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
