The conventional wisdom of "Jackie Brown"

Rating: Null/10 (28 August 2009)

Adapted from a novel by Elmore Leonard, Quentin Tarantino's follow-up to his classic "Pulp fiction" is another crime movie, paying tribute to the blaxploitation movies of the seventies, starring blaxploitation icon Pam Grier along with Robert Forster, Samuel Jackson and Robert de Niro.
One of the most annoying cliché you can read in a review of a Tarantino movie is some kind of pompous statement about "Jackie Brown" being his best/most mature work to date, usually meant to imply that everything went down hill from there. Well, let me respectfully disagree It's not that "Jackie Brown" is not a great movie. It is. But it is also a very conventional one by Tarantino standards. Like it or hate it, you have to admit that a Tarantino movie is unlike anything else you watched in a theater. They don't follow the codes of other movies; they don't unfold as you would expect them to do. They have their own rhythm, their own groove. That is, except if the Tarantino movie in question is "Jackie Brown".
It follows the template for "serious film-making by serious film-makers" to the letter. For an audience uncomfortable with the non-conformism and the chaotic creativity of other Tarantino movies, this might be reassuring. They are on known grounds there. This is conventional film-making. For once, a Tarantino movie is walking the line, talking the talk, going the way it should go. This is what a good movie by a great director should look like. So, be a good boy, Quentin. Do what everybody expects you to do and just shoot another "Jackie Brown". Who knows? You might even win an Oscar in the process!
Except that Tarantino is not a good boy. He does not care about what people expect him to do. He just follows his own path, without compromising, and this path leads him far away from the standards of conventional film-making, although he demonstrated in "Jackie Brown" that he mastered those standards as well. It's almost as if he did "Jackie Brown" just to prove that point. Yes, if only he wanted, he could be a "serious" film-maker making a "serious" "mature" movie. But a Tarantino movie is not about following the conventions: it is about inventing new ones! There are wild territories off the main road and it is where he wants to be.
This is this gung-ho take-no-prisoner attitude that makes him without a doubt the most brilliant and interesting director currently working. And that's why "Jackie Brown", although an accomplished work by any standard, cannot be considered in any way as the apex of his movie output.