Advanced Search 
Find in




Content provided in partnership with
Thomson / Gale

FIND IN Advanced
Search

Pulp Fiction. - movie reviews

National Review,  Nov 21, 1994  by John Simon

NO FILM arrives with more advance hype than Pulp Fiction. The winner at Cannes, it was the opener of the New York Film Festival, where its writer-director, Quentin Tarantino, began his presentation by thanking Janet Maslin for her dithyrambic review in the New York Times, now being reprinted as half of a two-page ad. Mr. Tarantino made his directorial debut with the mean and nasty Reservoir Dogs, and has provided similarly sniggeringsadistic screenplays for other directors.

The haute audience at the Lincoln Center gala premiere laughed, applauded, and cheered like a bunch of Saturday-night rowdies attending the latest horror film. During the most troubling scene, when a woman who has OD'd has to be given a hypodermic straight to the heart with a wallop sufficient to penetrate the chest cavity (is this good medicine?), someone in the audience passed out, there were calls for a doctor, and, in the near-panic, the film had to be stopped, only to resume with an encore of the injection scene, making the premiere that much more prestigious and memorable.

Pulp Fiction consists of three interrelated stories and a framing story. In the latter, two unlikely criminals (the grotesque Amanda Plummer and the Mayfairish Tim Roth), who call each other Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, work up to the holdup of the coffee shop in which they are breakfasting. They seem rank amateurs rather than bona (or mala) fide crooks, but brandish compelling rods as they leap up to proclaim the holdup. Freeze frame.

Advertisement

We move into the first tale, in which two hitmen - Jules, a philosophical black, and Vincent, a pragmatic Latino-liquidate some delinquent associates of their boss, the awesome Marsellus Wallace, a thuggish black married to a white sexpot, Mia. They are a bit early for the job, so they keep up a dialectical inquiry begun in their car about whether Marsellus was justified in having a henchman thrown from a fourth-floor window for administering a foot massage to the seductive Mia. The innocence or indiscretion of such a massage is argued in a quasi-Socratic dialogue until the chronometrically correct moment to settle the hash of refractory business partners who have absconded with a mysterious attache case containing something priceless.

One of the prospective cadavers, all of whom are scared out of their wits, was about to eat a burger, which Jules proceeds to sample, gastronomically evaluate, and consume; he then launches on Ezekiel's prophecy to the Philistines to terrorize the victims before he and the impassive Vincent blow them away. The guys look like errant yuppies who, if involved in drugs, would never aspire beyond contact with piddling street pushers, much less make off with Marsellus's attache case, containing - what? We are repeatedly teased, but never find out.

You can see the whole game plan: accentuate the incongruous and ludicrous, either by juxtaposing something elevated (quotations from the Bible) with something low-down (gangland executions), or by expatiating on the trivial (the ethics of foot massage) in tandem with the terrifying (casual defenestration). Endless smartass chitchat is saturated with the detritus of Seventies pop culture (the movie and TV references, the music on the soundtrack) that you'd expect from someone who, like Mr. Tarantino, got his education clerking in a video store and saw every movie in tarnation, which, please note, is an anagram for Tarantino.

The hitmen mixing comic palaver with lethal acts come out of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas by way of David Mamet's cinematic oeuvre, and hark back all the way to Godard. The attache case with the mighty but unshown contents derives from Bunuel's Belle de jour, where a Japanese client brings along a mysteriously charged but never explained box on his brothel visits. The Bible-spouting killer is cribbed from Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, and connoisseurs of Seventies schlock, from QT's formative period, will surely spot many another hommage or plagiarism.

A fledgling filmmaker hatched in a video store presents another problem: old movies strike me as a poor substitute for life in the real world. If you catch Mr. Tarantino on the talk shows he is currently camping out on, you'll encounter a compulsive tongue-wagger who, like his characters, rattles on without substance or discernment, to say nothing of taste. Pulp Fiction is based on stories by Mr. Tarantino and Roger Avary, a Hollywood-besotted Frenchman whose own film noir, Killing Chloe, shows many traces of tarantinism (or is it tarantism, a mad urge to dance?). Much has been made of Pulp Fiction's subdivision into three overlapping stories that lead into an epilogue dovetailing into the prologue, and that, moreover, play with chronological order. But titillation cures neither hollowness nor shallowness.

There are some amusing moments in the film, and some accomplished acting, notably from Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta as the hitmen, and Bruce Willis as a boxer who refuses to throw a fight and must run from Marsellus's mob. But there is always something to undercut the pleasure, whether it is the rotten performance by the unappetizing Franco-Portuguese Maria de Medeiros, or some particularly blatant piece of copycattishness, as when Harvey Keitel is made to recycle the character he played in Point of No Return, itself a recycling of the French original, La Femme Nikita. Self-indulgence reaches its apogee when a character accuses another of being square and makes the appropriate gesture, whereupon a square in dotted outline appears on the screen. Truffaut did something similar but much better in Shoot the Piano Player. And the boxer story is so crammed with absurdities that just listing them would take up this entire column.


1 -  2 -  3 -  4 -  Next