Smooth Criminal

Rating: Null/10 (9 December 2009)

Based on an Elmore Leonard novel, Quintin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown" stars Pam Grier as a sassy flight attendant who attempts to evade both criminals and the law. The film was released in 1997, two years after another Leonard adaptation ("Get Shorty").
Though it was brushed aside in 1997, "Brown's" reputation has grown over the years, thanks largely to the way it avoids Tarantino's more annoying tendencies. The film lacks the rapid-fire dialogue, narrative gymnastics and bloody violence of Tarantino's previous two films, and is generally more sedate and easy going. The film's also far less cartoonish than Tarantino's other flicks, perhaps thanks to its central characters, played by Robert Forster and Pam Grier. They're a charming couple, both in their late 40s or early 50s, and lend the film a certain gravitas. They also strike up an interesting relationship which, though it never quite turns romantic, sizzles nevertheless.
Restraint, then, separates "Jackie Brown" from Tarantino's other pictures. The director gives his characters room to breath, fills his film with quieter moments, deaths and murders aren't taken as lightly as is usual, his characters aren't as self-consciously hip and Grier and Forster exude a kind of world-weary disillusionment, both quieter and wiser than the motormouths typical of Tarantino-land. Indeed, one can easily imagine a Humphrey Bogart or a late career Robert Mitchum in the film's Robert Forster role.
Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of "homages" here. Tarantino inserts nods to "Black Mamma White Mamma", "Vampyros Lesbos" and "Bucktown", and turns the hero of Leonard's novel from a blonde Caucasian to an African American woman called Jackie Brown, a nod to Pam Grier's blaxploitation classic, "Foxy Brown". One song used, "Longtime Woman", was itself sung by Grier, and is a nod to "The Big Doll House", a 1971 film in which she starred.
Many know that "Brown's" opening shot, in which Bobby Momack's "Across 110th Street" plays while Grier rides a moving walk-way, is a raging rip-off of "The Graduate's" opening shot, but it's also ripped right out of the 1972 crime drama "Across 110th Street", which is itself the name of a song by Bobby Momack, whom Pam Grier sang back-up for before she began her career in film. In truth, the film is packed with scenes and moments cribbed from other films – the best moments from "Pulp Fiction" also reappear here, Travolta and Thurman becoming Gier and Forster - but there's also a certain gravity here that Tarantino's other films lack. "Jackie Brown's" a tale of unrequited love, a sad romance, and a film about desperate people trying to survive. As Momack's song attests, the film's packed with characters "trying to get out of the ghetto alive", "doing whatever they have to do to survive". Smooth.
"Jackie Brown" ends with a heist which is shown to the audience from three different points of view. This feels very gimmicky, as no real "shocking" or "interesting" new bits of information are revealed to us by the time we reach the third pass; the alert viewer has already predicted how the heist goes down midway into the second "point of view" sequence. Still, the film is packed with lots of little "reveals" which do work brilliantly. These reveals range from the subtle (Ordell's "hot women on the side" is really a battered addict) to the obvious (Jackie pocket's a gun etc). The film then closes on a close up of Grier's face. It's a face Tarantino adores, and one which he manages to elevate above postmodern fetish object. This is in contrast to his next film, "Kill Bill", in which his women once again feel more like dolls, reference points and signposts.
8.5/10 – Slight, but perhaps also some kind of pulp masterpiece. Worth three viewings.