Today, genre-pastiche superstar Quentin Tarantino turns 50, and Nathaniel R has accordingly selected the director’s 1997 Jackie Brown as this week’s Hit Me with Your Best Shot entry. A bold choice, given that I think most of us would likely first think of one of Tarantino’s collaborations with Robert Richardson when it comes to the visually richest films of his career, but a wise choice as well: though Jackie Brown is typically the odd man out in most considerations of Tarantino’s career (owing to it being adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel), it is probably the most sophisticated and mature of all his movies, as cinema and as narrative (and this also probably owes to it being adapted from Elmore Leonard). Besides, Guillermo Navarro might not be a Robert Richardson, but he’s hardly a slouch in the rich visuals department.
The film might not be as playful as a Kill Bill, Vol. 2, for example, but re-watching it for the first time in several years, I was struck by just how complex the imagery actually was; enough so that picking one single shot that summed it all up was as enjoyable hard as it has been in all the years that this series has been going on. Not least because some of the finest shots gain a great deal of their impact from being echoes of earlier shots, or because of the relationship between shots in a scene (this was also the first time I watched anything cut by the great Sally Menke since her untimely 2010 death, and boy, talk about being missed).
In the end, I went with something that I can’t help but feel might have fallen on the wrong side of obvious, but the more I thought about it, the more that it encapsulates everything that makes Jackie Brown unique among Tarantino’s films and rewarding in its own right: the low-key but nevertheless densely packed visuals, the unusually adult perspective, the relative naturalism. And it happens to be one of the moments on which the whole film hinges: at 45 minutes into the film, when bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) first catches a glimpse of Pam Grier’s titular Jackie, the sun around which everything else in the movie orbits. He’s come to prison to bail her out and take her home, and he walks over to the prison gate to watch her coming out.
Then he sees her, and the focus shifts – this is hugely important.
For it is right at this point that everything coalesces and a film that has shifted between characters and locations somewhat loosely (though it all makes sense at the end, the way that Tarantino introduces plotlines and characters feels deliberately shaggy) takes the shape that it will take from here own out: Jackie Brown is going to make all the decisions for everybody, but especially for Max, who has just fallen in love with this marvelous woman, just from the way she carries herself, steady of pace and straight-backed even as she leaves her first-ever stay in jail. It helps, undoubtedly, that Navarro slights this long cement walk with such overt Romanticism – the one key light in the back, a certain mistiness in the air.
Accidentally or not, it recalls to my mind the iconic final shot of The Third Man, and given Tarantino’s penchant for quoting movies, I won’t say that’s impossible: certainly, both shots contain a similar narrative about a grubby sort of Everyman, and the camera behind them, staring longingly at a steel-willed woman. But Jackie Brown is nowhere near as cynical about it: we don’t merely feel awe for Jackie in this shot, though it’s one of the images in the whole movie that best showcases her (and Grier’s) strength – even as a little dot, she can be the visual anchor for a whole frame! It’s also a moment that places her in such a glamorised context that we can’t help but fall in love with her a little bit too, and that makes it a perfect symbol of a film that frequently functions as nothing more or less than Tarantino’s Valentine to a legendary actress.