Good Tarantino but film belongs to Pam Grier

Rating: 7/10 (24 February 2013)

The things you need to know are; that SLJ sells guns and Pam Grier, who plays Jackie Brown, works as a flight attendant for a crummy airline but smuggles money out of Mexico for SLJ. Jackie Brown is braced by the feds who are after SLJ just when SLJ decides he wants his entire half million stash bringing out of Mexico. Thrown into the mix are Robert De Niro as a very dim sidekick to SLJ, Bridget Fonda as one of SLJ's girlfriends and Robert Forster as a bail bondsman who falls for Grier. The scene is then set for a complex plot in which you are never entirely sure who is going to double-cross whom right up to the very last few scenes of the film.
This is a very conventional film in many ways. It is heavily plot-driven in a way that sustains tension throughout. The characters are given plenty of opportunity to develop and to surprise the audience. There are laughs and a few in-jokes. The camera movements are, for the most part, very constrained and the use of close-ups is extensive. Only twice does Tarantino do anything out of the ordinary; once where he uses a short split-screen sequence and once where he shows the same scene three times from three different perspectives. But you feel that this is not the director showing off but sensible decision taking about how the plot can best be served. The violence is nearly all off screen and the only thing your maiden aunt could object to is the language. And what language it is. It seems like Tarantino has a perfect ear for putting just exactly the words you would expect into his character's mouths. We all know no one is as fluent, as funny or as dumb in real life but, whilst we are in the cinema, we believe that real people could speak this way. It seems like there are acres and acres of dialogue in Tarantino's films but they are all worth hearing.
At the heart of the film though is Pam Grier as Jackie Brown. It's not as if she comes over as being a great actress but she does come across as being a real woman. She's got a serious choice to make if she is ever going to get out of being a flight attendant and she is streetwise enough to be plausible as the woman who will risk it all to rip off the half million and still win your sympathy. She is also in her forties, big by comparison with what is fashionable, and more gorgeous than any teen or twenties stick-insect actress that you could ever mention. Clearly, either Tarantino or the cameraperson, or both, are deeply in love with Pam Grier as is evidenced by the many long and lingering shots of her. Some of these shots go on for so long that there can be no reason to hold them for the sake of advancing the film. They are simply there to let us look at her and read every nuance in her face. If you don't like her face then some of this film will leave you cold. And this leads to my only criticism of the film in that it could comfortably be 20 to 30 minutes shorter – not necessarily cutting the shots of Pam Grier but elsewhere where things run on just a shade too long.