Sterling Debut

Rating: 8/10 (26 April 2004)

Quentin Tarantino's crime thriller about an anonymous group of low-end hoods and how they deal with a diamond heist gone terribly awry still stands out as a coruscating debut, with its elliptical, jump-cutting narrative construction illuminating a vision of antisocial individuals unwittingly confined to a hell of their own making. The cavernous warehouse, a windowless, stifling structure, is where the characters eventually "end up" after a bungled heist and where the fulcrum of this tense, sweaty battle of wills plays out. The moral linchpin of the story is the relationship between Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) and Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), an undercover cop whose unnerving, gut-wounded shrieks open the movie proper. A tough, grizzled veteran, White blasts through police cars filled with cops, while paradoxically nurturing the incognito Orange back to health, holding his head in his lap, assuring him in a sing-song voice: "You're not gonn-aa dii-eee."
It's a wonderfully absurd dichotomy that suggests the dual natures of the other two primary hoods: Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen), a cool, unflappable silver-tongue on one hand and a ruthless, inhuman monster on the other, and Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi), an eloquent, irritated card—as in the opening restaurant conversation, which is about as finely crafted as expository intros get—who, like a Leone anti-hero, is also an oily, amoral pragmatist, playing all sides to fulfill his ends. Tarantino's dialogue, particularly in how it seeks and finds the characters' blue-collar-rooted colloquialisms—their endless discussions of pop culture tropes, Joe's rallying call of "Let's go to work," their choices of music—seems uncannily effortless, despite an understandable temptation to devolve into oscillating theatrics. These characters live in a parallel universe, their dual social roles of criminal and laborer making their flash and bravado seem empty and innocuously self-contained. True pariahs, they lash out as a means of communicating, perhaps because they have no means of transcendence. Which, returning to the story's central relationship, all makes White's compassion and humanity nothing less than tragic.