JOIN USTarantino: The golden boy must make good
When Quentin Tarantino climbs the steps of the Grand Palais for the world premiere of his new movie at this month’s Cannes Film Festival, he may feel like he’s coming home. It was in Cannes 15 years ago that he received the Palme d’Or for Pulp Fiction. Even those among us who believe it to be a film of moments, as opposed to a momentous film, will concede that it had a seismic effect on what followed. Its zesty, profane dialogue retuned the ears of cinema audiences much as David Mamet had done for 1980s theatergoers; it introduced the possibility, more or less absent since Godard, that violence could be flip and funny; and it altered for ever our definitions of independent and mainstream cinema.
This year, Tarantino is back in Cannes with Inglourious Basterds, not merely a title destined to have ‘sic’ printed after it wherever it is mentioned, but a spaghetti western draped in a Second World War greatcoat. Brad Pitt plays Lt Aldo Raine, leader of a ruthless squad of Jewish-American soldiers dedicated to killing, maiming and torturing as many Nazis as they can get their bloodthirsty mitts on. The gore-spattered trailer promises everything from a swastika being carved into a Nazi officer’s forehead to a man’s head being pulped with a baseball bat.
A lot has changed since Pulp Fiction. The former enfant terrible has just turned 46; the films on which his reputation is founded are some distance behind him. Those who marvelled at the assurance and aplomb of Tarantino’s 1992 debut, the slippery heist thriller Reservoir Dogs or the unexpected warmth and wisdom of the 1997 Jackie Brown may then be wary of Inglourious Basterds, with its early signs that the director is wading even further into the B-movie hinterlands of his most recent work. But then his career has always been very much a tale of two Tarantinos.
On one hand, there is the over-excitable movie buff who makes films the way he talks — manic and magpie-like, grabbing at influences and touchstones. This is the Tarantino abundantly in evidence throughout much of the two-part martial arts revenge thriller Kill Bill and the entirety of the trashy B-movie homage Death Proof. These are movies which have no frame of reference outside other movies; they exist in a cinematic hall of mirrors, where nothing resembling emotional authenticity can hope to find purchase.
And yet it is precisely Tarantino’s movie-geek personality that has made him a uniquely democratic celebrity. Pop-cultural fame for a director is virtually unheard of outside special cases such as Spielberg, Scorsese and Lucas. But Tarantino has that sewn up while still giving the impression of being on an equal footing with his audience.
His boyhood enthusiasm for movies is undimmed by the part he now plays in making them. You can see what a whizz this Californian chatterbox must have been when he was manning the till at Manhattan Beach’s Video Archives shop, recommending obscure titles to anyone who’d listen. Is it any wonder his fans still feel they may bump into him at a martial arts film convention or in the queue for a midnight movie?
But some of us are eager now to know what happened to the other Quentin Tarantino, the one who gave US cinema a hefty adrenaline shot to the heart much like the one administered to Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. Certainly, the early years of his career were the most dynamic by a long chalk. Despite a reported IQ of 160, the dyslexic Tarantino dropped out of junior high school in Harbor City, Los Angeles, in ninth grade. His mother raised him and Tarantino was none too impressed years later when his biological father tried to make contact with him. “The only thing I’ve got to say to him is, ‘Thanks for the sperm.’ He had 30 years to look me up and he tries after I’m famous? It was sad.”
Initially, Tarantino landed the occasional acting gig, most famously a turn as an Elvis impersonator on an episode of the sitcom The Golden Girls. But his earnings at this point were meagre and he found himself banged up on driving offences when he couldn’t stretch to the fines. He had also started collaborating on scripts with his Video Archives colleague, Roger Avary. He based True Romance, a lovers-on-the-lam comedy-thriller crammed with movie references, on Avary’s screenplay The Open Road. Avary, in turn, tidied up his friend’s spelling and helped him with structure; he came to Tarantino’s rescue when he was having difficulty with a scene in Natural Born Killers, and wrote background dialogue for Reservoir Dogs.
The weight of expectation resting on Pulp Fiction was immense, and even the ease with which it surpassed hopes — raking in $250m worldwide and cleaning up at awards ceremonies — hardly indicated what was in store for Tarantino. It is no exaggeration to say that, for the first time since Scorsese, a director was enjoying something like rock star status.
But he also found himself caught up in some very public spats. Spike Lee railed against Tarantino for the preponderance of the word ‘nigger’ in Pulp Fiction: “I’m not against the word, and I use it, but not excessively... but Quentin is infatuated with that word. What does he want to be made — an honourary black man?” Tarantino also came to blows in a restaurant with one of the producers of NBK.
He came back from the brink in 1997 with Jackie Brown, adapted from Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch. This tribute to the blaxploitation era is his most compassionate work to date, as well as a film that cheerfully violates the Hollywood commandment regarding screen romance. Tarantino says it is the film to which he feels least attached. How peculiar that of all his films he feels so divorced from Jackie Brown, with its emotional plausibility and understated melancholy. has carte blanche.”
Perhaps the very act of expecting him to mature and evolve, or to return to the tenor of his early work, is like waiting for Wim Wenders to make a frathouse comedy. It could be that he wanted all along to devote his career to paying homage to hacks and trashmeisters. Will the chasm continue to widen between the qualities that made Tarantino’s first three movies so fascinating and the shameless, sometimes juvenile passions that drive him on? Or perhaps those of us who hailed Tarantino as a cinematic revolutionary will find further support for our case this month in Cannes.