Jackie Brown

Quentin Tarantino, USA 1997, 154 mins

Quentin Tarantino's third full length feature is a radical change of pace for the director as he turns in a luxurious, elegant star vehicle for the wonderful Pam Grier. Although the trademark frenetic pace of his previous two films has gone, the great characters and daring dialogue remain.

Samuel L. Jackson plays Ordell Robbi, a gunrunner who posts bail with Max Cherry (Robert Forster) for henchman Beaumont, facing time in jail for arms possession. Ordell then kills Beaumont. Shortly afterwards Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) who smuggles money for Ordell to supplement her stewardess' income is caught with $50,000 and a stash of cocaine at LA airport. She knows that Ordell will kill her too so she strikes a deal both with him and, to make doubly sure, the cops. Jackie then tempts Max to come in with her on a $500,000 deal and things to get a little complex.

This is essentially Tarantino's homage to the blaxpliotation movies of the 70's wth the casting of Grier the clearest indication of this. Jackson, with his pimp-look outfits and fast talking would not have looked out of place in Shaft. Tarantino also manages, as in his last film Pulp Fiction, to resurrect the career of a faded star. Not Grier, but in fact Robert Forster, whose career has been in the doldrums since the days of Medium Cool, when his face was as ubiquitous as Samuel L. Jackson's is today. A sound track full of quality seventies grooves by the likes of the Brothers Johnson and Randy Crawford and starry cast including Robert De Niro and Bridget Fonda complete a classy package and an interesting auteur piece.

Geof Jarvis
EUFS Programme 1998-99

Customs inspectors catch airhostess Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) with $50,000 and a bag of cocaine on her. Knowing that she's working for arms dealer Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson) they offer her a deal: If she can deliver them Ordell then she won't be prosecuted. Jackie, having little choice, agrees to go along with this and contacts Ordell. He goes to bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) to bail Jackie out. This does not bode well for Jackie's wellbeing - the last person Ordell bailed out, Beaumont, was murdered shortly afterwards. However she's smarter than either Ordell or the customs inspectors take her to be and starts to see a possible way of getting out of her predicament alive and considerably richer.

Quentin Tarantino's third feature film as director is also his first adaptation. In adapting Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch for the screen he has made one major change: Jackie Brown, a white woman in Leonard's novel, becomes a black woman in Tarantino's film. Though Tarantino throws in a few references to Jackie's heightened marginality within his film, the real reason he made this change was simply to give Pam Grier a leading role. The biggest female star of the Blaxploitation boom of the early 70s, with her appearances as Coffy (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), Sheba Baby (1975) and so forth, Grier's star had faded along with Blaxploitation in the mid-70s. While this was ancient history to Hollywood, film geek Tarantino had never forgotten Grier. The two met around the time of Pulp Fiction. Grier tried for a part but didn't get one. Tarantino, however, promised her that he'd do a film for her.

Jackie Brown is the result. It's the best chance Grier will ever get to do a Travolta and resurrect her career. Tarantino gives her every chance to show what she can do as an actress. She convinces, hopefully dissolving any lingering doubts that her talents were confined solely to the body of 25 years ago. This is not, however, to dismiss the contributions of the other actors. Robert Forster, too, makes the best of his second bite at the cherry. Bridget Fonda and Robert De Niro impress in what are, if you think about it, really rather difficult roles. As Ordell's "surfer chick" girlfriend Fonda is required to be annoying but yet ultimately arouse our sympathies. As Ordell's laconic buddy, just released from prison, De Niro has to act primarily though his body and expressions whilst giving the impression of something stirring at tectonic speed beneath that surface.

Tarantino's successful writing of De Niro's essentially non-verbal character - as opposed to one with logorrhoea - is perhaps one sign of his growing maturity as an artist. Watching Jackie Brown I get the impression he no longer feels he has anything left to prove. Everything is more leisured than in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. The narrative structure is far more straightforward, largely eschewing the flashbacks and "beginning, middle, end - but not necessarily in that order" approach of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction respectively, while the trademark pop-culture references are less self consciously clever and attention-seeking than before.

Jackie Brown is also markedly less violent than its predecessors. Here the moments of violence are not so throwaway or casual, more shocking than shockingly funny. Jackie Brown and Max Cherry are, after all, basically ordinary people. They're not gangsters for whom carrying and using guns is second nature. With Jackie Brown's lower violence quota, it is Tarantino's use of language that has proven most controversial. Ordell's speech is liberally peppered with the N word. 'Nigger this, Nigger that'. Tarantino's most vociferous critic here has been fellow-director Spike Lee. Lee's position is roughly that while it's acceptable for black directors, who can legitimately claim to have a grounding in African-American culture, to have their characters call each other Niggers, it's racist when a white director, lacking in that cultural background, does so. Tarantino's response is to claim that he's aware of the different meanings attaching to the word, depending on the context in which it is uttered, through his work with black actors like Jackson and Ving Rhames and that they don't have a problem with it. As such, it's okay.

Jackson - who has worked with both directors - came down more on Tarantino's side when asked about the subject. But, of course, he might be expected to support his current director, who's made him more of a star than Lee ever did. Jackson also implied that he'd had something of a falling out with Lee, suggesting that when the director was moving on to bigger things the rewards of this success had not percolated down to be equally felt by Lee's actors, himself included.

Personally I'm not sure what I think here, seeing elements to agree with and criticise in both the Lee and Tarantino positions. Ultimately I guess the N word debate Jackie Brown has opened up is like the X-Files - "the truth is out there" ... somewhere.

Programme note by Keith H. Brown
October 1998