Synopsis
In the city of Hermosa Beach, gun smuggler Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) entertains dim-witted prison buddy Louis Gara (Robert DeNiro) with his knowledge of the firearms trade. Ordell’s girlfriend – an insolent, bong loving beach bunny named Melanie (Bridget Fonda) – is hardly impressed. “He’s just repeating shit he overheard. He ain’t any more of a gun expert than I am.” Ordell receives an urgent phone call from Beaumont – an associate who’s been arrested for drunk driving with a pistol. Ordell hires competent bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) to post bail. A freed man, Beaumont (Chris Tucker) receives a visit from Ordell, who lures the compromised employee to his death using Roscoe’s Chicken ‘n Waffles as bait.

Meanwhile, stewardess Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) is intercepted returning from Mexico by an LAPD detective (Michael Bowen) and a high charged ATF Special Agent named Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton). Caught with $50,000 and a bag of cocaine, Jackie remains mum on who the contraband belongs to. Hired by Ordell to bail the stewardess out of County, Max falls for Jackie at first sight. Ordell drops by Jackie’s apartment with the intent of silencing her as well, but Jackie is ready for him. Faced with a year in prison if she stands mute, or a walk if she rats on Ordell, she demands $100,000 for each year in prison she’s given. In return, she convinces Ordell that she’s worked out a plan to retrieve half a million dollars he’s amassed from an airport locker in Cabo.

Confiding to Max that she actually intends to cooperate with the authorities and set Ordell up, Jackie reveals her biggest fear: “And if I lose this job I gotta start all over again and I ain’t got nothin to start over with. I’ll be stuck with whatever I can get.” With Max making up his mind that he’s tired of the bail bond business, he agrees to help Jackie scam not only Ordell, but get away with his money under the nose of the ATF. When the carefully orchestrated sting at Del Amo Mall culminates with Ordell’s half million disappearing, Ordell first blames Louis and Melanie, who the smuggler entrusted with making the pickup. To stay out of jail, Jackie has to convince Nicolette that she’s on his side. To stay alive, Max has to convince Ordell that Jackie was protecting him, and that she’s waiting to give him his money face to face.

Production history
Elmore Leonard was the first novelist Quentin Tarantino ever read. According to legend, Tarantino was caught shoplifting a copy of The Switch from K-Mart when he was 15 years old and was almost taken to jail. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in 1994, Tarantino revealed, “I love Elmore Leonard. In fact, to me True Romance is basically like an Elmore Leonard movie that he didn’t write, you know. And like, actually, I actually owe a big debt to like, kind of figuring out my style from Elmore Leonard because, you know, he was the first writer I’d ever read – and, but also like Charles Willeford did it as well – but he was one of the first writers I had ever read that just let mundane conversations actually inform the characters, you know, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boof!,’ you know, you’re into whatever story you’re telling.”

Published in 1992, Rum Punch was Leonard’s 29th novel. Recalling its genesis, the celebrated author stated, “I decided I wanted to do a book about a bail bondsman because of the kind of people he’s involved with every day. A story has to come out of that situation. My researcher found a bail bondsman for me who understood what we wanted to do. He was very willing to cooperate. So I learned about his business and started to write the book about a bondsman doing his job. I realized not too far into the book that he wasn’t my main character. The woman, Jackie, was the main character. The plot was happening to her. And then the other characters fall right into place on opposite sides of her. She’s caught in the middle and how does she get out?”

Tarantino and his producing partner Lawrence Bender read Rum Punch in galleys as they were getting ready to make Pulp Fiction. Bender attempted to option the book, but was rebuked by Leonard’s publisher. The situation changed once Pulp Fiction became a critical and commercial sensation. Miramax Films optioned four Elmore Leonard novels for the filmmaker: Bandits, Freaky Deaky, Killshot and Rum Punch. At one time, Tarantino envisioned adapting, producing and co-starring in Killshot opposite Robert DeNiro for director Tony Scott, but the film was ultimately directed by John Madden with Joseph Gordon Levitt and Mickey Rourke (it first wrapped in 2005 but as of November 2008, still hasn’t been released by the Weinstein Company).

Lawrence Bender referred to Tarantino’s affinity for Rum Punch as “The thing that sort of rose to the top I think in terms of his consciousness, and I was really happy because I’ve always loved the book and I’ve always wanted to make it.” In his adaptation, Tarantino made key alterations. The action shifted from South Florida to the South Bay of Los Angeles – Hermosa Beach, Carson, Torrance – where Tarantino grew up. “I don’t know Miami at all, but I know South Bay like the back of my hand. This was a way for me to make this movie personal to myself and to be confident that I could keep it real. In a South Bay context I knew exactly where each of these people would live, how they would dress, what their apartments would look like. Shooting in Miami I would not have come to those things as naturally.”

Tarantino also changed the lead character from a white airline stewardess named Jackie Burke to a black stewardess named Jackie Brown, with Pam Grier in mind to play her. Grier had auditioned for the role in Pulp Fiction that ultimately went to Rosanna Arquette, but Tarantino had promised her they’d work together on something else. After Samuel L. Jackson and Bridget Fonda joined the cast, Tarantino was trying to settle on who would play Max Cherry, the bail bondsman. “I had Paul Newman in mind; I had Gene Hackman in mind; I had John Saxon in mind; and I had Robert Forster in mind. I was always leaning more towards Robert Forster than the other guys. I didn’t have to cast him right away. I had my options open.”

Robert Forster had gained notice starring in the 1969 cult classic Medium Cool before descending into short-lived TV series like Banyon and – with the exception of Alligator – one forgettable B-movie after another. The actor recalled, “The past five years, I hadn’t gotten a job for more than scale; and terrible, junky stuff that you take when you’ve got a kid in college and an ex-wife. Then Quentin comes along and says, ‘You’ve waited long enough. Now you’re going to work again.’ I can’t describe the feeling.” Receiving membership privileges in what Variety critic Michael Fleming referred to as “Tarantino’s Rediscovery Network,” Forster would receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and like John Travolta and David Carradine, never have to look for work again.

With a $12 million budget from Miramax and Guillermo Navarro serving as director of photography, Tarantino’s third film commenced shooting May 1997 in Los Angeles. “My cinematographer and I watched two movies: Hickey and Boggs, which was directed by Robert Culp and was shot in the 70’s – it’s a really good movie. And then we watched They All Laughed, by Peter Bogdanovich. Both were perfect for Jackie Brown. They All Laughed is a masterpiece, I think. It captures a fairy-tale New York. It makes New York look like Paris in the 20’s. It makes you want to live there. And we kind of used it. And then we watched Straight Time, one of the best L.A. crime movies ever. But I wanted Jackie Brown to look more like a movie than that. Straight Time is too gritty.”

With Tarantino and editor Sally Menke working on the film up to December 4, Jackie Brown snuck into theaters Christmas Day 1997. Critics responded coolly. Elvis Mitchell, the New York Times: “But for all its enthusiasm, this film isn’t sharp enough to afford all the time it wastes on small talk, long drives, trips to the mall and favorite songs played on car radios.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: “Each scene is staged methodically, overdeliberately, as if it concealed some payoff zinger. But the zingers don’t arrive. All we see is a reasonably clever Elmore Leonard caper that needed to be treated as fast, trashy fun.” Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times: “A raunchy doodle, a leisurely and easygoing diversion that goes down easy enough but is far from compelling.”

Jackie Brown grossed $39.6 million in the U.S., but compared to the $213 million Pulp Fiction made all over the globe and the celebration that followed in the press, Tarantino felt disconnected from his follow-up. In an interview with Sight & Sound in February 2008, he commented, “One of the things that is fun about reading books is it puts you in a complete different environment. If you read one of Ian Rankin’s books and you think you got a good excuse to go to Edinburgh and shoot this big Scottish thing that could be really fun. But I lost my stamina in the last quarter of the last lap of Jackie Brown and part of the reason was I wasn’t taking something I created from scratch from a blank piece of paper and turning it into a full project. When I finished the edit and got my cut the way I wanted, I was emotionally done. I believe people could say it’s my best movie, but there’s a slight once-removed quality, located somewhere in my balls where that doesn’t live.”

Opinion
For every member of the “Quentin Tarantino Is a Hack” Society, there’s probably something to dislike about Jackie Brown. Samuel L. Jackson is once again allowed to do too much and draws a spotlight on how pleased some of Tarantino’s dialogue is with itself. And at a notch above 2 ½ hours, it is too long. While Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill warranted epic running times, here, the story barely seems to warrant the excess. What ends up being so remarkable about Jackie Brown is that, while using the Blaxploitation genre of the ‘70s as a touchstone, Tarantino refuses to populate the film with pimps, prostitutes or private dicks and in a stunner, composes as subtle, mature and self-assured a modern love story as any director at any stage of his career.

Like all great cult classics, Jackie Brown offers little in the way of instant gratification. Four shootings each happen just out of frame. Instead of bullets, words are the primary weapon of choice. Plot device and style are almost invisible; it’s character and performance that take center stage and on that count, the film is brilliant. Pam Grier’s moments with Robert Forster soar. Bridget Fonda gives the performance of a lifetime as one of the goofiest vixens ever seen in a caper. Samuel L. Jackson’s scenes with DeNiro are monumental. While a remake of The Big Bird Cage might have passed for daring by a less gifted filmmaker, Tarantino demonstrates remarkable taste by recognizing what makes an Elmore Leonard novel special: human beings expressing their fears and desires, while stealing lots of money.

Richard Booth at DVD Times writes, “Jackie Brown is not over-indulgent or flawed, in fact it’s almost as good as his first two efforts. The more times you watch it, the more engrossing it gets, until there comes a point where it can proudly stand alongside Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. It may not be quite as good, lacking the hip edge that defined his first two films, but the few flaws in the film actually shape it, and the more mature approach taken show that Tarantino possesses layers as a filmmaker.”

Dawn Taylor at The DVD Journal writes, “A more leisurely paced, less-violent film than his first two, Jackie Brown is a movie that improves with age. The performances are top-notch, the setting, clothes, music and other details are timeless, and the writing dazzles. However, at two hours, 31 minutes it’s far too long and starts to wear out its welcome before QT finally ties all of the pieces together. But despite that, there’s some moments of sheer genius in the picture, most notably when the climactic money exchange is shown from three different perspectives — each new version offers delicious, important details that were missed from the other characters’ point of view, and the sheer fun of it all reminds us of why we go to the movies in the first place: to be surprised, thrilled, and entertained.”

© Joe Valdez