"Royale with cheese"

Rating: 8/10 (20 January 2012)

Cinema is not like rock and roll, but once or twice in a generation someone will come along and try to reinvent cool for the screen. In our generation, just such a personage is Quentin Tarantino, a writer-director who raised the snappy, witty dialogue of the gangster genre to the level a cunning art. Pulp Fiction is arguably his signature movie.
It has a screenplay of perfect construction, full of symbolism and tiny elements that play off one another throughout the two-and-a-half hour runtime. As with Tarantino's debut, Reservoir Dogs, the dialogue is a continual complement to the action, in contrast to cinema's usual actions-over-words ethos. There are actually often more words then are strictly needed, for the sake of rhythm or emphasis, such as Uma Thurman saying "five, as in there's 1-2-3-4-5 of us". One of the best things about the Pulp Fiction screenplay is that, though ostensibly a gangster movie, it's also very much not. There is much of the mundane aspects of criminality, such as Lance asking his wife for baggies and twisticks, and the irony of hoods relying upon a cleaner and an underworld medic for things they got up to when off-duty, as it were.
Tarantino's style as a visual director is, for the most part, beautifully simple. In an era where edits seem to come every two seconds, Pulp Fiction features some refreshingly long takes. It's a very minimalist style – he doesn't show us anything we don't really need to see. During the Kahuna burger exchange, he breaks it down to just two opposing but contrasting shots, a close-up of Samuel L. Jackson and the mid-shot of Brad with Jackson and Travolta before and behind him. Some scenes open with just a series of close-ups, and for much of the movie, sets and scenery are barely noticeable. This puts the focus totally on the actors, something that is all too often forgotten in the more showy, technical movies of the modern age. That's not to say backgrounds never matter. Once in a while there is a brilliant something-or-other to be noticed, like the game of Operation in Lance's house, standing out amid the dull-coloured bric-a-brac for a second or two.
The reams of dialogue and this attention given to actors puts a burden on the cast that has similarities to that in a stage play. And as with classic stage acting the performances here are certainly exaggerated, a kind of heightened version of reality, albeit a world away from theatrical hamming. Uma Thurman particularly stands out, sparkling with energy and delight, and a flirtatious frisson with an also-impressive John Travolta. Michael Madsen was the original choice for the role, but Travolta has a somewhat softer approach that is just right. Finest of all though is surely Samuel L. Jackson, who has this brilliantly menacing stillness, contrasting with a rhythmic, shifting tone in his words. Jackson is to Tarantino what Laurence Olivier is to Shakespeare; he can speak the lines as if he's actually thinking them.
My only problem with Pulp Fiction is it's sometimes too clever for its own good, filled with too many embellishments, too many attempts to be outstanding and different. There are some moments that just seem almost twee in a way, like when Thurman's "square" is literally drawn on the screen. But by-and-large Pulp Fiction is a work of much filmmaking genius, and it's hardly surprising that creativity as vibrant as this will come bubbling through the seams here and there.