B-Movie Heroine Chic: Tarantino's Hyper-Hip Brew Potent No More

I am immune to hype.

Folks may whine this way or that about the foundering dinghy that is Titanic but the real crime of the minute is the non-criticism of Jackie Brown. Its reviews have had all the analytical ferocity of a dog rolling over and playing dead, and we can be sure Quentin Tarantino has rubbed that pup's belly--explaining feelingly to a wheedling New York Times or an absurd Charlie Rose about how the borrowing of mediocre orchestral tracks from '70s B-movie is a gesture of high art. He's a used car salesman, but the problem is, people are actually snapping up the Gremlins and Pintos he purveys.

To borrow the rant of Network's furious prophet of the little screen, Howard Beale: "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

Step back: Jackie Brown is fundamentally a boring movie, which has to be bought into to be enjoyed or believed. The devices that worked in the past are now really straining under the pop culture pressure and expectations: the tangled slice-of-underworld-life plots, time sequence double-takes, vintage insta-cool sound track, and all the rest are present--but sloppy and unsatisfying. Fundamentally, Tarantino has failed to make things click; the elements fizzling in a way reminiscent of the almost-but-not-quite of Mike Leigh's Career Girls.

Adapted from Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, the plot follows a female flight attendant (Pam Grier) as she sets about holding on to some cash, orbited by a small-time gunrunner (Samuel L. Jackson) and a lovelorn bailbondsman (Robert Forster). Unfortunately, Tarantino has complicated things by letting too much B-movie slip into his creation: specifically, bits of a score from the blaxploitation movie Coffy and a none-too-riveting acting style on the part of the title's heroine.

Receiving accolades left and right, such that her comeback has become a gimmick in itself, Pam Grier's performance fails to hold up to close scrutiny--literally. She delivers lines in earnest or with meaningful pauses when her character's been found out, but the look and feel smacks of trying too hard. Looking concerned is not enough to convey emotion, nor does wielding a gun against evil men and "fighting back" correlate to credible passion, anger, etc.

Which is a pity, since Tarantino plainly believes his movie to be putting his sensitive side on parade: this is his touching portrait of a woman who is vulnerable yet strong. Accordingly, we are subjected to long stretches of Grier, punctuated with experimental or retro techniques. Grier gets a '70s long-shot in which we wait for her to walk towards us from 50 feet away (sent up hilariously by Woody Allen in Annie Hall). The screen goes blurry for Forster's bondsman as he thinks. Grier and Jackson carry on an argument behind glass doors.

The more compelling of these tricks is Tarantino's playing with a kind of leitmotif song for a couple of characters, but this fades in and out and becomes a frustrating medley selection from, we are assured in reports, his extensive LP collection. Indulgence and soundtrack worship reaches an unbelievable point when we are forced to watch Forster's bondsman go to a record store, browse among tapes, and finally buy, quite clearly, a Delfonics hit. The merchandisers of old chestnut love songs must be rejoicing with a future return more guaranteed than the suddenly fortunate surf bands who saw new sales with Pulp Fiction's skittering guitar soundtrack.

The point is not that Tarantino really works for the music industry, but that the way in which he's selling us his interests is no longer interesting. His vividly imagined, detailed criminal underworld, with a language all its own, was what helped hold together the short-attention-span oddities of his first two endeavors. Now, shocking devices foisted upon this movie's stultifyingly paced plot and Grier's well-intentioned yet boring performance seem instantly tired. At one point, the "sudden shoot" gimmick--witness Tim Roth's character in Reservoir Dogs, or Pulp Fiction's poor victim of Vincent Vega's gun and a bump in the road--seems downright offensive, suggesting a world where such cavalier violence on a woman is far more disturbing and sinister than Tarantino blindly intended.

Even that which we enjoy of his world, he doesn't know to temper. Having Jackson's gun runner sit Robert DeNiro's aging felon on a couch and show a video of gals with guns--that's a master touch. But lingering on the boring homebody life of a criminal is a little too much, even if DeNiro's the criminal: I'm not all for the experiential method of getting an audience to feel the consummate boredom of a character by subjecting them to the same.