Left Field Cinema

The early 1990’s in Hollywood belonged to one man, director, writer, and actor: Quentin Tarantino, much has been written about his successes in two of the three roles listed here, and how he radically changed the way main stream cinema was drafted in Hollywood. Here today the question is simple, which is his finest film? Automatically I’m discounting his writing credits from the running, although none of them were particularly in with a shot anyway, but the likes of True Romance, Natural Born Killers, and From Dusk till Dawn will not be included. This assessment will be limited to his six feature films as it currently stands which include: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill Vol.1, Kill Bill Vol.2, and eath Proof.

Whilst I feel that Tarantino is a director who is generally over rated especially when he is hailed as “the greatest director who ever lived”. I consider this to be far from the case, and of the six features I’d argue only three of them have any significant worth. However I must also be mindful that it’s very fashionable to criticise Tarantino at this point in his career, the higher a director soars the more people want to revel in the same director’s subsequent failures. My intension is not to lampoon the mans work or to pretend that he was not a significant force within early 90’s American cinema which he uncontrovertibly was.

In true Tarantino style let’s start in the middle and work our way to somewhere else. His fourth and fifth features Kill Bill Vol’s 1 and 2. It’s important to access them together as they were intended to be one film before a financial decision was made to split the three plus hour film into two and sell it twice. Tarantino at this point had been out of the director’s chair for half a decade and as a result anticipation was building up for what the charismatic, pop culture reference, and quotable dialogue king would come up with next. The result was a surprise for all as it featured both the bare minimum of everything Tarantino was known for being good at, not a single memorable line in its entire run time, and with the notable exceptions of a superman speech which seems oddly out of place and a epigraph which quotes the Klingon proverb “revenge is a dish which is best served cold” it doesn’t feature as many pop culture references either. But more than this, Kill Bill seemed to lack a sense of the ordinary, of the mundane which had made his previous films stand out. The protagonists of his first three films are hardly average, but we see them doing average ordinary things: Using the toilet, discussing whether to tip a waitress or not, or something even more innocuous like dropping a set of car keys on the floor accidentally. This is basically what made Tarantino’s work stand out, not surprisingly both Kill Bill films were maligned by the critics upon its release, and are subjected to even more unsympathetic critiques today. You have to give Tarantino praise for at least attempting something new, but he didn’t completely escape his comfort zone, it’s not like Kill Bill is a romantic comedy or a kids cartoon, but by abandoning everything he was hailed as a genius for Tarantino clearly wanted to stretch his legs. Kill Bill Vol.1 is easily his most action packed film to date featuring blood thirsty violence and an almost amoral portrayal of violence towards women in particular. Unfortunately, although Tarantino does a good job with the many action set pieces his skills are not up to the level of his contemporaries. Braver still was his abandonment of Vol.1’s tone in favour of a more sedated and slow paced Vol.2 which when watched back to back is stark to the point of unnatural in the contrast between the two films, it’s inventive but left the action junkies disappointed and the rest of the viewers still craving just one line of dialogue we could take away and repeat to our friends the next day.

Skipping back to the beginning and we have his 1992 debut Reservoir Dogs which put Tarantino on the map, produced from the money he made selling the True Romance script, this was a brutal uncompromising heist-gone-wrong movie which inspired a number of facsimile through the mid-1990’s. Unfortunately the film looses points because it itself is a facsimile of the earlier Ringo Lam film City on Fire from 1987, although Tarantino admits it was his inspiration, the originality of his film is tarnished by the films relationship to its predecessor. The line between homage and theft is tenuous and Tarantino often dances around that line. Even so, it is a startling first film which marries razor sharp dialogue, blood thirsty and at the time controversial screen violence and a perfectly formed non-linear plot line which is easy to follow despite its complexities, all of which are to the credit of Tarantino, not City on Fire. This all combined with the incidentalness of some of the films scenarios, and the naturalism of great portions of the films dialogue helped put Tarantino on the map.

Then came the ever so tricky second feature, where numerous film makers in the past have overwhelmed critics with their audacity and originality only to become a victim of their own hype and fail to deliver a successful sophomore offering. Tarantino didn’t just match his debut, he surpassed it in every sense with Pulp Fiction, continuing and further exploring what he did so well with Reservoir Dogs, here Tarantino could be accused of not moving forward, another story of crime, another set of law-breakers who we witness having “ordinary” conversations, another non-linear narrative. But this time its content was entirely original, he didn’t borrow from other films, he created a new world and introduced a main stream audience to a splintered narrative, he was not a pioneer of this story telling technique as some have hailed him as, but he did manage to sink it into the public conscience, and introduce it to a majority audience in the west. His major achievement with Pulp Fiction was to take everything that was successful about Reservoir Dogs and infuse it with a wider sense of humanity, giving his characters heart, making them likable and hateable at the same time like most human beings are. Famously the characters could be talking about what Europeans call a McDonalds product and recounting trivialities from a long trip on the other side of the Atlantic and then the next scene cold heartedly execute an unarmed man. John Travolta’s character Vincent Vega trying to convince himself not to sleep with a mob boss’s wife in the next room by talking to himself in a mirror, whilst meanwhile she accidentally snorts heroin and comes close to death. Pulp fiction also began another Tarantino trademark, finding once famous actors and giving them central roles in his films, his casting of Travolta gave his career a boost it needed, Travolta’s mid-90’s come-back was entirely a result of Pulp Fiction. Tarantino would attempt it again with Pam Grier and Robert Forester in Jackie Brown, and David Carradine in Kill Bill but none were as successful as Travolta.

Skipping ahead to his latest film, after Kill Bill’s financially motivated split came 2007’s Grindhouse. A double feature with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Tarantino’s Death Proof, dogged by controversy over its U.S box office failure the production company took the drastic step of splitting Grindhouse into two films and presenting them separately for international audiences. It could be argued that Death Proof and Planet Terror were never designed to be assessed by themselves, and that they should only be considered as a single entity. But forgoing that consideration for the moment I am unfortunately forced to conclude that Death Proof is not only the weakest of Tarantino’s films, but actually the only truly bad film he’s ever made. Inferior to Planet Terror in every way conceivable, it lacks the sense of fun which Rodriguez’s instalment had so much of, it lacks a sense of the ridiculous, or the surreal, and instead plays rather matter of fact like in its approach and instead of presenting a parody of a bad horror movie, it is in fact a bad horror movie. The U.S. cut is by all accounts a far tighter beast with less ponderously slow plot developments, but the European cut of the film is unforgivably bloated, featuring lots of scenes with girls dancing or talking about music, some interpersonal dynamics which then become more than pointless when half way through the film Tarantino decides to switch up his leading ladies for a set of even more irritating characters. Indeed the women of the second half are so infuriating to watch that you’re rooting for films villain Stuntman Mike a sexual deviant who gets off on killing girls with his “Death proof” car, to kill every last one of the twittering air heads. Kurt Russell is adequate in the role, but lacks the requisite amount of evil to be a truly terrifying villain. There is, in fairness, a jaw-dropping stunt sequence in the films final reel where a New Zealander stunt girl is holding onto the bonnet of a car for dear life as Stuntman Mike tries to ram the car off the road at incredible speeds, this prolonged sequence proves that Tarantino can handle stunts and action very successfully, but without a single likeable character in the mix the audience is unfortunately completely uninvolved. One good stunt does not a great film make. There is also a terribly indulgent streak to Death Proof, not only does Tarantino regress to acting mode once again, but he also litters his film with untimely references to his previous films. The one time king of the pop culture reference, now feels that his own status is enough justification for him to now only reference his own work. Death Proof is also visually inconsistent for some perplexing reason, the scratched film technique which was employed throughout Planet Terror is here only used for the first half with smatterings of it during the second half, it almost feels like Tarantino lacked the courage to go all out in his parody and regressed into familiar territory, unfortunately his prowess as a writer also seems to have heavily diminished. A painfully unengaging scene in a diner for the characters of the second act is shot in the same manner as a similar scene at the start of Reservoir Dogs; here Tarantino’s self-referential streak bites him where it hurts, it serves to remind that where previously the dialogue was inventive and the characters were involving, here the dialogue is poorly constructed and the characters are just plain annoying. Overall Death Proof is a monumental failure and one I hope Tarantino never repeats.

Which leads us back ten years to the middle again, and Tarantino’s 1997 film Jackie Brown, based on the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard. Tarantino put together possibly his best and most diverse cast for his first literary adaptation (although his previous two films were also inspired by other mediums.) Bridget Fonda, Robert DeNiro, Michael Keaton, Pam Grier, Robert Forester and Samuel L. Jackson make up the players of a story following a Flight Attendant and a Bails Bondsman who are linked together in a web of deceit starting with an arms dealer and leading to FBI. Here Tarantino benefits untold amounts from having his plot and character to a certain extent dictated to him by the source material, Leonard’s plots are unmistakably better than Tarantino’s. Using this to his benefit, Tarantino takes the humanity of Pulp Fiction, continues the theme of crime but adds something we didn’t expect, something we’d not seen from Tarantino before and haven’t seen again since – a love story. Grier and Forester slowly migrate towards one and other with restrained and fascinating realism. A romantic subplot about a middle-aged pair in the middle of the hippest director’s third feature, brave move, but hardly anyone noticed. Jackson has never been better, out classing his performance in Pulp Fiction and giving us a rounded, complex villain who is both believably flawed and terrifyingly mercenary in his approach to his business.

Jackie Brown has been unfairly dismissed over the years by punters still reeling from the audacity of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, but ultimately Jackie Brown is the superior film because it does not rely on the sensational elements which first garnered Tarantino widespread attention, not that either of these films rely on violence to make their point, but Jackie Brown doesn’t need it at all, there are violent moments but they’re usually just off screen or at such a distance that you can’t truly gage what’s going on, no cutting off ears of police officers, no shooting Marvin in the face accidentally. Jackie Brown is also easily his most plot driven film, as intricate as Pulp Fiction in its structure, but not relying on gimmicky chronology shifts to keep the audiences attention. Through a synthesis of what elevated Tarantino to public attention in the first instance, with a newly acquired subtlety of character and plot, Jackie Brown became one of my favourite films of the 1990’s and in my personal opinion the finest of his six films to date.

M.Dawson