Review: Jackie Brown
Jackie Brown has always been the black sheep of Tarantino’s filmography, being the only film of his that’s adapted from another person’s work – in this case the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch – and regarded by most to be one of his lesser works. Having only seen the film once beforehand I wanted to give it another shot, being a little bit older and hopefully more mature to see the film in a different light. While I can appreciate Tarantino trying something different I still think this might be a slight misstep in his career and probably why he’s never tried to adapt another story since.
The film follows Jackie Brown, a stewardess in her mid-40s, struggling to just get by in a shitty job in a shitty part of L.A., on the sly she smuggles money in and out of Mexico for Gun Runner Ordell Robbie who is currently under watch by ATF meaning he relies on couriers like Jackie to keep a living. When Jackie is stopped by ATF agent Ray Nicolette and found with Ordell’s money and a small bag of cocaine she is threatened with a prison sentence, however Ordell bails her out through Bondsman Max Cherry with the intent of killing her before she can turn informant against her.
Jackie instead proves her worth by planning a double-cross on the police, pretending to work with them to catch Ordell with his money only to have a third party – Ordell’s former cellmate Louis Gara and ex-surfer girl Melanie - take it instead. In truth however, Jackie teams up with Max to trick both the police and Ordell in order to keep Jackie out of jail AND keep Ordell’s money for themselves without either side getting suspicious.
Despite the ins and outs, which can be a little confounding to follow at first, this is easily the most straightforward narrative Tarantino has ever done partly because it plays out mostly linear with a slight jump during the actual heist. The basic set-up is that Jackie is trying to get away from Ordell and has found an opportunity with the police but can’t tip either side off to her plan, and honestly once you break it down and realise that that’s the majority of what’s pushing this two and a half hour flick you can see the edges fraying. Not that it’s a bad story, it’s just a little too small with too much time focussed on repeatedly setting up Jackie’s plan or following people who aren’t important, it’s a shame because there’s a few general themes on show here – namely the fact that both Jackie and Max are middle-aged, going nowhere and hating where they’ve ended up – that showcase a more mature Tarantino, especially following the bloodthirsty Dogs and Pulp Fiction but aren’t given enough of a chance to stand out.
Characters were also a mixed bag which is a damn shame considering the amount of talent on display here, to get the bad out of the way first, Bridget Fonda as Melanie is pretty much worthless, all she does is sit around in a bikini and smoke dope which might sound fine but that’s literally all of her character until out of nowhere she starts being an annoying little bitch to Louis in the third act. Speaking of which, Louis himself is sadly played by a very underutilised Robert De Niro who spends the first half of his screentime standing awkwardly in the background and mumbling and the second half being angry and confused. And fair enough, once De Niro is allowed to start acting Louis does come off better but by that time it’s too little too late and it feels like an odd shift for the character, seemingly changing gears with very little warning. Thankfully Louis and Melanie are stuck together for the majority of the film so the worst elements are focussed solely within their screentime.
Things pick up slightly with Michael Keaton as Ray Nicolette, the ATF agent on Jackie’s tail, Keaton isn’t given a lot to do but he balances the line between good cop and asshole pretty well, he’s doing his job and he doesn’t fully trust Jackie but he’s willing to help her if she keeps her nose clean. It’s a decent role but one that could’ve been built upon a little more.
The late Robert Forster earned his only Oscar nomination playing bondsman Max Cherry and it’s not hard to see why, Max is easily the most likeable person in the entire film, he starts off not really giving a damn, helping Ordell bail out his ‘friends’ just simply cause it was easy money for him. But it’s after he meets Jackie and finds himself suddenly smitten by someone in the same situation as him that he starts warming up. Out of everyone in the film, Max is the only one without ulterior motives, he helps Jackie because of the high pay she’s offering but he advises her because he knows how dangerous it is going against Ordell and doesn’t want her going against him alone. There’s a lot of subtlety to Forster’s performance, he only gives slight hints as to his true emotion, probably as a defence mechanism, but when you can pick up on when he’s scared or angry or even when he’s caring it stands out amongst the greediness of the other characters.
Speaking of greedy, Samuel L. Jackson as Ordell damn near steals the film with one of his strongest performances, what makes Ordell stand out is that the man is pretty damn evil, with the first 20 minutes he’s killed one of his couriers just for the minor possibility of them turning against him and through the rest of the film he makes it clear that he’s not above doing the same again. There’s a coldness to Ordell that, even when he’s getting mad and boisterous, shines through to highlight how little he cares about the people he’s working with. Jackson has moments where he lets some humour shine through – like when he tells a colleague they could’ve hit someone to shut them up instead of killing them – but is very quick to remind you just how much of shit Ordell is and he plays it very well, especially coming off the redemptive arc of Jules in Pulp Fiction this is a nice change of character for him.
Rounding out the cast is Pam Grier as the titular Jackie, known mostly for her Blaxploitation work in the 70s, Jackie was a career resurgence for Grier and arguably could be seen as a follow-up to some of her characters. Stuck in middle-age with a bad record from her youth holding her back and a shitty future keeping her where she is, Jackie is not in a good place when the film starts but it’s after her threat of prison where she finally snaps about where her life will take her one day that she finally takes action. Despite life beating her into the dirt, Jackie is constantly shown to be the smartest one in the room at any given time, she plays it cool, confident and collected, after the cocaine incident at the start she keeps herself one step ahead of everyone, planning what she’s going to do and how to counter what others will do. It’s a level of confidence that might come across as presumptuous in the wrong hands but Grier adds a small level of desperation to her character, she’s confident because she’s entering a dangerous world and needs to keep her cool in order to survive and escape, she plays it well and stands out as arguably the most mature character Tarantino has ever created.
That maturity is what stands out about Tarantino’s direction because on face value this is the least Tarantino film there is, it’s too soft, too quiet, too small to really feel like one of his works outside of the soundtrack which includes funk and blaxploitation classics like Bobby Womack, Delfonics, Bill Withers and even Foxy Brown. I do appreciate Tarantino possibly trying something different here and I do like some of what he has here, this isn’t a film about some hardened criminals making a steal, this is a middle aged woman looking for a way out of hum-drum existence that just so happens to know criminals, in any other film Jackie Brown is a foot-note, a featured extra in a much larger gangster film, here she is the film. There’s something quite interesting about that as a concept with the cops not even thinking about Jackie double-crossing anyone because all they want is Ordell, allowing her to slip under the radar.
As a concept, that’s interesting, in execution is a little more iffy, maybe it’s the linear nature that makes things a little too straight-forward, maybe it’s the lack of any real drive to push the whole 2 and a half hour runtime but the film as a whole doesn’t really have a lot of meat to it. It’s a heist movie where the heist is taken place between two women in a dressing room and never goes beyond that. Don’t get me wrong, the actual heist is the best part of the film where we see it from three different angles of Jackie, Max and Louis/Melanie in order to see every part of how Jackie pulled the whole thing off and carries a fair amount of tension throughout all three sides, but it’s still just a dressing room and after the film repeatedly had Jackie explaining her plan to Ordell then explaining the adjusted plan to Max, to have the whole thing done with so easily feels anti-climatic, not helped by there being a further 20-30 minutes afterwards to slowly tie everything together.
I might try Jackie Brown again someday but until then I’ll count this as a misstep for Tarantino, that’s not to say it’s a bad film, I think the slower-pace and more mature themes were impressively handled and the combined efforts of Grier, Forster and Jackson utilise them to have their characters stand out. But the story’s too easy to carry the size of the film, De Niro and Fonda grind the film to a halt whenever they’re onscreen and the whole thing sizzles out long before it reaches the end. Maybe that’s the point, maybe I’m still too immature to really grasp what Tarantino is putting down here, but that’s twice now I’ve walked away not feeling 100% on the whole thing.
7/10