At the end of two successive films by Quentin Tarantino (Jackie Brown and Kill Bill: Vol. 1), Peter Bogdanovich has been listed in thank-yous at the conclusion of the final credit roll. I presume this is because the two directors are friends who have much in common in their taste for old school American auteurists (especially Hawks.) But it got me to thinking about how much, and in what idiosyncratic ways, Jackie Brown and Kill Bill have in common with Bogdanovich's cinema.

While the two directors seldom meet in stylistic terms (although Jackie Brown was, I'd argue, very influenced by Bogdanovich's use of point-of-view in They All Laughed and, indeed, some of the most rhapsodic moments in Jackie are those of Robert Forster's Max watching, and slowly falling for, Pam Grier's Jackie), they both share a propensity to center their films around beautiful, independent, resourceful women who are taken by their directors to be little short of holy. This tendency asserts itself most noticeably in Tarantino's canon in Jackie Brown, which is a two-hour plus argument for the grace and strength of Pam Grier (we don't need much convincing), and in Kill Bill, which constructs a universe around Uma Thurman's need for vengeance against those who did very, very wrong by her--a universe which also practically guarantees her victory in said matters of vengeance. (There are only so many knife fights a protagonist can win before we begin to--joyously--expect triumph.) As with McG's Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, the audience is asked to set plausibility aside. When Kent Jones wrote of Tarantino's virtual intoxication with Grier in the earlier film--the intoxicated way his camera recorded her every line reading and move across screen--he was keying into something enormously important to Tarantino's work and something which, alas, risks being lost amidst the more delirious ornamentation of Kill Bill. Thurman's unnamed character can do no wrong in Tarantino's eyes; that her character--called "The Bride" because she was beaten to a pulp and left for dead by the ubiquitous Bill (David Carradine) and his associates on her wedding day--was conceived jointly by Tarantino and Thurman confirms, to my thinking at least, the decidedly feminist mores of this movie.

This angle can also usefully be approached by considering the profound presence of consequences in this film. There is simply no action in Kill Bill which goes unanswered (or will go unanswered in Vol. 2, to be released this February); every choice has a reverberation, a cost. It's a precis of the whole movie when The Bride kills one of her enemies, one Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), in front of Vernita's young daughter and promises they can settle their scores someday down the line; The Bride knows that day will come. More importantly, virtually every major female character is provided with a background, an explanation by Tarantino of why she has chosen a life of violence; the reasons are never arbitrary. In this sense, Tarantino is an intensely moral artist who views violence not as a given but as part of a cycle--in other words, he regards violence as a consequence of violence.

And yet, as with William Friedkin's The Hunted (or, for that matter, Samuel Fuller's Forty Guns), I think there's a point where a critic faces diminishing returns by treating the themes of Kill Bill with too much strained seriousness (to revive Andrew Sarris' wonderfully descriptive term.) This--the self-professed "4th Film By Quentin Tarantino"--is primarily an exercise in cinematic styles and forms which excite and interest the director. If Kill Bill ends up being critically divisive I think it's because it doesn't offer some of the non-visual l satisfactions of previous Tarantino films. I am referring to his famed dialogue: it's present, of course, but it can't be said to overwhelm--or upstage--the mise-en-scene as it sometimes threatens to in pictures like Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction. This is a seductively and unabashedly cinematic
film, packed with not only overtly expressionistic flourishes (such as a stunning split screen sequence) but also a workman-like visual intelligence. Tarantino goes to pains to ensure that movement and action across spaces are clearly seen. His editing style in action scenes--while undeniably kinetic and effective--never overwhelms to such an extent that the viewer is uncertain where they are in a given location. Indeed, Tarantino's skills at blocking actors (already in evidence in the superbly staged final scene between Jackie and Max in Max's office; watch the way Tarantino pulls Jackie closer to Max, then takes her away, and finally leaves Max a blurry, literally out-of-focus presence) has never been more apparent than in the final confrontation between The Bride and archenemy O-ren (Lucy Liu) in a Chinese snow garden. The participant's shifts in positions and Tarantino's selection of camera positions are breathtaking to watch, as is the restraint and care he takes with sound design and music in this sequence. Quentin Tarantino tries his best to be a gaudy genre filmmaker, but his elegance and (stylistic) good taste invariably get the best of him. At one point during The Bride's epic battle at The House of Blue Leaves, Tarantino turns off the lights and suddenly the participants are fighting in silhouette against a dark blue background. In this age when so many Hollywood films can barely even be considered "directed" if we mean by direction a thoughtful and beautiful approach to visual language, the graphic panache of Kill Bill makes any cinephile sit up and take note.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002