Tarantino’s second film is loud, long and pleased with itself, and it also has some of the sharpest talk in any crime film of its decade. Travolta and Jackson carry it, the middle hour flags, and it is still worth your evening.
Quentin Tarantino’s second film, after Reservoir Dogs, is three crime stories told in the wrong order over 154 minutes. Two hitmen collect a briefcase. One of them takes the boss’s wife to dinner. A boxer is paid to lose. It is the talkiest crime film we know, and most of the talk is worth hearing. It is also half an hour too long, and it knows, and it does not care.
The talk is the film. Tarantino wrote it from a story he worked out with Roger Avary, and the best of it belongs to Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), in a car and a corridor, on what a hamburger is called in Paris and whether a foot massage means anything. Travolta plays Vincent slow and slack, a man who has eaten well for years. Jackson plays Jules as a preacher who has taken the wrong job and brought the sermon with him. We laughed at the foot massage argument for a full minute, then they knocked on the door, we remembered what they had come to do, and we stopped laughing. That is the trick the whole film is trying to pull, and here it pulls it clean.
Andrzej Sekula lights it flat and bright, the flat and the diner and the kitchen all lit like a daytime soap, so that when something terrible happens it looks like an accident in the wrong programme. David Wasco’s biggest set is Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a restaurant with booths cut from old cars and waiters got up as dead film stars, so pleased with itself that it becomes a joke about the film’s own tastes. Betsy Heimann puts the hitmen in black suits, white shirts and thin ties, and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) in a white shirt and a black bob, and half the film’s fame is those four items of clothing. Sally Menke holds on the two-shots and lets people finish. There is no score to speak of; the film runs on old records, surf guitar and soul, dropped in at the top of scenes.
The dinner date is the centre. Thurman is bored, watchful and flirting from behind glass, Travolta lets her lead, and the dance contest they end up in is pure pleasure and has nothing to do with the plot. What follows, in the living room of Vincent’s dealer Lance (Eric Stoltz), involves a syringe and a medical book, and we watched it through our fingers and heard ourselves laughing at the same time. We have not forgiven the film for that, and we would not want it cut.
Then Bruce Willis takes over, and the film loses some air. Willis is good, chin down and words few, playing a man who has already decided. Christopher Walken tells a small boy a story about a watch, and it is the best few minutes in the chapter. But Maria de Medeiros’s Fabienne gets a long motel scene about pancakes and pot bellies in which the talk is only talk, and somewhere past the hundredth minute we were bored, then cross with ourselves for being bored by Bruce Willis doing little and doing it well. The chapter then takes a turn we will not describe. Tarantino casts himself as Jimmie, a suburban husband with a dressing gown and a grievance, and he is the weakest actor in his own film. Harvey Keitel’s Wolf turns up in a dinner jacket and gets the scene moving again.
Reservoir Dogs was one warehouse and one story, and it was tight. This is three stories and a whole city, and the extra room shows. The violence is played for laughs, the laughs are real, and there is nobody on screen the film grieves for; whether that bothers you is a fair test of whether the film is for you. The reviews on release were split, some calling it shapeless and self-indulgent, others saying it had remade the genre. We are nearer the second camp than the first, and we have kept our reservations.
See it with someone who will quote it back to you for a week, because they will. It runs 154 minutes and carries an 18, and it earns both.
