Jackie Brown Review(1997)

With Jackie Brown, Tarantino proved that he could make the film that everybody thought was a great film unlike his previous hits Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. The film focuses on Jackie Brown, played by a seductively beautiful Pam Grier, who works as an air hostess and smuggles money for Ordell Robbie, Played by a stone cold but hilarious Sam Jackson with the aid of Max Cherry, played a heart-warming Robert Forster.

With his previous films, Tarantino had an excessive focus on the need/want to show off his dialogue writing abilities, made famous by both of his previous films. But here he resists showing off but only shows his dialogue and lets the actors and the situation to uplift the dialogues. Being the only film in Tarantino’s filmography to be adapted from an existing source which is Elmore Leonard’s “Rum Punch”, Tarantino makes the film in vein of Pulp Fiction in the sense that the film, though about Jackie is more about a certain feeling. We have a tense money exchange sequence but rather than treat it like Pulp Fiction’s Reviving Mia From Overdose scene, Tarantino lets it play out like a calculative mind game without giving us the, for the first time, emotion individually but makes us feel in an overarching way.

A lot of Tarantino’s B movie love has been kept away for this film, where even though murders are quite less, the blood shown is even less, possibly only for 1 scene, but even that is for realism rather than to show off blood. The shootings have a certain detached quality to them and not the flashy. Bloody style of RD and PF. There are not majorly any high points and we get a streamlined central narrative with plottings, double plottings and backstabs planned along the way. To this, Tarantino adds, what might possibly be, in the few that he has done, the greatest characterisation of Jackie and Max Cherry.

Both are middle aged, having grown weary of the world around them and are planning to escape it and the chemistry that Max feels when he sets his eyes on Jackie for the first time, convey all that needs to be said of how he feels about her and might be as brilliant as the scene when Sam meets Nicky for the first time in Casino. The raw emotion that they feel for each other, the fact that Max buys a Delfonics record after Jackie recommends it are so subtle and lifelike and subconsciously add to the unsaid and unspoken romance between them both.

Stylistically, albeit being similar to his previous 2 films, there is a certain “slowness” which is not actually slowness but I can’t seem to think another word for it, permeates the film which again fits the whole middle aged aspect of Jackie and Max. As a director, I have often felt Tarantino as weaker than a writer, but here he absolutely, positively builds an atmosphere which is indescribable yet has an ethereal feel to it. Tarantino has never really had a prominent signature shots or style, kind of like his hero Howard Hawks, but his usage of the 360 degree camera is used here in a scene which is so unlike the ones he previously used it for and his classic Trunk shot also makes not one but 2 appearances here in 2 wholly different scenes. His affinity for the split dioptre shot is also scene here (pun intended literally) even though it exists purely on a stylistic whim.

The only way I can think of ending this review is by telling what the film made me feel which is what Roger Ebert also said:

"You savor every moment of "Jackie Brown.'' Those who say it is too long have developed cinematic attention deficit disorder. I wanted these characters to live, talk, deceive and scheme for hours and hours.