Santa's Got a Brand New Bag and it's Empty

Rating: Null/10 (20 October 1999)

In the fall of 1994 "Pulp Fiction" became an overnight sensation. Critics all over hailed it as an American masterpiece--an instant classic that generated so much excitement that it immediately spawned a generation of Tarantinos and Tarantinites in its wake. In order to understand this phenomenon we need to turn our attention to the current state of the American cinema and compared it with the last three decades. In the seventies the American cinema enjoyed what is arguably its golden years when it produced such masterpieces as "McCabe & Mrs Miller", "The Godfather", "Badlands", "Chinatown", "The Godfather II", "The Conversation", "Taxi Driver", "Nashville", and "Manhattan". In the eighties the number of masterpieces dwindled to just three films. Apart from "Raging Bull" the best films were also the most underrated: "Cutter's Way" and "Dangerous Liaisons". In the nineties the American cinema declined so precipitously that the closest thing to a masterpiece, if any, was arguably Robert Altman's "The Player". So when "Pulp Fiction" opened it was not difficult to see why the public readily embraced it as a masterpiece. It was as if the American pride was at stake and that Tarantino was perhaps the man who could restore the public's faith in the cinema again. Does Tarantino really deserved this kind of attention? Maybe. But is he a major talent? I think not. Tarantino's talent is somewhat suspect when one considers just how much of his own "Reservoir Dogs" resembles Ringo Lam's "City on Fire". Was this homage or just plain theft? In "Pulp Fiction" the main characters end up pointing their pistols at each other in close proximity. This classic gun-toting mexican standoff was of course gleefully appropriated from John Woo--another favorite of the director's.
In "Jackie Brown" Tarantino, this time, turns his attention on Pam Grier and the black exploitation cinema of the seventies. But the end result of what he hopes is hip and soulful feels more like a white man's attempt to ape the moves and rhythms of someone black. Soul train on film it is not. "Jackie Brown" is rhythmless, sluggish, and shapeless. It is evident that he needs a more disciplined editor to trim the excess fat.
It is not that Tarantino is without talent. He certainly has a good ear for street gutter and writes dialogue that is appropriately foul, abrasive, and wickedly funny. But Tarantino's fondness for the lowlives, the B movies that he grew up on, is pure pulp not art no matter how good his craft is. His ludicrous screenplay for "From Dusk to Dawn" clearly suggests that what he truly loves is trash--which is enough to make one wonder if there is more to "Pulp Fiction" than all the clever chatter about redemption and the like. To put it another way, Tarantino is less than the artist he purports to be: he is a shrewd trickster, a consummate showman who is only too eager to dazzle us with his bag of tricks. Consider the scene in which the bag of money is switched in "Jackie Brown". Tarantino offers us three different viewpoints of this sequence but adds nothing significant to what we already know. It is an editing "trick" he had learned so well in "Pulp Fiction". But when the smoke clears it is unlikely that anyone will be gullible enough to believe that the LAPD would not arrive early to prepare their sting operation. It is the audience who will be left holding the bag. There is no doubt that when a man of Tarantino's talent decides to aim this low you can bet that he will surely hit his mark.