This week we’ll be highlighting three films by Quentin Tarantino: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown. Why, you ask? Because summer is in the dog days of August, and it’s time for a pallet cleanser from the non-stop parade of studio tent-poles, that’s why.
Reservoir Dogs was the kind of film at the very forefront of the 90s American indie movement, so it’s fitting that we get away from large, corporate filmmaking and begin with Tarantino’s first film, and one of his most personal. The film follows the aftermath of a heist gone wrong, and plays out like a Samuel Beckett production, confined to a warehouse where the thieves argue about just what exactly caused this disaster. Things continue to escalate into realms of unbearable tension until a major revelation in the third act, which literally changes everything.
Even 22 years later, Tarantino’s debut film maintains the kind of dramatic urgency and depth it always had, and continues to grow in my estimation. There are just so many little touches of refinement here that it never once feels like the work of a first time filmmaker who famously learned everything he knew from working in a video store.
Not satisfied to rest on his laurels, Tarantino went on to then make one of the defining pieces of American cinema, Pulp Fiction. What more can really be said about it at this point? It still has that crackling electric quality to it, following nothing more than, as Tarantino himself describes it, a day hanging out with criminals. They aren’t presented as romanticized or particularly effective, either.
For the most part, their days are filled with droll chatter about various things, most of which might come off as mundane. Two hitmen talk about fast food in Europe, one of them takes his boss’s wife out for a meal, and so on. It isn’t so much the physical actions that drive their lives, but the dramatic weight of their words and choices. The film can’t be accused, however, of having nothing happen. Certainly, a lot does happen, but most of it seems to be shrugged off by the end of things with a dismissal of it being just another day in the life.
Lastly, we come to Jackie Brown. This film is a bit of an oddity for Tarantino, as it’s (as far as we know) the only film in his career adapted from another work, rather than being an original production. Adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel, the film takes elements from blaxploitation cinema, including Pam Grier’s previous character, Foxy Brown, and injects them into Leonard’s story about an airline stewardess smuggling cash into the country for a local gunrunner.
The result is a richly textured character study of people trapped in circumstances, desperate to get out and find their own measures of personal freedom. This film has aged like a fine wine. Whereas the other two films we discussed have always had this undeniably energy to them, Jackie Brown is a more reserved affair, more concerned with studying its subjects and understanding them as human beings. So it’s only natural the the more interesting dramatic layers have slowly revealed themselves over time. Pam Grier and Robert Foster give career best performances, and it’s a shame the film is often forgotten in the list of Tarantino’s finest works. To me, it’s up there as one of his most mature and refined films.
