1. Jackie Brown
Perhaps it's unfair to type Jackie Brown any kind of "failure", but certainly "disappointment" seems to capture the flavor of the film's reputation. It's hard to remember a time when he wasn't already an institution -- often imitated, never bettered, if rarely
equaled -- but back in the early '90s Quentin Tarantino absolutely exploded onto the film scene, the opening salvo of Reservoir Dogs and the ferocious knockout punch of Pulp Fiction transforming the little video store clerk into a cinematic legend. After Pulp Fiction became
the water-cooler film of the mid-'90s, expectations were going to be high for Tarantino's follow-up; a drop was probably to be expected, and the general consensus amongst critics -- and certainly among fans of Tarantino -- was that 1997's Jackie Brown...well, y'know, it was OK. It had some good performances, it had some cool scenes (remember De Niro in the parking lot?), but it was too long, it was too slow, and it lacked Tarantino's usual panache. It was no Pulp Fiction. No, Jackie Brown isn't Pulp Fiction. It's
better. What makes Jackie Brown so remarkable -- what makes it, arguably, the best thing Tarantino has done to date -- is that all of Tarantino's usual bravura facility with dialogue and exploitation violence is here combined with an unexpected depth. Tarantino's characters tend toward the mythic; they have quirks but sometimes lack dimension -- does anybody really
care what happens to Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds? Pam Grier's Jackie Brown has all the smart mouth of any other Tarantino protagonist, but she's also a black woman in her mid '40s who is looking down the barrel of prison time and losing the one job she can afford to get. Robert Forster's exhausted bail bondsman, Samuel L. Jackson's sociopathic criminal -- who is not quite as sharp as he thinks he is..., Robert De Niro's over the hill, drug addled ex-con...these are
real people -- heightened, yes, but with real concerns, real worries, real pain. When these characters go off on those patented Tarantino discussions of pop culture, it plays like the bored small talk of real people trying to pass the time, not the writer/director proving how many lousy '70s TV shows he knows backwards; and when the moments of startling violence come (and they do come), they come with a force that is missing in Tarantino's later, cartoonish revenge epics, because we've come to
know these people. Violence has consequences. So no, Jackie Brown
isn't Pulp Fiction. It's slower, more relaxed, in certain ways more assured; not a movie that slaps you in the face, but a movie you settle into, like a comfortable chair. (Tarantino has described it as his "hang out" movie -- you come to it to spend time with its characters, and the more times you see it, the better it plays.) It's a nuanced, moving, beautifully written, beautifully performed tale of desperate people on the edges of the criminal fraternity. And to riff on Inglourious Basterds, it just might be Tarantino's masterpiece.