Screen
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN BEATEN TO A PULP TARANTINO'S 'FICTION' M aybe you have to be able to see through Quentin Tarantino before you can enjoy him. Like all his previous movies, Pulp Fiction is packed with...
...Yet Pulp Fiction has about as much to do with actual criminality or violence as Cyrano de Bergerac with the realities of seventeenth-century France or The Prisoner of Zenda with Balkan politics...
...Of course, the web of one's destiny always gets tangled with the webs of others, and a good part of the romantic excitement of Pulp Fiction lies in the way Tarantino lets us have a bird's-eye view of overlapping fates...
...If gangsters really had this sort of wit, they'd be writing screenplays...
...Their tough talk is wise-guy literate, media-smart, obscenely epigrammatic...
...Chapter 5: The two hoods have taken their philosophical argument to a restaurant which may look strangely familiar...
...Whence the salvation...
...The wife proposes that the very place they're in would be ideal...
...Refusing to see the significance of events, dismissing all circumstance as happenstance, refusing to believe that you are undergoing your own destiny can doom you...
...I make these comparisons respectfully, for this movie gives us precisely what the title of an earlier Tarantino script promised (however ironically) but didn't deliver: true romance...
...Tarantino gangsters must be couch potatoes and video fiends when they're not slaughtering each other: they use the Fonz and the cute pig from "Green Acres" as reference points and can spot the difference between Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Van Doren impersonators...
...Then something happens to these killers that makes them return to headquarters...
...As a result, the boxer brushes up against death three times, once at Travolta's hands...
...Suddenly, Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer spring into action...
...The pair look bemused, wrung-out, almost slaphappy...
...We don't find out until chapter 4. Chapter 2: Travolta is ordered to chaperone Marcellus's sexy wife (Uma Thurman) while the boss is away on business...
...Like all his previous movies, Pulp Fiction is packed with violent larcenies, shoot-outs, drug deals, mob executions, gangland politicking, and (a Tarantino specialty) heavy-duty, sadistically gloating speeches made by hitmen to their victims just before the bullet to the brain is dispatched...
...The gangsters of Pulp Fiction, taken as criminal studies, are strictly factitious...
...It comes with the territory and helps make the territory a tourist attraction...
...So you have a destiny anyway—a horrid one...
...What happened...
...The husband agrees and they spring into action...
...Cyrano de Bergerac may not be a believable portrait of a poet-soldier in the age of Richelieu, but he is a truthful embodiment of a chivalric ideal...
...Whence the doom...
...Jackson cocks a pistol under the table...
...But the sham of romance serves the truth of romance...
...then a near-catastrophe makes sex impractical and unthinkable...
...Tarantino's gangsters are mere marionettes of violence but their dance is gripping because it's performed in the Theater of Destiny that is Tarantino's vision of life...
...When the hit men Jules and Vincent (Samuel Jackson and John Travolta) saunter out of a restaurant at the film's conclusion, we know that one of them is doomed and the other saved...
...Chapter 3: After accepting a bribe from Marcellus to take a dive, boxer Bruce Willis bets big money on himself to win and proceeds to massacre his opponent...
...End of prologue...
...In Pulp Fiction, significance saves...
...He flees Marcellus's vengeance, then recklessly returns to his apartment to recover his dead father's watch...
...In short, Tarantino gangsters are actors in the flimsiest of underworld disguises...
...Chapter 4 brings us back to the hit men at the end of chapter 1. It is now shown that Travolta and Jackson were almost killed at the conclusion of their assignment, but their lives were spared...
...And soon Roth is moving toward Jackson for his money or his life...
...Travolta and Thurman are mutually attracted and mutually wary...
...But can he really kill a man now that he's promised God to turn over a new leaf...
...Any romance must have an element of sham in its make-up...
...the credits roll...
...We are back in the prologue...
...No wonder that this latest Hollywood wunderkindhas been labeled the "hot high priest of film ultra-violence," "the Sultan of Sadism," and so forth...
...No Frank Sinatra heist flick (Oceans 11, say, or Robin and the 7 Hoods) was so flauntingly unauthen-tic...
...The movie is told in five chapters and a prologue: Prologue: A husband-and-wife stick-up team (Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer) sit in a restaurant and discuss over coffee the best sorts of places to rob...
...Jackson decides to reform his life, Travolta shrugs and is determined to go on as before...
...Chapter 1: Two hit men (Jackson and Travolta) murder some drug dealers who have cheated their boss, a drug lord named Marcellus...
...The conversation of these hooligans may be spiked with the argot of Hollywood players and hustlers, but their lives are utterly devoid of the grunginess, boredom, pettiness, and the close attention to shady economics that you find in the memories and histories of real criminals...
...I can't imagine one of these hoods reading anything as workaday as a racing form, but I bet all of them subscribe to Variety...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 20
