Movie Review – Jackie Brown

Jackie Brown (1997)
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

Saying a lot has been written about Quentin Tarantino’s films would be an understatement. I think it would be safe to say that Jackie Brown is the film the least written about or regarded with the least awe. It was the filmmaker’s follow-up to Pulp Fiction, and such “next movies” can fail to live up to eager fans’ expectations. Brown is a far more muted picture than we have come to expect from Tarantino. There are a few loud stylistic flourishes, but for the most part, the picture is entirely character-driven. The result is something that still feels very fresh despite being made twenty-five years ago. Other movies will age poorly, but Tarantino’s work always feels like it could have been made today.

Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) is a flight attendant based out of Los Angeles. To make some income on the side, she smuggles money for gun runner Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson) on her flights to Mexico. After questioning one of Ordell’s couriers and going after Jackie, the ATF and LAPD are aware of the operation. The flight attendant is jailed, and her employer goes to Max Cherry (Robert Forster), a well-regarded bail bondsman. Upon meeting Jackie, Max falls head over heels, and she begins to devise a plan that will help her escape her life and the looming threats involved. The plan will not go off without a hitch, two of those hitches being beach-babe Melanie (Bridget Fonda) and Louis (Robert DeNiro).

Jackie Brown is a film with the energy of a Tarantino movie but not all the annoying bullshit he can sometimes get bogged down by. It’s still clearly an homage to Blaxploitation cinema without being too abrasive. The picture maintains a cool vibe with just enough tension from start to end, which is accentuated by Pam Grier, who is in the lead role. I had been aware of Grier for a long time but never saw a film in which she had a prominent role. Wow. She is so incredibly charismatic and draws you in. While all the performances here are pretty good, Grier is the glue that ties everything together.

Unlike many other Tarantino movies, the characters are not comic book-styled badasses. Max is a schlubby, balding guy who admits he got hair plugs. He’s not played as a loser but as a regular guy who is pretty sharp and picks up on details. Louis is a basket case, an ex-con who has been zapped in the head from years of incarceration and forgets where he parked his car during the big heist of the second act. Jackie is just a person trying to stay alive and be in abject poverty. We get an informative scene near the film’s end, watching Jackie practice her tough gal banter before pulling a revolver from a desk drawer. 

One of Tarantino’s strengths has always been in making minor roles feel larger. Early in the film, Chris Tucker appears as Beaumont, the first of Ordell’s minions to get caught. The sequence between the two of them plays out so wonderfully. It never feels superfluous because it teaches us something about Ordell and what he will do to protect his interests. Yet it works as a short piece that doesn’t need the rest of the film around it. That’s a common trait I’ve begun to notice in Tarantino’s work, as well as other stylish auteurs like Wes Anderson, that they make a film out of a collection of interconnected short films. Long sequences with a complete narrative arc are used to build an even bigger narrative across the top of everything.

The locations are similarly non-exotic. Pot smoke-filled apartments. Dive bars. The food court at the mall. Nothing looks out of place like the retro diner from Pulp Fiction or the cartoon version of Japan in Kill Bill. This is Los Angeles as in 1997 but with a soundtrack from a 1970s crime film. These people feel at ease in these locales because it’s their world. I can’t imagine a heightened L.A. here, which would detract from the characters and the stories. Tarantino realized the same thing, which is why this movie sticks out in all the best ways in his filmography. 

It’s only in a film like this that you could have DeNiro playing a supporting role, and that role is of a stoned-out, emotionally stunted ex-con who is quick to shoot someone for annoying him while he wanders around a mall parking lot. I would argue that this is one of DeNiro’s last great performances before he became a caricature of himself throughout the 2000s. You have Bridget Fonda as the angriest pot-chain-smoking, bikini-wearing beach babe. Even Jackson, who often plays a version of himself in most movies these days, develops Ordell as a complex character. He’s a charming viper who can sweet-talk people into doing whatever he wants until the pressure really cranks up, and then suddenly, no one is listening to him anymore.

At the center of this film is a smoldering love story between a woman in her late forties and a man in his mid-50s, which ultimately works. Grier and Forster, once young stars of the 1970s grindhouse era, have aged beautifully. They are people with regrets from a youth we don’t see or really hear much about in this film. It can be inferred that they lived these lives through exhaustion in their eyes, how they perked up at the promise of a new love, only to be quickly tempered by life experience. Once upon a time, they would have gotten lost in each other’s eyes, but now…well, they know fairy tale endings don’t happen for people like them, who must keep surviving until the end.

Everything about Jackie Brown is so precise and confident. Despite being two and a half hours long, every moment of this picture is effortless. You’ll get to the end, shocked that everything went by so fast. We’re never rushed through a single scene or interaction. Characters get room to breathe. Relationships are developed and explored through conflict. Yet, at no point does Jackie Brown stall out or feel like we’ve become trapped in a meandering scene. Whether you love or hate him, Tarantino is one of the great living filmmakers. He understands the language of a specific type of cinema so fluently that making these movies is second nature for him. 

What I take from all of this is that Tarantino is a far more exciting filmmaker when he’s engaged with the story rather than the meta-narrative elements of the genre. Kill Bill is entertaining, but there can be a point where you are so overwhelmed by the flourishes you don’t feel much for the people on screen. Jackie Brown is the opposite, a movie that hinges entirely on the people and their goals and conflicts. There are some small touches of that in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, but nothing exactly like this. I know Tarantino has been in the news lately, with rumblings of his “final movie,” as he wants a perfectly round number of ten. I hope that whatever he does next, it can recapture the feel of this picture because it is so damn satisfying.