JACKIE BROWN

SYNOPSIS:
Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) is a 44 year old spinster flight attendant on a US-Mexico shuttle airline, who can’t get a better job because of her criminal record. She supplements her income by running cash for Ordell Robbi (Samuel L. Jackson) a low-life arms dealer who has saved $500,000 for retirement in a safe-deposit box in Mexico. Ordell is planning to earn another half million in one more sale, with the help of his old prison buddy Louis (Robert DeNiro), and then retire. When Jackie gets nabbed at the airport by ATF agent Ray Nicolet (Michael Keaton), she can either take the rap or do a deal that will deliver Ordell to the cops. She chooses to double cross both sides for her own (retirement) benefit and agrees to help Ray catch Ordell in exchange for dropping the smuggling charges. But she tells Ordell that she is going to double-cross the ops. Meanwhile, Louis contemplates double-crossing Ordell and Jackie with the help of Ordell’s much stoned and much abused girlfriend, Melanie (Bridget Fonda). Jackie develops enlists the help of a bail bondsman who has a crush on her - Max Cherry (Robert Forster) – to carry out a double double cross.

"There’s a line in Jackie Brown which, in a way, sums up the mood of Quentin Tarantino’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel (Rum Punch). Ordell Robbi (Samuel L. Jackson) is meeting Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) in a black neighbourhood bar during a rather tense episode. They’re alone bar the barman, who makes a low key pass at Jackie; she is indeed a handsome woman. Ordell shakes his head in wry amusement and says in his black badass way: "I bet if you came here on a Saturday night, you’d need nigger repellant. . ." The tone of the language is perfectly typical of the film, a tale set in the underworld of Los Angeles in the 70s. The fact that Jackie Brown is such a handsome but unattached woman, provides the setting for the sexual/romantic undertones that drive the motivations of Jackie Brown’s ally in the story, the bonds bailman Max Cherry (Robert Forster). This is Tarantino territory, but his camera is much steadier: his approach is a blend of classic film techniques and personal flourishes – not to mention his punchy use of music, often juxtapositioning source music while jump-cutting between scenes for great effect. The performances are first rate, all of them. Jackson’s confident, arrogant, sharply dressed, pony-tailed dude of a gun runner is the dark sun around whom the planets revolve: Melanie (Bridget Fonda) is a blonde with a bong and a low ambition level. Her flat is where he hangs out and does business. Fonda finds her character but it takes a while for us to fully understand her various sides. She manages to retain a mystery while apparently being a simple, two sided young woman; it’s a compleat performance, peaking perhaps in what may be the shortest sex scene on film, and the most droll. Louis Gara (Robert de Niro) is a bank robber just out after four years in prison. This is yet another de Niro, after all this time; an underdressed underachiever with a hang dog expression but a fatally short fuse. The idiosyncratic nervous ticks are absent, the character beams out of him, the eyes speak of confusion, fear, and a modicum of bravado. This gripping, funny and human film even has warmth. It’s at least as good as LA Confidential, but the language is even more muthafucka colourful."
Andrew L. Urban