Tarantino Pounds Mirth And Mayhem into An Outrageously Funny Postmodern Pulp!

Rating: 9/10 (20 April 2015)

Quentin Tarantino's mesmeric Pulp Fiction is a slow dance on the killing ground, a prodigious horror-comedy spun out with such ferocious comic glee and buoyancy that belie its seeming cruelty. Superficially set in the gang haunts, streets, bistros, apartments, pawnshops and eateries in the cheesiest corners of modern Los Angeles, this dizzily convoluted noir plunges us into a kind of retro-nightmare fantasy land (formed of Tarantino's own pop-drenched experience) that keeps looping back on itself and traps us in a cul- de-sac of double-crosses, absurdity, arousal and danger, never completely sure of where anyone's going or why â€“ creating a sheer directionless excitement that only Tarantino can conjure.
The structure itself is wickedly ingenious: Three interconnected stories, bracketed by several preludes and a few codas, are told deliberately out of sequence, with the same cast - a bloody band of outsiders - popping up everywhere. Most of the characters are familiar - the boxer who refuses to throw a fight (Bruce Willis), an obsessive war veteran (Christopher Walken), a mob boss's jaded wife (Uma Thurman), two desperate young lovers starting a crime spree (Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer), a pair of single-minded hit men who operate within a twisted code of honor (John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson) - but Tarantino's approach to their behavior consistently avoids the stereotypical. By and large these mugs exist in a moral vacuum which, for Tarantino, is the ideal atmosphere for cracking jokes while cracking open heads. Their tales all start slowly, but soon everyone's destiny plays out as the stories dovetail into outlandish twists.
Stuff happens in Pulp Fiction, exhilarating, jaw-dropping, visceral stuff but Tarantino weaves the stock stories into an amazingly coherent whole. Unlike other action-thrillers, this movie gets its charge not from action pyrotechnics but from its electric barrage of language, wisecracks and dialog, as the lingo takes on a murderous eloquence - a verbal swagger. The tension Tarantino creates between the threat of guns and the greater threat of verbal fusillade is electrifying. It's hard to imagine any viewer leaving this extravagantly demented low- life lollapalooza without carrying away at least a few indelible moments. The entire cast, like Tarantino, also seems to revel in sloshing around in this muck, each one of them having a time of their lives.
Pulp Fiction also makes it clear, despite its gory content, that Tarantino isn't just some punk nihilist on a sick joyride; his movies are all about consequences. There is a moral core in Pulp Fiction too- a subversive one. But ultimately this is also what makes the movie so unexpectedly buoyant. Despite the drugs, the blood, the language and the grit, Pulp Fiction is fundamentally light-hearted. It's fluff!