Two of the World's Greatest Writers Join Forces

Rating: 10/10 (3 December 2006)

Quentin Tarantino is one of the few filmmakers that will adapt a novel by a popular and well- received veteran novelist like Elmore Leonard, whose books are famous for not being adapted into very good movies, twist it into a blaxploitation homage, change the settings and a few things about the characters, and make it the best adaptation ever made of that author's work...save for Out of Sight, of course. Tarantino has that way of charmingly ruffling up other people's work and making it his own and somehow getting us to love it. Jackie Brown is wonderful.
This is inarguably Quentin's least appreciated film. This is something like saying the Holy Spirit is not as appreciated as the Father and the Son, because all of his films are appreciated. They're looked at by incredible amounts of people as ingenious, groundbreaking cinema. However, Jackie Brown is not mentioned as often, it's not quoted constantly, it doesn't have a following, and it's not on IMDb's Top 250, where Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and the Kill Bills have their places. I think it deserves more recognition than it gets. l think that the reason it's his least appreciated film is frankly because it's not soaked in blood and it's a battle wits more than weapons. Even though I love blood-soaked gorefests, highlights of such a kind of film being those other four Tarantino films, I think it's awfully shallow to expect such a narrow criteria from such a brilliant filmmaker like him, leaving his other efforts in the shadows. Jackie Brown has a lot to offer: One of the finest ensemble casts I've ever seen, Tarantino's trademark salt-of-the-earth dialogue ("Beaumont ain't got a doin'- time kind of disposition..."), a roller-coaster rush of a soundtrack including forcibly head-bobbing 1970s funk with unforgettable highlights like Bobby Womack's Across 110th Street and The Brothers Johnson's Strawberry Letter #23, and a clever con game that is slowly unraveled.
Jackson ignites the screen with his infectious and eternally memorable portrayal of Ordell Robie, the perfect opposite to his Jules Winnfield. He's an eccentric who doesn't realize it, a nearly laughable pseudo-badass-businessman exterior, but with a cold-hearted interior quietly ahead of everyone else, a clever double-sided mastermind.
Grier naturally gives off that down-home, unsophisticated streetwise woman-trying-to- make-it feeling in the movie's title heroine, especially early on when we're just coming to know her as a character and she's not saying much, tired from nights spent in jail, just wanting a drink and a smoke and to go home, but knowing something about her situation isn't adding up. We learn to love her not just as a badass black chick in a suit with a gun, but as a middle-aged woman trying to cling to that semblance of a life she has and taking such risks to beat the odds.
One surprise in Jackie Brown is the presence of Robert De Niro. It seems appropriate that Tarantino, someone who so embraces the crime genre and having done so much with Harvey Keitel, should cast De Niro as a seasoned career scumbag, the staple of his tremendous career. The surprise is that he plays the character down, which is so rare for him to do. Usually, De Niro takes a character and plays him up, making him a bigger, tougher, more brazen and bombastic character, sometimes just a little bit and sometimes a lot. Jackie Brown is a departure from the majority of his other work. His character shares a lot of the same traits as most of De Niro's other tough guys and crooks, but his disposition is so different. It makes this one of his most intriguing performances.
Those who've overlooked this gem, buried in all the hype of Tarantino's other classics, you're really really missing out.