal buddy who’s just done a spell inside for armed robbery.  Melanie suggests to Louis that they cheat on Ordell and make off with his cash but Louis stays true to his pal.  After interviewing Jackie again, Nicolette and Dargus set up a sting to catch Ordell during a money transfer of $50,000.  Neither they nor he realise Jackie intends to keep half a million dollars for herself.  She recruits Max Cherry, though, offering him a cut.  From the first time he sees Jackie, walking down a prison corridor towards him, Max takes more than a professional interest in her.

    That gives a flavour of Jackie Brown’s tricky, who’s-fooling-who crime plot and the offbeat romance at its heart.  Tarantino handles both aspects well and his orchestration of a cast that’s not just ethnically diverse is impeccable.  Jackie is a supposedly young-looking forty-four.  Pam Grier was a few years older when she made Jackie Brown; although she looks great, I don’t think – as Tarantino evidently did – that Grier appears to be much less than her actual age.  What’s surely crucial is that Jackie has a been-round-the-block glamour and wariness, both of which Grier radiates.  She does a fine job of showing a quick, desperate mind at work.  She’s an extraordinary camera subject, more properly described as mixed race than black.  (According to Wikipedia, Grier has said she’s ‘of African American, Hispanic, Chinese, Filipino … and Cheyenne heritage’.)  Just as Jackie Brown is the story of a woman who has a tough life and grabs an unexpected chance to make it better, so Pam Grier seizes an unprecedented and never repeated acting opportunity.  She gives a wonderful performance.

    So does Robert Forster.  Trim, calmly spoken Max Cherry is good at his job.  In all these respects, he contrasts strikingly with other men in the story.  Even so, the situation Max suddenly finds himself in puts him under unaccustomed pressure.  Stimulated but unnerved, he needs to take particular care keeping a lid on his feelings for Jackie but his beautifully expressive eyes don’t lie to the viewer.  Tarantino rescued Forster, as he did Grier, from a career that seemed to have been going nowhere for some time.  The actor may never quite have matched subsequently what he achieves in Jackie Brown but he worked very regularly throughout the next twenty-odd years, right up to Elizabeth Chomko’s What They Had (2018) and Jim Cummings’s The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020), released after Forster’s death the previous year.  The bigger names in the cast, although they can’t match the revelatory impact of Grier and Forster, do admirable work, especially De Niro, who really gets inside defeated, doomed Louis Gara.

    Most of the Jackie Brown personnel live a life of crime or rely on crime to make a living.  (Several characters also feature in Elmore Leonard’s earlier novel The Switch (1978) and thereby in Daniel Schechter’s mediocre screen adaptation, which is actually called Life of Crime (2013).)   As someone with an abiding resistance to supposedly cute screen criminals, I’m impressed by how engaging Tarantino and his actors make these wrongdoers.  Without being tediously explained, they’re convincing as people who, for financial or psychological reasons (or both), have to break the law.  At 154 minutes, this isn’t Tarantino’s longest film, though it seems to have been accused of excessive length more than any other.  Tarantino takes more time than usual to develop momentum – you’re particularly conscious of this in the early scenes that don’t feature Jackie – but the sluggish quality gradually dissipates.  By the end of the story, you’re sorry not to be spending more time in the company of those who get out of it alive.

    Four important characters don’t manage that but the mayhem here is far removed from that of, say, Reservoir Dogs (1992), Inglourious Basterds (2009) or Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019).  Some of it occurs off-camera; most of it happens rapidly and without undue bloody emphasis.   This doesn’t mean there are no violent coups de théâtre.  Louis’s killing of Melanie is almost comically shocking.  In the parking lot outside the shopping mall where the money transfer has taken place, Melanie gives Louis a hard time for panicking in the department store they’ve just left and for now forgetting where he parked the car.  He tells her to stop, she doesn’t and he shuts her up with two bullets.  The climactic showdown in Max’s office, in which Nicolette and Dargus shoot Ordell dead, is hardly less startling, even though he’s the villain of the piece.  As with Melanie, it’s partly because Ordell is a motormouth that the sudden silencing of him has such impact.

    Despite its differences from other Tarantino films, Jackie Brown also features some of his accustomed strengths:  trenchantly credible dialogue, for individual voices; fluent editing by Sally Menke (who cut all Tarantino’s features until her death in 2010); excellent production design (David Wasco) and set decoration (Sandy Reynolds-Wasco) that nails the lifestyles being described.  Above all, there’s Tarantino’s use of music – and how he shows what the pop songs on the soundtrack mean, or come to mean, to the people in the story.  Max gets to love The Delfonics’ ‘Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)’, a favourite of Jackie’s.  (Ordell, when he hears the song playing on Max’s car radio, is instantly suspicious of this new enthusiasm.)  Jackie’s journey to the money transfer is accompanied by Randy Crawford’s ‘Street Life’.  A brief part of this sequence, in which Jackie, in her blue airline uniform, walks anxiously but purposefully alongside a bright blue-tiled wall, echoes, and contrasts with, the opening title sequence:  this shows her, in the same clothes, borne along a moving walkway at the airport where she’s arriving for work, against a background of blue mosaicked walls.  Both the opening and closing credits are scored to Bobby Womack’s potently melancholy ‘Across 110th Street’.  The song’s lyrics (‘Been down so long, getting up didn’t cross my mind/But I knew there was a better way of life, and I was just trying to find …’) and yearning melody express something essential to Jackie Brown and Max Cherry, two of the most memorable characters in 1990s American cinema.

    27 September 2022

  • The Life of Oharu

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Saikaku ichidai onna

    Kenji Mizoguchi (1952)

    Set in late-seventeenth-century Japan, The Life of Oharu, with a screenplay by Kenji Mizoguchi’s frequent collaborator Yoshikata Yoda, is based on The Life of an Amorous Woman, a 1686 novel by (as the film’s original title suggests) Ihara Saikaku, pioneer of the ‘floating world’ genre in Japanese literature.  While the story is technically fictional, the social system that drives it is, presumably, historical fact.  Because that obnoxious system was, to this viewer, a hitherto closed book, I sometimes found myself reacting to The Life of Oharu as enraging polemical exposé rather than drama.  One way or another, though, it’s impressive cinema.

    In late middle age, the eponymous heroine (Kinuyo Tanaka) recalls, in extended flashbacks, her unhappy past and the stages of her inexorable fall from grace.  Born into a noble family, the young Oharu loves the page Katsunosuke (Toshiro Mifune) but the rules of feudal society forbid relations between two people of such unequal social rank.  The lovers are caught together, Katsunosuke is executed and Oharu’s disgraced family is banished from the imperial court.  After her mother (Tsukie Matsuura) intervenes to prevent Oharu from committing suicide, her samurai father Shinzaemon (Ichiro Sugai) sells his daughter, now unmarriageable within her class, as a concubine to Lord Matsudaira (Toshiaki Konoe); according to expectations, she bears him a son but is paid only a pittance for doing so and sent back home.  With the family in debt, Shinzaemon arranges for Oharu to work as a courtesan.  She subsequently becomes a servant in the household of a client, the wealthy merchant Sasaya (Eitaro Shindo); his jealous wife Owasa (Sadako Sawamura) finds out that her husband got to know Oharu in Kyoto’s red-light district and she’s forced to leave the household.  Her fortunes look set to change with a happy marriage to kind, humble Yakichi (Jukichi Uno), a maker of fans.  He is then attacked and killed by robbers.  Oharu next resides in a temple with an order of Buddhist nuns; when a male intruder attempts to rape her and Oharu is found in her cell undressed, she’s ejected from the temple.  To keep herself alive, she becomes a streetwalker on the outskirts of Kyoto.  She’s at the end of her tether when her mother arrives with news that Lord Matsudaira has died and that his heir, Oharu’s son, wishes her to live with him.  Oharu arrives at the new lord’s grand home to learn that her shameful past will condemn her to virtual solitary confinement there.  She runs away, choosing to see out her days as an itinerant nun.

    I was absorbed, aghast, by Oharu’s tribulations but not so much as to blind me to brilliant images created by Mizoguchi and his cameraman, Yoshimi Hirano.  (More obscuring was the often crepuscular look of the film, which is in black and white:  I wasn’t sure how much the murky visuals were a stylistic device, how much a matter of BFI’s print showing its age.)  I think it will be hard to forget the sight of courtesans scrabbling for the handful of coins that a rich man tosses to the floor of a brothel; or a bunraku puppet show whose action chimes with events in the main story; or the faces of the Buddha carved in a temple wall that, at the start and near the end of the film, morph into the faces of men Oharu has known.  There’s a startling series of sequences in Sasaya’s home.  Oharu brushes her mistress Owasa’s hair, only to discover that it’s a wig and that Owasa is desperate her husband shouldn’t find out she’s bald.  Suspicious that Sasaya prefers Oharu to her, Owasa then unwisely punishes her servant by forcing her to cut off her own hair.  Oharu, in her turn, also takes revenge:  she contrives to make the family cat run off with Owasa’s hair weave while the woman’s asleep in bed with her husband.  He thus discovers his wife’s terrible secret.

    There’s a malign feline flavour too to a later episode.  Oharu, repeatedly branded a whore in the course of her life, is now a mutton-dressed-as-lamb prostitute.  She has a chance encounter with an elderly Buddhist teacher (Takashi Shimura) and his young male pupils; the teacher proceeds to use her as an object lesson in the ghastly futility of carnal pleasures.  He asks Oharu to remove her veil and show her painted face.  ‘Everybody take a good look,’ the old man says, ‘You see that?  You still want to sleep with women now?  You all want happiness in the next world. … However, if you’d rather steep yourself in the impermanence of earthly life, then follow the example of this goblin cat in human form’.   As she takes her leave of the group, Oharu angrily imitates the movements and sounds of a cat.  A poignantly different, equally remarkable feature of the soundtrack is her occasional laments, sung to the accompaniment of a samisen.

    The plot seems shaky at a few points.  The narrative jerks forward to Oharu’s short-lived happiness with Yakichi and the writing’s on the wall as soon as he sets off one morning, assuring his wife he’ll bring her back a fine sash when he returns later in the day.  (When his body is found, his hand is still holding the promised sash, one of the items of clothing removed by Oharu during the temple assault.)  More important, the episode is relatively weak because Yakichi’s death feels like an extra misery imposed on the heroine, as distinct from being a natural consequence of the tyrannical patriarchy that governs her life.  Her well-meaning mother’s surprise news that Oharu’s son, whom she has longed to meet, wants to meet her, immediately sounds too good to be true, and instantly proves to be.  In the scenes on the son’s estate, it’s not clear how Oharu manages to evade a posse of his male servants both in order to get to see her son face to face and then to make good her escape.  But Kinuyo Tanaka plays her role with such integrity, and is so convincing at whatever   age, that Oharu’s emotional responses to events are always believable.  Only a year after the release of The Life of Oharu, Tanaka had embarked on her own directing career in cinema, one of the first Japanese women to do so.

    In the mid-1970s, Kenneth Tynan wrote a series of extended profiles for the New Yorker, including one of Tom Stoppard (published in December 1977).  In it, Tynan describes, inter alia, the friendship that developed between Stoppard and A J Ayer, leading light of logical positivism and likely inspiration of the philosopher protagonist of Stoppard’s play Jumpers.  Tynan joins the pair for lunch and the conversation turns briefly to Eastern philosophies, which Ayer ‘pooh-poohs …with Hegelian vehemence, dismissing Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism in a single barking laugh. “They have some psychological interest, but nothing more than that,” he adds. “For the most part, they’re devices for reconciling people to a perfectly dreadful earthly life. …” ‘   I don’t like to agree with Ayer’s sweeping brush-off but I’ve never forgotten it.  The conclusion to The Life of Oharu brings his sentiments vividly to mind.

    15 September 2022

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