‘Jackie Brown’ Has All The Earmarks Of A Quentin Tarantino Movie, But Still Manages To Surprise

Quentin Tarantino is one of Hollywood’s most distinctly iconic filmmakers. Over the last three decades, his films have thrived on his immediately recognizable style — one that’s both wildly unique and a loving pastiche of film history. Though his career has been defined by original stories such as those in Inglorious Basterds, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and this year’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, the lone time he built on the work of another author quietly stands as one of his best.

In 1997’s crime story Jackie Brown — currently available to stream on Netflix — Tarantino adapts the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch into a sizzling, darkly comic tribute to 1970s blaxploitation thrillers. Leonard, the prolific author of dozens of novels, short stories and screenplays over a career spanning more than a half-century, was no stranger to seeing his work adapted for the screen. His stories provide the backbone of films including 3:10 to Yuma, Out of Sight, Get Shorty and the much-loved FX television series Justified. In Jackie Brown, this once-in-two-lifetimes marriage of author and auteur produces a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The story — a tangled web that sprawls over a typically Tarantino-esque two-and-a-half-hour runtime — centers on the titular Jackie (Pam Grier, in a career-reviving role), a flight attendant smuggling money on behalf of gun-runner Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson, as Samuel L. Jackson as ever here.) When she’s nabbed by federal agents returning from a trip to Mexico with a bag full of cash and an unexpected (to her) stash of cocaine, she’s cast unwillingly into a dangerous trap. The government wants her to snitch on Ordell; Ordell expects her to do so, and he’s already demonstrated — in the casually brutal and darkly hilarious manner anyone who’s watching a Tarantino film before should expect — that he’ll eliminate his associates before risking that.

Jackie quickly shows that she’s no patsy, though, and Grier’s performance is both fierce and vulnerable, smart and sympathetic. She turns the tables on Ordell, setting in motion a complex series of plans, deceptions and double-crosses worthy of the best crime novel. The details of the intricate plot can be hard to keep up with at times, but the true strength of the film is in the deep cast — featuring Robert Forster as a bail-bondsman, Michael Keaton as an ATF agent, Robert De Niro as a recently-paroled bank robber, Bridget Fonda as a layabout surfer, and Chris Tucker as a briefly-featured henchman — and the tense, sultry atmosphere of betrayal and danger.

The characters are fully fleshed-out, and given time to develop into more than just pawns in a paint-by-numbers crime story. Undergirding the story is a slow-smoldering romantic tension between Jackie and Forster’s Max, a relationship played with a subtlety uncharacteristic of most interactions in a Tarantino film. It’s doubtful that this would succeed in the hands of two less-seasoned actors, but Grier and Forster are true veterans — both with long careers that had stalled before the release of Jackie Brown. They each received fully-deserved and long-overdue plaudits for their performances here: Grier a Golden Globe nomination and Forster an Academy Award nomination. Meanwhile, the most-decorated actor in the cast, De Niro, barely speaks a few words in each of his scenes, playing his henchman role with an understated humor that stands in contrast to much of his late-career scenery-chewing.

The atmosphere is driven by a wonderfully anachronistic soundtrack of ’70s R&B artists including The Brothers Johnson, Minnie Riperton, Bill Withers and Grier herself, and an opening shot of Jackie strolling through the airport rides on Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street,” itself the title track to a 1972 crime thriller. Tarantino has never been shy about alluding to (or overtly stating) his inspirations, but there’s immense skill in making it all come together in a cohesive whole.

The magic of a Quentin Tarantino film is both knowing exactly what you’ll get and getting something completely new in the process. Dark humor, casual violence, questionable language, winks and nods to other films — it’s all there, as much as it is in everything he does. When he takes on a new story, though, he takes it on with full abandon — telling it in a completely unpredictable way. Though both his work and Leonard’s have found tremendous success and appreciation on their own, it’s the planetary alignment of the two that give Jackie Brown such an intense gravity.

When the ultimate plan comes to fruition — a one-last-score proposition for Ordell, a break-free-from-it-all opportunity for Jackie, and a potential setup for the government agents — you’re not going to know who’s betrayed whom, who’s going to succeed and who’s going to end up dead in the process. It’s an electric conclusion to a story that deserves your attention as much as any of Tarantino’s bigger box-office titans.

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and internet user who lives in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife, two young children, and a small, loud dog.

Where to stream Jackie Brown