Word: grier
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...could irrepressible actor QUENTIN TARANTINO, after casting himself in all his directorial outings, not put himself in Jackie Brown? A careful listening will discover him giving a shrill, stilted delivery of lines like "end of messages" as the voice of PAM GRIER'S answering machine. Not quite as sly as Hitchcock, but a lot more pleasant than watching him play a real character...
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...
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...
...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...