Tarantino’s revenge film is the most purely made thing he has done and the least written. The fights are extraordinary and Uma Thurman carries them on nerve alone, but it is half a film and knows it.
Six years after Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino comes back with a revenge film so long it has been cut in two, and this first half is the most purely made thing he has done and the least written. A woman is shot in the head at her own wedding, wakes up four years later, writes five names on a pad and starts working through them. That is the whole plot. Tarantino tells it out of order, in numbered chapters with title cards, and each chapter is a set piece. The set pieces are as good as anything he has staged. The talk in between them is where the trouble is.
Yohei Taneda and David Wasco build the House of Blue Leaves, the Tokyo club where the film ends up, as two storeys of dark wood around a dance floor lit from below, with a snow garden out the back. Robert Richardson lights it hard and clean, so the yellow of Thurman’s tracksuit and the white of Lucy Liu’s kimono read from the back row and the blood comes out a poster red. Earlier, in the hospital, he splits the screen down the middle: Daryl Hannah’s Elle Driver in a nurse’s uniform and an eyepatch, walking a corridor and whistling, on one side; the Bride asleep on the other. It is the tensest minute in the film and nobody draws a weapon.
Sally Menke cuts the fights so that you always know where the Bride is and how many are still standing. When the Blue Leaves fight reaches a pitch of gore no certificate would allow, the film drops into black and white and carries on, and we laughed out loud at the nerve of it. Then the lights go and the fight continues as silhouettes against blue, and the laugh turned into admiration. RZA’s beats and Tomoyasu Hotei’s strutting guitar riff, which arrives with O-Ren’s entourage in slow motion, are cut to the footsteps. Chiaki Kuriyama’s Gogo, a schoolgirl in uniform swinging a spiked ball on a chain, gets the best short fight.
Thurman holds it together with almost nothing written for her. The Bride is given no jokes and no speeches; Thurman plays her as pure effort, a woman whose body keeps having to be argued into working. The hospital chapter horrified us, and not because of anything with a blade. Michael Bowen’s orderly Buck has been selling the comatose Bride to men, and the film says so with a grin and a novelty truck and moves on. We wanted it to be as sickened as we were. Then it sits still while she stares at her feet and wills her big toe to move, and Thurman does more with that minute than with any sword.
Liu gets the one stretch of writing that sounds like the man who wrote Pulp Fiction, a speech to the Tokyo crime bosses that switches from Japanese to English for the threat, and she delivers it with relish. Sonny Chiba’s Hattori Hanzo, a swordsmith running a sushi bar in Okinawa, has the only quiet scene and the best: two people at a counter, one pretending not to understand the other, then an attic full of swords. David Carradine’s Bill is a voice on a phone and a pair of hands. Vivica A. Fox gets one fight in a suburban kitchen and makes Vernita Green a person in about four minutes.
The rest of the cast is not so lucky, because Tarantino has given most of his dialogue to other films this time. The chapter that tells O-Ren’s childhood is drawn as anime and is the nastiest thing here, a child watching what is done to her parents, and from there the killing stops costing anyone anything, including us. What follows is an expensive tribute reel. If you do not know the films being quoted, a good deal of the second hour is men in black suits falling over.
Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Jackie Brown (1997) were about people who talked, and the violence interrupted them. This time he has kept the violence and left most of the talk at home. It is also, plainly, half of something: it stops rather than ends, on a last line we will not repeat that changes the shape of what you have just watched.
See it for the Blue Leaves, for Chiba, for Thurman’s toe, and for the moment the colour drains out of the frame. Do not expect to feel much for anyone but her. It runs 111 minutes and carries an 18, and it earns the certificate.
