One was the love scene/frame job between Ed Exley and Lynn Bracken. Goldman didn't buy someone as smart as Exley falling for so obvious a set-up. It is a bit of a stretch but I am more than willing to cut them some slack on that one. They needed something major like that to precipitate Exley and "Bud" White's confrontation and subsequent revelation. Plus, everything else was gangbusters up to that point so I am more than happy to look the other way for a skip in logic like that. The other point Goldman made, which I agree with, is that the film SHOULD have ended with Exley raising his badge over the fallen Dudley Smith. That way the final line of the film would have been Dudley's "Hold your badge up. That way they'll know your a cop." A little more oblique than Chinatown's incredible closer but still pretty devastating. Instead, you get the ending of a much lesser film that should have starred Tom Berenger and Matt Damon.
Until being completely enamored with Kill Bill, Jackie Brown was easily my favorite Tarantino film. It had me at the opening with Womack's harrowing Across 110th Street playing while Grier's clearly world-weary character glides so majestically across the airport terminal. He may be a tad obnoxious in interviews and, according to Greg Proops, you definitely do not want to be sitting in a theater with him if From Dusk Till Dawn is playing....but Quentin Tarantino has the most uncanny sense of what song fits what scene since Scorcese.
One of the most thrilling, and rare, sights in American film is when middle-aged actors are actually given the opportunity to portray tired, thwarted middle-aged people. There is such an inherent dramatic urgency when this happens and it doesn't happen enough. When an actor gets into their late 40's and on in to their 50's they have managed to live long enough to see some pretty seismic shifts in their lives and careers and their acting usually gets a lot more interesting. I never get tired of the quartet of performances by Samuel L. Jackson, Pam Grier, Robert Forster and Robert DeNiro in this film. Jackson's Odell Robie is one of the few film characters who really and truly scares the piss out of me. He's magnetic enough and a smooth enough talker to get close to you and then he kills you. His rappaport with DeNiro's dazed and confused Louis was priceless and I would love to see them work together more. DeNiro, when he clicks with costars like Charles Grodin in the great Midnight Run or here with Sam Jack, has this great ability to show you his character's relationship to everyone with almost no dialogue. In fact, the less he talks the better he is usually. He was so good in a nothing little role here that when I saw it for the first time with some friends, one of them leaned over and grumbled "Great, they killed the best character." after DeNiro's death scene.
For me, Robert Forster and Pam Grier create a much, much more believable example of middle-aged love (albeit unrequited) than bigger stars like Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton did in the bloated, intermitently funny Something's Gotta Give. I love Forster's deadpan drone and it is utilized perfectly here. He made a great cool, decent hero in this film. Not so much Humphrey Bogart as maybe Henry Fonda or a rangier Clint Eastwood. Considering how up and down Forster's life and career have been, it is exciting to watch someone who knows that this is probably their last chance to hit a home run.
I remember being a little disappointed with Grier's performance at first. I had to get a little bit older to appreciate better what she was doing. Whatever Tarantino's actual feelings are towards women, he has managed to write (or cowrite, adapt, whatever) two beautifully realized bad ass female protagonists in Jackie Brown and The Bride. Pam Grier's performance is incredilbly lived-in and it is hard to tell where she ends and the acting begins. I love her exchanges with Jackson, there's real affection there even though both are willing to kill the other, and she has some good, funny scenes with Michael Keaton who made a great, slighly wacked-out agent.....he was even funnier as the same character in Soderbergh's Out of Sight.
The film manages to slip in some pretty trenchant social commentary along with the endlessly quotable dialogue and a very cool "con" scene. Recently, I watched a documentary on blaxploitation that was fairly entertaining (although I was pissed that Rudy Ray Moore's contributions were snubbed) but it lost me with Fred "The Hammer" Williamson's annoying self-promotion. I respect the fact that old-school indie filmmakers have to be almost like carnival barkers but Williamson made some of the most boring and predictable films in the history of the genre. Richard Pryor, who appeared in Williamson's Adios Amigo!, apparently felt the same way because he would go on talk shows while promoting the movie, look directly in the camery and say "I'm sorry, I needed the money!"
Fred Williamson called Jackie Brown a second-rate imitation of a proper blaxploitation film and seemed genuinely peeved over Quentin Tarantino's "thievery" of the genre's style. All I could think was "No, your boring ass movies were a pale imitation of the good stuff. They were the exact same thing as McQ except you're black." Of course, I said this to myself because I'm sure that The Hammer could still break me in half without working up a single bead of sweat.
Damn, I'm sorry to have rambled so long. Didn't mean to do that at all.
