So, here's two films from the late '90s, by two of the most acclaimed directors of the last 25 years. What's our common theme here, you ask? Aside from some obvious connections, I think it's that crime can be pretty romantic.
Yeah, that's a weird thing to say. But let's take a look at a couple of films and see what happens.
HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!
Jackie Brown
1997, Directed by Quentin Tarantino
There are people that think you're a snob when you say Jackie Brown is your favorite Quentin Tarantino film. It's the hipster answer to that question, they say. I don't like those people very much. I forgive them. It's not like there's a bad answer to that question. Dude is pretty talented.
That said, Jackie Brown is definitely my favorite Quentin Tarantino film. I could list a lot of reasons for that, the simplest of which is that the characters in the film are just so beautiful to me. There are a bunch of great characters played by great actors here, but the two characters at the center of the film - Pam Grier's Jackie Brown and Robert Forster's Max Cherry - are two people I truly love.
By rule, when your name is in the title you're probably the center of the film. That's true of Jackie Brown, a 44 year old stewardess for a small Mexican airline who lives in Los Angeles and moonlights as an employee for a gun-running crime lord, Ordell Robbie. Ordell is played by Samuel L. Jackson who, with all apologies to Pulp Fiction, might give his most vulgarly Samuel L. Jackson (that's the verb usage, as in "He Samuel L. Jacksoned the hell out of that profane rant") performance here. One of the major complaints about this film when it was released is how willingly Tarantino and Jackson were to fill the script with racial slurs - a criticism that would return with a vengeance when Django Unchained happened - but it's the profane portrayal of Ordell that really sets up the viewer to support Jackie. Her participation in his crime operation is never fully explained, however it's clear that she needs to take these actions to make ends meet.
Jackie is a criminal - she willingly runs money for Ordell - but she's never portrayed as a bad person. This is especially true in the eyes of Max, the bail bondsman Ordell hires to pick her up from jail after she is caught bringing in a package for him. Forster's Max is a person who seems to be in tune with everyone he meets, something of an empath who doesn't judge the people he meets while being careful about who he trusts based on his perceptions. It's clear from their first meeting that he knows Ordell is not to be trusted, and also it's clear when he sees Jackie that he's enamored with her.
Max has always appealed to me as a character because he's caught up in something he didn't really intend to join - the world of Ordell and his criminal enterprise is surely outside his professional comfort zone - yet he never really wavers in his emotions. He's a calm, introspective character, and he always keeps his emotions close to his chest. We can see by his approach that he's intrigued by Jackie, but there are no grand proclamations of love from the stoic man. When they meet in her house one morning - Max had to stop over because Jackie borrowed his gun without permission, naturally - a song she likes draws his attention. To me, that means he's in love.
The song Tarantino features here, Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time) by The Delfonics, is a soulful ballad that sounds a lot more romantic than it is. It's the kind of song you'd expect a woman who grew up in the 1970s to play, not the kind of song you'd expect a bail bondsman to be into. He asks what it is, she tells him, and he heads straight out to a music store from the '90s to buy the cassette tape for his car. (Man, that scene is a glorious time capsule when you watch it today. If you lived through the '90s like I did, you knew that store.) I can't confirm this is the only song Max listened to for the rest of the time he knew Jackie, yet every time we see Max in his car he's listening to it. And that just makes my heart smile. I like to believe he listened to that song on repeat for weeks.
I can tell you, as a stoic hopeless romantic myself, there's nothing better than a soulful ballad that sounds a lot more romantic than it is. Especially if it reminds you of someone you can't stop thinking about. One of my favorite moments in the film is when Forster's Max tells Jackie "I'm 56 years old. I can't blame anyone for anything I do." - yet we know deep inside that he's just enamored with the opportunity to be in Jackie's life at this moment. He made the choice to follow her into a tricky con game with Ordell and the choice to buy a cassette full of soothing melodies. He never really chose to be caught up in Jackie the way he is though, that just happened when he saw her.
The heart wants what the heart wants, even if it's the heart of a 56 year old bail bondsman. Robert Forster got an Academy Award nomination for this role, and even though Burt Reynolds and Robin Williams were great that year I'd vote for him to win that statue every day. Though it's Pam Grier's movie, and a great tribute to her reign over exploitation cinema of the 1970s, the reaction she gets from Max is what gives Jackie Brown the biggest heart of any Tarantino film. Viewers might come for the catchy crime plot and the snappy dialogue that the director made famous, but for me it's the meaningful platonic relationship between the heroine and her friend that really makes this film soar.
If you know anything about Jackie Brown's cast, the source material that it was adapted from, or the time period when it came out, you've probably got an idea where I'm going with this double feature. For those that don't let's take a look at the reasons for the double feature I'm about to offer up.
- Jackie Brown is adapted from a novel, Rum Punch, by one of the great crime writers of the late 20th century, Elmore Leonard. Leonard had already been a force in Hollywood for more than 25 years by the mid '90s, with plenty of his works being adapted and several screenwriting credits. He experienced something of a reappraisal in the mid '90s, and from 1995-1998 three of his more recent novels were adapted into successful Hollywood crime flicks.
- Tarantino made Jackie Brown with Grier in the lead because he wanted to make a movie for her, despite the fact the lead character in Rum Punch was a white woman named Jackie Burke. (The name change is a nod to Foxy Brown, one of Grier's most famous roles.) The next adaptation of Leonard's work also starred a minority woman in a role that the author had written as white. Two major Hollywood productions that cast women of color in white roles? That's something we don't see every day, and it's very double feature worthy.
- And, of course, I'm looking to expand on the theme I mentioned in the introduction - the romantic aspect of crime. Jackie Brown succeeds because Jackie, a criminal, is presented as a complex individual in a complex situation. Max, who seems like he should be a straight arrow kind of guy in his line of work, is portrayed as someone who sees the bigger picture and is willing to consider multiple sides of the story. These are the kind of characters that a lot of movies and books don't understand, yet Leonard and the two fine directors working on these films were willing to blur the lines between right and wrong when feelings get involved.
So, let's jump ahead almost six months to the day from the Christmas 1997 release of Jackie Brown to June 26, 1998, and the summer release of a very different, yet very romantic, Elmore Leonard adaptation.
Out of Sight
1998, Directed by Steven Soderbergh
You're not wrong if you think the relationship between Jackie Brown and Max Cherry is sexy; they're two of the most beautiful souls I've seen in film, and the movie leaves plenty of opportunities for the mentally adventurous to write some fan fiction about their love. The next major Leonard adaptation out of the gate in Hollywood, Out of Sight, is a far more direct attempt to get your knickers in a twist. And it's a pretty good - and pretty tasteful - one at that. More on that in a minute. We can't get right down to the sexiness without setting the mood, can we?
(No. We can't. I'm not like that, you guys. KEEP YOUR EYES UP HERE.)
(Thank you.)
If Robert Forster and Max Cherry are the men I want to be when I grow up (Spoiler alert: They are.) then George Clooney and Jack Foley are the men I wish I was when I was younger. Jack's a bank robber - and not a very good one, at that - which isn't a quality I wish I had. What he lacks in criminal prowess is made up for in pure coolness. Sure, he got busted robbing a bank because his car wouldn't start. But his plan to trick the teller into thinking a random dude was an associate with a gun was pretty clever. And he walks around like he's the man, and because of that...people kind of think he's the man. You gotta respect that confidence. My dad used to say "Walk like you know where you're going!" when I asked him why we were doing things like sneaking into Lambeau Field on a Friday afternoon, and I think Jack Foley's dad - or someone else in his life - might have taught him the same thing too.
Like Jackie Brown, Jack meets someone on the other side of the law when he gets out of prison. She's Karen Sisco, played by Jennifer Lopez, and she's a U.S. Marshal who's trying her hardest to be taken seriously in the predominantly male world of law enforcement. The problem she runs into when she meets Jack is that she's not supposed to be picking him up from prison - he just happens to escape into a parking lot that she's waiting in. She becomes a hostage of Jack and his partner Buddy, played by Ving Rhames (another role the author wrote as white that was changed during casting), and ends up riding in the trunk of her own car, playing little spoon to Jack while he's still filthy from his underground prison escape.
This is an uncomfortable predicament for her, but that cool confidence that Jack has been showing us made its way into the trunk too. Too calm to fight in a no-win situation, Karen begrudgingly accepts small talk with Jack, which turns into talk about movies that parallel their situations like Bonnie & Clyde and Three Days of the Condor. The latter film, in which fugitive Robert Redford strikes up a relationship with hostage Faye Dunaway, is a clear metaphor for their predicament and an inspiration for the film's approach to it. Even though Karen knows that Jack Foley is a criminal, there's something attractive about him. Because he looks like the guy who was voted Sexiest Man Alive in 1997, and also because he's cool in the face of such a unique situation.
He's a far different person than Jackie Brown, yet Jack Foley fits into same criminal profile in many ways. He's doing what he does because he can, because he's trying to get ahead. He's not violent, and when faced with a more savage criminal (like Ordell was to Jackie) he always seems to be on the side of peace and sanity, using his wit to keep himself afloat. He's less aggressive than Jackie, but they're both cunning and easy to root for.
Karen isn't necessarily rooting for Jack - after all, she's professionally obligated to get him back behind bars - though she is willing to give him a chance. The first time she sees him after their initial split, she pauses when the chance to bring him back in arises. Jack is shocked at her inaction, and sounds dumbfounded when he tells Buddy "She just sat there, looking right at me." To the outside viewer it's almost like Karen is in a trance when she sees him, but we've seen the thoughts she's had about him since they last met. She later describes wishing that they "could take a time out," and it becomes clear that she's taking things in stride the same way Jack is.
When they meet again, in a Detroit hotel bar with a snowy view of the seemingly peaceful city behind them, the result is one of the sexiest not-really-sex scenes ever put on film. Moments of Karen and Jack explaining their feelings are intercut with what happens when they make their way to her hotel room. The scenes in the hotel room are stunning, mostly because the film chooses not to show us what happens when they get to bed.
We see them having drinks quietly, gently touching each other, and moving into the bedroom where they watch each other undress from opposite sides of the bed. David Holmes' musical score beautifully punctuates the whole sequence, leading up to the moment when they jump in bed with gleeful looks on their faces. The camera pauses on their embrace and kiss, and that's as far as we need to go. We've seen how much excitement they have to be in this moment, showing any more than that would actually make the whole thing less sexy.
Out of Sight and Jackie Brown both do a perfect job of showing us characters who come together despite the different paths they are on, and through all the films' similarities - I haven't even mentioned the fact that Michael Keaton plays the same character, ATF/FBI agent Ray Nicollete, in both films, placing them in a shared universe - that's the tie that really brings them together for me. Max, Jackie, Karen, and Jack all seem to be living in the moment despite the odds against them - and it's their willingness to accept their place in that moment and enjoy what they have that feels so pure and romantic to me.
We don't always get to choose how and when we meet someone in life, and circumstances that are outside our control may doom a romance from the start. It's worth taking a look at the characters in each of these films and the peace and happiness they find in their situations. None of them necessarily end up where they want to be, but they each come out of their situations with a hope that was missing from their life before and experience happiness they didn't expect to find during their brief moments together.
A nice thing about the world is that you don't have to be a criminal or the person responsible for their freedom (or lack thereof) to take the same approach to your life. Crime is an easy backdrop for these relationships in Leonard's stories, yet any of us could adapt the attitude of these characters to our relationships. The best scenes between these characters are fantastic reminders of how beautiful the moments we spend together can be, as long as we're willing to take chances and challenge ourselves to be open to the opportunities.
Maybe it's not how we all should live our lives - fortune favors the bold....patience is a virtue....it's all so confusing! - but I like watching these characters do what they do for each other. So if you feel like watching foul-mouthed crime dramas that are led by some open minded romantics, this is the pair of films for you.
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