I pray this won't always be the third best Tarantino flick

Rating: 8/10 (29 August 2010)

I haven't liked the last 3 movies by Quentin Tarantino. I loathed Kill Bill, was bored stiff by Death Proof and unimpressed by Inglorious Basterds. I was starting to wonder if I was being unfair. Perhaps my standards for Tarantino's work were too high and I was being overly critical. Then I rewatched Jackie Brown and remembered just how great Tarantino can be. This movie is so good it completely validates my view of how crappy everything he's done since has been.
Based on a book by Elmore Leonard, this is probably the least showy and ostentatious of all Taratino's films, but it's also the one where he's most trying to grow and mature as a storyteller. It's about a loquacious and murderous gun dealer named Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) who's set himself in inner city Los Angeles like a spider in a web. Ordell has women set up in houses all over town, an ex-con buddy named Louis Gara (Robert De Niro) helping him out and 500 thousand dollars stashed down in Mexico. To get access to his money, Ordell relies on an 40something flight attendant working the last airline job she'll ever have on the worst airline in the business. Her name is Jackie Brown (Pam Grier). When an ATF agent named Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) catches Jackie coming back into the country with drugs and an envelope filled with 50 thousand dollars, he gives her a simple choice. Go to jail and lose everything she has or turn on Ordell. It's a simple choice but Jackie Brown isn't a simple woman. With the aid of a bail bondsman named Max Cherry (Robert Forster), Jackie hatches a scheme to get her out from under the cops, Ordell and her own run down life.
This movie looks, feels, flows and even sounds different than anything else Quentin Tarantino has done. It dispenses with slick attitude and embraces and earthy and compromised reality. These characters are real people living real lives and when they talk, they say real things. They live in a world that looks lived in and unpolished. When these characters act, they don't do anything cutely clever or stylish but move and perform with a mesmerizingly plain directness. Jackie Brown is an effort by Tarantino to become more than the flashy shtick he executed so brilliantly in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. He's not trying to make that same sort of film again and he wonderfully succeeds.
There's a lighter touch to the whole movie. The violence is less grotesque, the dialog is less contrived, the performances are less theatric and even the music that defines Tarantino's direction is less intrusive. Most of the songs we hear are a part of these characters' lives, not a soundtrack slathered over them.
Now, that does also mean that Jackie Brown doesn't have quite the energy or intensity of Tarantino's previous work and the pacing of the story is maybe a bit too luxurious. But there are no serious flaws to the movie. There's nothing in here you have to overlook or excuse. There's never a point or a moment that you have to accept that you wouldn't accept if you saw it in the work of a lesser filmmaker.
The performances here are uniformly strong with the actors filling out the depth of each and every character. None of these roles are just here to serve The Almighty Plot Hammer. They do what they do because of who they are.
Jackie Brown is a really good film. Sadly, though, I fear that when Tarantino's career is overJackie Brown will still be the third best movie he ever made. True, that would mean he made three films that were better than most people ever make. It would also mean he spent decades throwing away one of the greatest talents of his time.