Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writer: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda, Robert De Niro
Synopsis: A flight attendant with a criminal past gets nabbed by the ATF for smuggling. Under pressure to become an informant against the drug dealer she works for, she must find a way to secure her future without getting killed.
When Jackie Brown opened on Christmas weekend 1997, expectations were incredibly high. How could they not be? After making a giant splash on the cinema scene with 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, he returned with an even more acclaimed hit with critics and audiences two years later with 1994’s Pulp Fiction, a landmark film that hasn’t lost any of its power. Quentin Tarantino deservedly won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar with Roger Avary, and the film’s massive box office of more than one hundred million dollars ensured Tarantino could make practically anything he wanted for his follow-up.
Years passed, and the anticipation continued to grow for what his third film would be. His participation as a screenwriter and an actor in From Dusk Till Dawn showed that he was open to making action-filled genre movies, so when it was announced that his third feature directorial effort would be a film called Jackie Brown starring the 1970s exploitation queen Pam Grier, many thought he was going to be making an homage to those entertaining but cheesy indie action films from decades past. Whatever the tone was going to be, many assumed it would at least have the same kind of energy and narrative creativity of Pulp Fiction, especially when actors like Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro were announced for the project.
What we ended up getting was a curiously quiet, thoughtful, and well-observed meditation on love and loss, on crime and redemption. It was the kind of slow burn that most audiences didn’t care for at the time, the love story between Pam Grier’s Jackie Brown and Robert Forster’s Max Cherry seeming too reserved and inconsequential. I saw this film at age thirteen with my dad super pumped to be getting a new Tarantino movie—Pulp Fiction was one of my favorites at the time—and I walked out of the theater shaking my head in disappointment, thinking the film was too slow and meandering.
Well, if there’s one film from all of 1997 I’ve changed my mind the most on, it’s certainly Jackie Brown. This is one of those rare films that seems to improve with every viewing. In the twenty-five years since its release, I’ve watched it at least ten times, and I always find new things to love about it, the characters bursting with life, the actors perfectly chosen for their roles, the beautifully written dialogue so sweet to the ear. The film, at times, is a struggle to follow on that first viewing, but I find the more I watch it, the more I understand all the pieces of the narrative, as well as the characters’ motivations every step of the way.
Something that has helped the growing affection for Jackie Brown throughout the years has been its special place in Tarantino’s filmography as the only real adaptation he’s brought to the screen, and his insistence on placing character over action or genre conventions. I adore his Kill Bill movies, Inglourious Basterds, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but those movies have a boisterous visionary style to them that’s also to some extent in both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, but not at all in Jackie Brown. It’s his one film where you really get to sit with the characters, let them talk, watch them be, without feeling like a big scene of violence is right around the corner.
Many critics loved the movie at the time, including Roger Ebert, who put Jackie Brown on his top ten list, but when it came to the awards season, Tarantino’s direction and screenplay were mostly passed over, Pam Grier recognized at the Golden Globes and SAG, while Robert Forster managed the film’s only Oscar nomination. But what an amazing nomination it is, the character actor’s career in the dumps before his understated performance breathed new life into his career, and is one of the greatest elements of the film that keeps me returning to it again and again. Jackie Brown is an outstanding drama, and is the film I believe to be Quentin Tarantino’s most lasting masterpiece.
