Putting the Punch in Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch: Jackie Brown as Homage (Part 1)

 

by Charles J. Rzepka, Editor, Sympos

 

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In style, themes, and characterization, the works of Quentin Tarantino and Elmore Leonard share a family resemblance so striking that only the disparity in their ages might challenge the assumption that they’re twins separated at birth. Perhaps adoption offers a better analogy. As director Steven Soderbergh told Sheila Johnson in 1999, referring to the first of three successive box-office hits in the late 90s inspired by Leonard’s crime novels, “Quentin Tarantino’s rise has so much to do with Elmore Leonard’s world . . . that by the time a ‘real’ Leonard adaptation showed up in the form of Get Shorty, everyone had been prepared by Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction for that tone” (Kaufman).

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Soderbergh’s “everyone” could not have included anyone familiar with Leonard’s history of writing for the movies, or the older writer’s fictional world in general, which had originated in the Old West and was chugging merrily along under its own steam by 1963, the year Tarantino was born. Far from preparing them for the "tone" of Get Shorty (1995) on screen, Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) would have struck a familiar chord to any reader of Get Shorty in print (1990). That was no accident. “Elmore Leonard . . . was the first novelist I read as a kid that really spoke to me,” Tarantino told Adrian Wooton less than two weeks after Jackie Brown, his film adaptation of Leonard’s Rum Punch (1992), premiered on Christmas Day, 1997. Tarantino’s enthusiasm began at age 12 and got him in trouble three years later when he tried to shoplift a copy of Leonard’s The Switch (1978) from a local K-Mart. [1] Which reminds us that in cases of artistic influence, the adoptive metaphor must always be reversed: it’s the younger epigone who chooses a mentor to emulate, not the other way around, and his gratitude is expressed by imitation. Leonard’s books helped a young Tarantino to perfect the “tone” that, as Soderberg suggests, prepared the way for Leonard’s successful return to film prominence after decades of sporadic Hollywood misfires.

 

From the beginning of his career, writing westerns in the 1950s, Elmore Leonard had his eye on the movies, conceiving his stories and books cinematically well before he began to write screenplays. Successful movie versions of Leonard’s fiction like 3:10 to Yuma and The Tall “T” (both released in 1957), Hombre, starring Paul Newman (1967), and Valdez is Coming, featuring Burt Lancaster (1971), held out the promise of more to come as Leonard, beginning in 1965, began the tough transition from horse operas to crime capers, the genre for which he was to become famous. [2] That promise dimmed at the outset with The Big Bounce (1969), starring Ryan O’Neal. "The second-worst movie ever made," he later told Neely Tucker of The Washington Post. "God, it was awful," adding, "The worst movie ever made was the second version of 'The Big Bounce,'" directed by George Armitage and released twenty-five years later (Tucker). 

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Until his fin de siècle celluloid renaissance, the only film based on a Leonard book or screenplay comparable in popularity to his movie westerns was, arguably, Mr. Majestyk (1974), a Charles Bronson vehicle that began life as a screenplay commissioned by Clint Eastwood. Leonard re-wrote it as a book to be published simultaneously with the movie’s release. [3]

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Leonard’s crime novels were generally mishandled by the studios until Get Shorty made its debut in 1995, “one of the first films to surf the post-Tarantino wave,” in Oliver Lyttleton’s opinion (Lyttleton). The most important reason for its success? “This is Leonard’s voice on screen pure and simple,” writes Lyttleton, crediting Scott Frank’s screenplay as well as Barry Sonnenfeld’s direction. While there are certain features of Leonard’s “voice” in prose that can’t be replicated on film, even in dialogues, Frank and Sonnenfeld, like Tarantino in Jackie Brown (1997) and Soderbergh himself working with Frank in Out of Sight (1998), did manage to capture, even when they didn’t copy to the letter, the diction, rhythm, and tone of Leonard’s dialogues and internal monologues.

 

They also grasped the most fundamental element necessary to any successful adaptation of a Leonard book: adhering to the author’s deadpan sense of humor.  

As Leonard himself told Sonnenfeld before the filming of Get Shorty began, “When someone delivers a funny line, I hope you don't cut to another actor to get a reaction, like a grin or a laugh or something, because these people are serious” (Orr 2014, para. 11). Sonnenfeld listened, but Leonard had little reason to expect he would, or Tarantino or Soderbergh either, for that matter. His advice to Sonnenfeld echoes his criticism of Burt Reynolds, director of the 1985 movie version of Leonard’s Stick (1983), which the author found appalling. As he wrote Reynolds afterwards, “When I’m writing I see real people and hear people…but when I view [your] picture I see, too often, actors acting…I hear what seems to me too many beats between exchanges, pauses for reactions, smiles for the benefit of the audience—like saying, get it?” (quoted in Vasquez).

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Of the three directors responsible for resurrecting Leonard’s Hollywood career as he entered the seventh decade of his life, Quentin Tarantino probably came closest, by familiarity and temperament, to both hearing Leonard’s voice and understanding his sense of humor, as the author himself acknowledged. “That was not an adaptation,” he said after seeing Jackie Brown, “that was my novel” (Wooton)—a remarkable compliment, considering that one of the most often cited departures from Leonard’s original was Tarantino’s decision to cast a black actress, Pam Grier, in the title role. In Rum Punch, Jackie Burke (as she’s known) is white. As we’ll see, however, Leonard’s handling of color suggests there was a Jackie Brown hiding inside Jackie Burke all along.

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One advantage Tarantino had over Sonnenfeld and Soderbergh, besides his life-long admiration for Leonard’s work, was that he wrote the screenplay for the film he directed, so he had two tries to get it right. During the filming, he could change what he’d written to better fit the performances, or encourage improvisations in the same key. Here's a minor example. Preparing for the “trial run” of a gun money sting at LAX, Detective Mark Dargus (Michael Bowen), Federal Agent Ray Nicolet (Michael Keaton), and money “mule” Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) argue briefly over Nicolet’s description of the Del Amo mall shopping bag to be used for carrying the cash, a description Nicolet is recording. It’s purple, he announces. No, white, says Mark. White, with pink lettering, says Jackie. Mark corrects her: the image is purple, with pink lettering. Ray, exasperated, announces that the bag is “white, it’s got purple on it, and the lettering’s pink” (1:26:00-1:26:16).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neither book nor screenplay includes this 16-second spat, but it’s in keeping with Leonard’s and Tarantino’s shared taste for random, comic digression. Whether improvised by the actors or by the director on the spot, it was Tarantino’s decision to let this exchange play out and to keep it.

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I’ve chosen four broad categories for sorting out the affinities and differences between Leonard’s book and Tarantino’s adaptation: structure, style, themes, and characterization. "Tone," which includes "sense of humor,” will be considered further under “Style.” Tarantino’s boldest move, casting a black woman in the role of Leonard’s white Jackie Burke, will come last under "Characterization."

 

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Structure:

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Given how much of Rum Punch had to be left out of the movie, even at a playing length of two and half hours, it’s a wonder that what did make the cut should adhere so closely to Leonard’s main plotline, despite Tarantino’s relocating the action from Miami to Los Angeles’ South Bay, the director’s home turf.  This may not have been the case had Tarantino followed his original intention to produce the film without directing it when Miramax first obtained the rights in 1994, along with those to two other Leonard novels, Freaky Deaky and Killshot. He’d originally read the book in galleys just before it was published, but on rereading it, decided to adapt and direct the movie himself. “Lo and behold,” he later told Wooton, “I saw the same movie I saw the first time, when I read [the galleys]. It just came back again. I thought I wanted to do this” (Wooton). Turning a book into a film seemed to Tarantino the right next step in his evolution as a screenwriter and director following the rapid-fire successes of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction: “Original writers need to do an adaptation . . . every once in awhile so a certain sameness doesn’t creep into the work,” Tarantino said at a press conference to promote the film (Sherman, 156). He had long admired Leonard’s handling of character and motivation, and wanted to see if he could do justice to the original using the same characters in a movie version. That’s one reason, observes Dale Sherman, that he spent “the first hour introducing the characters to the audience before the real action begins,” a departure from his standard practice (156).

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Tarantino introduced his main character last, along with the two cops that were about to put the screws to her. This delay, too, indicates the director’s respect for his source, for Leonard waits until chapter four to introduce his female protagonist. The delay, along with Leonard's shift to the cops' surveillance point of view (255), adds some mystery to Jackie Burke's personality. We don’t know at first who these two men are or why they're watching her, and once we do, we still don't know if she’s done what Mark and Ray accuse her of.  Similarly, aside from the opening credits, we don't lay eyes on Jackie Brown until almost half an hour into Tarantino’s film (00:27:32), right at the moment she’s arrested at LAX smuggling fifty thousand dollars into the country in her flight bag.

That’s well beyond the legal currency limit, and all of it is headed for Ordell Robbie (Samuel T. Jackson), an illicit gun dealer who launders his money through a Mexican bank. Working for tiny Cabo Air, which shuttles between Cabo San Lucas and LA, Jackie is the ideal courier for Ordell’s loot. Once Mark and Ray catch her with the goods, however, she has no choice but to cooperate in a sting operation aimed at Ordell if she wants to avoid being charged as his accessory. Half the fun of Jackie Brown is watching Jackie play Ordell and his two hangers-on, former prison buddy Louis Gara (Robert De Niro) and surfer-girl Melanie Ralston (Bridget Fonda), against her police handlers long enough to avoid getting killed or imprisoned. Along the way she latches onto $500,000 in cash and Ordell’s black Mercedes.

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The other half of the fun is watching the romantic relationship between Jackie and Max Cherry (Robert Forster) bud and bloom, only to fade suddenly at the very end. Cherry is the bail bondsman Ordell hires to post bail for Jackie so he can kill her before she starts giving the police information in exchange for a reduced sentence. Max falls in love with Jackie at first sight, when he comes to pick her up from her holding cell, and is soon inveigled into helping her execute the elaborate shell game she’s contrived in order to make off with the bulk of Ordell’s money, leaving Ordell and the cops with the petty cash.

 

Because Rum Punch was an unplanned sequel to The Switch (the coveted prize of Tarantino’s adolescent larceny), serious Leonard fans, including the director himself, would have already known something about the shared history of Ordell, Louis, and Melanie. All three were featured in the earlier book, which pivoted on a botched kidnapping scheme. For those not in the know, Leonard had enough room to allude to their backstory, enriching and complicating the characters’ decision-making in the present. Tarantino hasn’t the luxury to include any of this. His Ordell and Louis have done time together, but the rap isn't specified, and Melanie is a recently acquired beach bunny with just enough intelligence to think she can scam some cash off Ordell during the final money-switch at the Del Amo mall. As in the book, however, she ends up dead, as do Louis and Ordell, in that order.

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Occasionally, Tarantino has to stitch together pieces of scenes and snatches of dialogue, re-locate some scenes, and add to others to make connections and provide character insights Leonard achieves through his allusions to The Switch. Chapter 14 of Rum Punch, for instance, was mined for three separate scenes in the movie. The first is the opening scene with Ordell and Louis watching a video promotion for automatic weapons (“Chicks Who Love Guns”). In the second, an hour into the film, Louis and Melanie get to know each other better following their introduction. After a brief cut-away and return, Melanie urges Louis to help her rip off Ordell. Most of this scene was written by Tarantino. The exception is a handful of lines that include an exchange taken from page 338 of Leonard’s novel:

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MELANIE: Wanna fuck?

LOUIS: Yeah.

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“Three minutes later” (according to a subtitle over black), Louis says, “That hit the spot,” and Melanie agrees: “Now, we can catch up” (1:07:54-1:08:25).

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Here, Tarantino’s stitching (or that of his editor, Sally Menke) seems to have left a thread hanging from The Switch, since "Now, we can catch up" suggests that Melanie and Louis first met a long time ago. A more appropriate response would be something like “Now we can get to know each other.”  Because Melanie's line doesn't appear in the published screenplay, it gives the impression of something overlooked when Tarantino edited an earlier draft, as though he'd originally meant to include some references to The Switch but changed his mind. This impression is reinforced by an exchange occurring a few moments previously, where Melanie asks, “When was the last time I saw you?” and Louis replies, “Oh, six, seven years ago” (1:05:35). These lines in the film, referring directly to a long shared history, are also missing from the published version of the screenplay.

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The third scene from Chapter 14 occurs in the film not long after the three-minute fuck: Jackie’s first meeting with Ordell in the Cockatoo Bar. There she lays out her plan to get him his money by playing along with Ray and Mark’s sting operation, which goes very wrong for Ordell and the cops but oh-so-right for the woman they all believe they have under their thumb.

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Tarantino wisely dropped two of Leonard's major subplots: Max Cherry’s decision to divorce his separated wife, Reneé, a narcissistic art gallery owner, and anything having to do with how Ordell acquires his weapons for resale, including his raid on the rural compound of a wealthy fascist sympathizer (Gerald, aka “Big Guy”) in order to steal his cache of rocket launchers and AK 47s. Unfortunately, the latter cut also meant leaving out the meth-crazed “jackboys” that Ordell uses for his home invasions—a dependable go-to whenever Leonard wants to serve up his trademark cocktail of violence, stupidity, and humor. Even a scene between Ordell and Louis that the screenplay originally set at the rented storage locker where Ordell keeps his guns was relocated to the bar at the Cockatoo Inn.

 

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Style:

 

Nearly any feature of a movie or book can come under this heading. Aside from themes and characterization, which will be treated separately, tone and point of view are the most important. We’ll start with tone, which includes voice, pace, and affect.

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Considering that movie makers as a rule eschew voiceovers, [7] it’s remarkable that so many directors faltered when translating Leonard’s fiction into film, for cinema’s narrative silence matches Leonard’s narrative desideratum. Leonard told anyone who would listen that he tried to remain “invisible” in his books by letting his characters’ voices—their characteristic diction, syntax, turns of phrase, and rhythms—seep into his prose, to the point where any sense of an authorial persona simply disappeared. It was as though he took Christopher Isherwood’s famous “I am a camera,” from the first page of Goodbye to Berlin (1939), literally. “For the most part I’m copying a sound of speech,” Leonard has said, “so that my ‘sound’ or style or attitude is the sound of the characters. You never hear me. You’re never aware of words used by an author because I never use a word that my characters wouldn’t or couldn’t” (Skinner 41).

 

In short, all any screenwriter or director has to do to capture Leonard’s vocal tone is remain true to what his characters say and, more importantly, how they deliver their lines.  Despite numerous minor changes in phrasing and word order, Tarantino’s characters sound like their prose counterparts, whether the latter are speaking aloud or talking in their heads. Jackie Brown and her cohorts use more obscenities and speak in shorter bursts under the temporal constraints that film inevitably imposes on a novel’s verbal expansiveness. Still, the prevailing tone of voice in Tarantino’s movie is a close match to its fictional original, despite its deviations from Leonard's prose. As Tim Lucas puts it in “Breaking Down Jackie Brown,” a panel discussion led by Eliss Mitchell that accompanies Lionsgate’s Blue-Ray DVD release, Tarantino is not so much echoing Leonard but “constructing his voice” as if from scratch (“Breaking Down”).

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Contrary to what we might expect, Tarantino’s more staccato rhythms in dialogue don’t carry over to his pacing of events, which matches that of the book. Sherman’s comment about letting Leonard’s sense of character emerge is relevant here. Indeed, compared to Tarantino’s standard product, and especially Jackie Brown’s immediate predecessors Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, the held close-ups—as when Max first sees Jackie (00:40:21-00:41:20)—and the getting-to-know-you conversations—between Max and Jackie, for instance (00:53:28-1:00:17), or even Louis and Melanie (1:03:00-1:08:45)—are more frequent. The slower pace contributes to what Scott Foundas, in Mitchell’s roundtable discussion, calls the “autumnal quality” of the film, reflecting the midlife crisis that prompts both its romantic leads to take desperate measures that might otherwise seem out of character. It also makes Jackie Brown an initial disappointment to Tarantino fans like Andy Klein, a fellow panelist, who expected another Pulp Fiction but found the film “terrific” the second time around (“Breaking Down”).

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Tarantino's and Leonard's shared sense of humor is relevant to any discussion of affect, a prominent feature of style, in Jackie Brown. Mark, Ray, and Jackie’s disagreement regarding the color of the shopping bag Jackie will be carrying is a case in point: it works because this isn’t the time to be arguing over something as trivial as the bag’s exact color. Rum Punch contains many such moments of situational humor. In one scene left out of the movie, the jackboys try to figure out the directions for firing a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher at the cops who have trapped them in Ordell’s storage locker. Being almost entirely illiterate, however, they succumb to a stun grenade before they can figure out how to release the safety (405-7).  “Couldn’t read it, could you?” Nicolet asks the jackboy named Zulu. “See? You should never’ve dropped out of school” (407). [5]

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This scene is funny, in part, because its violent payoff is never realized: no one ends up hurt or dead. However, both Leonard and Tarantino are known for mixing more overt violence with humor, if in different proportions, and the aesthetics of violence, like an author’s or director’s sense of humor, is also a matter of tone. Tarantino is more graphic in his violence than Leonard (the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs marks a limit case for many viewers and reviewers) and he more often uses revenge as motivation, which tends to mitigate our revulsion: we feel these victims deserve what they get. At times, however, Tarantino invites us to laugh at horrifying punishment for its own sake, as if we were watching a cartoon. Jackie Brown is an outlier for the director in this respect as well. Its four coups de grâce are, for a Tarantino film, brief and tidy (in Melanie’s case the victim even gets it off-camera) and thus more aligned with Leonard’s relatively discreet handling of violent crime. Also, none of these four are revenge killings.

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This is not the place to discuss the merits and demerits of Tarantino’s use of violence, which has sharply divided viewers and critics alike. [6]  But his and Leonard’s mix of humor with violence does raise a stylistic question: is there a difference in how each of them tries to make laughter compatible with fear, pain, and suffering? Though often couched in moral terms, this is really a question about the aesthetics of violence, not its morality, and typically depends on a corresponding vocabulary of evaluation, e.g., “gratuitous” or “meretricious” on the negative side, “serious” or “meaningful” on the positive.  Because aesthetics focuses on the formal integration of all elements in the work of art into its structure, themes, and characterizations as a whole, any violence that can’t be integrated in this way raises a moral suspicion, like gratuitous sex, that it’s there just to pander to our baser instincts and, by extension, turn us into bad people.  Thus, the aesthetics of violence may provoke moral questions, but these are secondary to what aesthetics is all about. They are also unrelated to the moral attitude the work of art conveys toward human action within the world it represents, which is something that belongs under the heading of “Themes” and intersects with the idea of poetic justice.

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Several critics who have focused on the aesthetics of violence in Tarantino’s films have mounted a stylistic defense, turning on its head the accusation that the director celebrates violence “for its own sake” by, in effect, invoking the “art for art’s sake” motto of early modernism. Jeva Lange, for instance, considers the gore in Tarantino's movies as “yet another tool to emphasize the artifice — and, contained within that, the possibility — of filmmaking as a medium,” which would turn it into a commentary on film itself (Lange). Because the violence is “unnatural, unrealistically bloody, and heavily stylized,” she considers it integral to at least the visual meaning of the director’s work. Elmore Leonard’s use of violence elicits no such defense because it never rises to the level of needing one. Cormac McCarthy’s handling of violence in a book like Blood Meridian is probably a closer match to Tarantino’s than you’ll find in anything Leonard ever wrote, with the possible exception of a few pages in Split Images (300-5), where the morally numbing effect of stylized violence is the aesthetic point.

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Tarantino is accused of pandering not only because we often feel he’s inviting us to take pleasure in the infliction of pain, but also because he makes no bones about admitting that he likes cinematic violence. “If you ask me how I feel about violence in real life, well, I have a lot of feelings about it. It’s one of the worst aspects of America. In movies, violence is cool. I like it” (quoted in Kornhaber). While Leonard is famous for saying he “accepts” all of his characters and even has “an affection for them,” including the violent ones, he’s quick to add, “Doesn’t mean that I like them,” or, presumably, what they do (Grobel 282).  Accordingly, as in the case of Ordell’s illiterate jackboys, Leonard invites us to laugh at rather than with even his scariest psychopathic killers. In Jackie Brown, Tarantino follows his mentor’s lead, which is one reason why you won’t find this movie cited by those who deplore violence in his films. Not only is the carnage here less graphic and drawn out, but when Tarantino mixes humor with violence, he either invites us to laugh at, not with, those inflicting it or he uses a comic element to intensify by contrast the horror of the act rather than to mitigate it. Louis Gara’s shooting of Melanie illustrates the first option.

 

Louis and Melanie become involved in the money switch at the Del Amo mall when another female participant, Simone, backs out after the trial run-through, disappearing with $10,000 of Ordell’s illegal profits. Melanie is there to fill in for Simone, and Louis is there to make sure Melanie doesn’t follow Simone’s lead. Louis’s irritation with Melanie’s lackadaisical attitude grows throughout this scene. She makes them late for the drop-off and seems constantly distracted; he’s a professional bank robber who understands the importance of promptness and timing. Plus, he suspects she’s trying to pull a fast one. After Melanie receives the shopping bag full of cash from Jackie, Louis tears it away from her and heads for the parking lot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But he doesn’t remember where they came in, or where they parked. Melanie begins needling him in a sarcastic voice, asking how “Lou-isss” ever robbed banks if he couldn’t remember where he parked his car. She continues as they wander up and down the lot until Louis orders her to shut up: “I mean it. Don’t say one fuckin’ word, ok?” (1:53:07). Unable to resist, Melanie can't help replying, “Okay, Lou-isss.” Whereupon Louis pulls out his gun and shoots her, twice. Spotting the van, he hurries toward it, shouting, “See, just where I said it was!” (1:53:21). In the screenplay he adds, yelling out the window as he drives away, “Hey, look, I found it!”

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Louis’s sarcasm is not entirely lost on us, the viewers: these one-liners (both taken from Leonard’s text) do make us laugh, in part because we, too, found Melanie annoying. But her fecklessness and needling has turned Louis into the stumblebum bank robber she took him for. Not only did he forget where he entered the store and where he parked the van, but he also shot a gun, twice, in a public parking lot and now he’s trying to one-up a corpse. He even stalls the van as he backs it out. In short, we laugh at Louis even as we laugh with him, just as we laugh at his embarrassment and confusion in a subsequent scene, where he tries to explain to Ordell what happened to Melanie and finally blurts out, "I shot her" (2:00:22). This is the same Louis we meet in Rum Punch, the one who tries to hold up a liquor store by putting his hand in his pocket and pointing his finger at the owner, who replies, “Why don’t you take your finger out of there and stick it in your ass while I go get my shotgun” (294). Louis later returns with a real gun, but it’s obvious he’s gotten rusty in the joint and isn’t thinking too clearly out of it.

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When Tarantino can’t, like Leonard, direct our ridicule at characters that inflict pain, he uses humor to heighten our revulsion rather than lessen it. Ordell’s murder of Beaumont Livingston, another member of his crew, shows us how.

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Beaumont, a parolee arrested for possessing illegal drugs and carrying an unregistered weapon, is facing a sentence of ten years, and Ordell fears he might make a plea deal. Beaumont’s already told the cops about Jackie’s role as Ordell’s money mule, which is why she’s about to be stopped and searched on her next arrival at LAX. Ordell bails Beaumont out of jail, as he will Jackie, in order to kill him before he can cough up any more vital information. “Beaumont don’t got a doin’ time disposition,” he tells Max Cherry when making the arrangements (00:15:03).  The evening of Beaumont’s release, Ordell asks him to help out as security for an arms delivery by hiding in the trunk of Ordell’s car with a shotgun. It makes no sense, of course, but Beaumont eventually agrees despite his misgivings because he feels obliged to Ordell for springing him.

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Standup comedian Chris Tucker earned Tarantino’s praise for his performance as Beaumont, which he plays in broad comic strokes (“Interview”). Tucker’s high, loud, whiney voice sings a comical recitative of complaints and refusals right up to and just past the moment the trunk slams down, stopping only when Ordell starts the car. In a cinematographic tour de force, Tarantino then uses a continuous, slowly elevating crane shot to track the car as it circles the block to enter a fenced-in empty lot across the street from Beaumont’s motel. During these two long minutes (00:21:04-00:23:01), we hear nothing but the laid-back soul music on Ordell’s casette player, fading with distance, until the moment the car stops and Ordell gets out and opens the trunk. Beaumont’s cartoonish voice, now diminished with distance, comes bursting out as though it had never stopped. With two quick shots, Ordell puts a stop to it (00:23:02). He slams the trunk down and restarts the car, and as the cassette resumes playing, he drives slowly out of the lot.

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Whatever laughs Tucker's performance may have earned up to the point where he’s locked inside the trunk of Ordell’s car, those laughs are silenced the instant Beaumont is silenced forever. That's when the calculated cruelty of Ordell’s ruse, growing on us from the moment we first realize he’s only driving around the block, registers in direct but inverse proportion to the hilarity of Tucker’s previous routine, which now serves, in stark contrast, to heighten rather than diminish its emotional impact.

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Visual and aural distancing is crucial to achieving this somber effect, and that depends on Tarantino’s mastery of point of view.

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A director’s options in controlling point of view are generally limited to what can be seen or spoken diegetically, within the world depicted on screen. [7] The movie audience necessarily adopts the impersonal, exteriorized perspective of the camera, which can occasionally, through a facial close-up, establish a specific character’s point of view for the shots that immediately follow. [8.] However, no camera can allow us to overhear that character’s silent thoughts or experience what they smell, taste, or touch. Writers of fiction can lead us into the deepest recesses of a character's thoughts, impressions, and sensations through direct description (“he considered . . .,” “it seemed to her that. . .,” “they smelled smoke . . .,” “it tasted salty . . .”) or through what’s known as free indirect discourse (FID), where thoughts and sensations described in the third person and in past tense make us feel as though we're overhearing an interior monologue silently running through the character’s mind (“She entered the room. What was that smell? Smoke!”). FID, a prominent feature of Leonard’s style, particularly resists translation onto the screen, dependent as it is on grammatical markers like verb tense, person, and mood. [4]

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However, the limitations on point of view imposed by film also offer opportunities unavailable to a writer. The pathos registered by distance in the tracking crane shot of Beaumont Livingston’s murder would be impossible in a book unless the author gave us visual instructions: “Imagine Ordell’s car driving away as you rise into the air . . . .”  That kind of direct address would be fatal to the narrative invisibility that Elmore Leonard prized more than anything else. Elsewhere, Tarantino circles the camera around Jackie Burke’s head to convey her (feigned) panic as she looks for her handlers, Ray and Mark, after the money handoff at the mall goes (apparently) wrong (01:45:05-01:45:20). That, too, is beyond the capabilities of fiction. Meanwhile, Tarantino can exploit to the full Leonard’s chameleon tendency to tell the story from his characters’ perspectives by using establishment or point-of-view tracking shots whenever necessary. FID may be off the table, but Tarantino shows tremendous agility in trying to recreate Leonard’s shifts in narrative perspective without leaving the viewer dazed and confused.

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For instance, Chapter 22 of Rum Punch follows the complicated events of the real money transfer at the Dell Amo mall (the first was a rehearsal) through twelve changes in point of view using four different characters in a span of only fifteen pages. Tarantino re-shuffles these twelve fragments into three scenes, each dominated by a particular character's point of view (Louis's dominates the scene that includes Melanie) and integrates each of these three scenes into a continuous, self-contained narrative sequence, in the following order: Jackie, Louis, and Max. Establishment shots, frame composition, entrances and exits, and tracking shots anchor each scene in its dominant character's point of view, while superimposed time markings in the lower left of the screen at the start of each scene indicate that all three overlap roughly within the same chronological span. Thus, Tarantino manages to capture Leonard’s perspectival relativity without leaving the viewer feeling vertiginous.

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As in the movie’s handling of structure and pacing, characterization—so important to Leonard—here provides Tarantino with the rationale for organizing this 16-minute span of shifting perspectives at the Del Amo mall into a unified narrative arc embracing three distinct but internally coherent points of view, all focused on the same sequence of events. Except in this one case, Tarantino generally resists the temptation—clearly irresistible in his other films—to overlap or scramble chronologies. In Jackie Brown the complete sequence of events is, with a few minor exceptions, straightforward and easy to follow.

 

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Themes:

 

The way Tarantino and Leonard see the world is rooted in their similar childhoods. Both were raised by firm but loving mothers, with the father largely absent during their formative years, and both fell in love with movies while quite young. [9] With the exception of the all-male Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino has included strong, assertive, independent women in nearly every film he’s ever made or written. With some exceptions, like Jackie Brown, they are extremely violent, but like Jackie Brown, they are all tough as well as smart. Leonard included tough-minded female characters in many of his early sagebrush sagas, but the Code of the West dictated that, with rare exceptions, they play a secondary role to the male protagonist and his opponent. [10]

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This pattern continued after Leonard turned to crime writing until, in the late 70s, his second wife, Joan Shepard, urged him to catch up with Second Wave feminism. In The Switch (1978), Leonard paid his dues. Mickey Dawson’s kidnapping for ransom elicits little more than a shrug from her wealthy, alcoholic, and emotionally abusive husband, Frank, because he’s keeping a mistress he intends to marry and is about to file for divorce. Frank's mistress is Melanie, who actively discourages Frank from paying Mickey’s ransom since his money is about to become her money. Mickey’s kidnappers are Ordell Robbie, Louis Gara, and a loser named Richard Monk. Aided by Louis, who has developed a crush on her, Mickey escapes, “gets in touch” with her anger at Frank and Melanie, empowers the “new Mickey” inside her, and takes her revenge by making the male kidnappers a proposal they can’t refuse: she and Melanie will “switch” places!

No wonder Tarantino wanted to shoplift the book.

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Rum Punch resurrects the criminal cast of The Switch, minus Richard, to reprise the prequel’s basic theme of female empowerment using a similar plot device. Like Mickey, Jackie Burke is tired of being victimized by the men in her life—husbands, criminals, cops—and gets the upper hand by “switching” two shopping bags—one containing $50,000, the other $500,000—and beguiling Max Cherry into retrieving the bag containing the half million. Max thus has a major thematic function in both Rum Punch and Jackie Brown.  He introduces a romantic interest into what would otherwise amount to a fairly straightforward crime caper of the shell-game variety.

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Fascinated by news accounts of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow as a kid and drawn to film noir and the femme fatale as a young adult, Leonard began introducing romance elements into his crime fiction formula with his very first crime novel, The Big Bounce. It wasn’t until later in his career, however, that these elements began to assume the recognizable features of romantic comedy. [11] The formula is hard at work not only in Rum Punch, but also in the other two Leonard novels that became big-screen successes in the 90s, Get Shorty and Out of Sight. What makes Rum Punch unusual, as we’ve noted, is the more advanced ages of its lovers.

 

Part of what motivates Jackie Burke and emboldens her in the risky attempt to outsmart both the criminals and the cops is her 40-something realization that this may be her last chance, ever, to escape a life lived on the brink of poverty. “I feel like I’m always starting over . . . and before I know it, I won’t have any options left” (325), she tells Max, who is facing a similarly bleak end-game. Having “written something like fifteen thousand bonds” (289), he’s tired of the business and decides to quit the night he bails Jackie out of prison and falls in love with her (353). Accepting her invitation to become her accomplice seems, in retrospect, inevitable.

 

Tarantino’s screenplays and movies often include “romantic” pairings. Alabama and Clarence in True Romance and, more perversely, Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers are perhaps the most conspicuous, but even in Pulp Fiction they number no less than three: Vincent and Mia, Butch and Fabienne, and “Pumpkin” and “Honeybun.” The epic revenge saga Kill Bill, in two parts, pivots on the failure of Bill and the Bride’s previous relationship. Thus, it’s no surprise that Tarantino should give the romance between Max and Jackie the same prominence it has in Rum Punch. In both the book and the movie, moreover, the reciprocity of the couple’s romantic interest is put in question. Max is clearly smitten with Jackie, and would have helped her even without any prospect of sharing the loot. But is Jackie smitten with Max? Or, like the typical femme fatale of noir fiction and film, is she just using him, exploiting his infatuation to further her scheme?  Here Leonard takes a page from the work of James M. Cain, where the amorous motivations of deadly females like Cora Papadakis in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Phyllis Nirdlinger in Double Indemnity, both of whom seduce their male partners into helping them murder their husbands, are repeatedly placed in doubt. [12]  Tarantino follows Leonard’s lead, but only up to a point, a topic to be examined more closely under the heading of "Characterization."

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The moral attitude that informs Jackie Brown closely resembles that of its source material and finds expression in choices that determine the value and consequences of human action and the justice of outcomes. This is a matter of theme and not tone, which seeks to elicit a specific affective response in the reader or viewer—laughter, fear, anxiety, love, sadness, joy—rather than share with them a vision of the world.  Some viewers detect a bold streak of nihilism running through films like Pulp Fiction, which according to Mark Conrad offers a grim critique of America’s pop-cultural mirage of values. But Tarantino doesn’t see himself that way. “Some people have told me I’m a nihilist,” he said to Geoffrey Campbell in 1994. “But I’m not a nihilist at all. I’m an optimist” (Campell 95).

 

So is Leonard. Tarantino’s optimism finds expression in the poetic justice that, sooner or later, imposes itself on the anarchy, chaos, and random violence of his films and that, minus his standard depiction of revenge as a cathartic moral good, dictates the outcome of events in the make-believe world of Jackie Brown just as it does in that of Rum Punch. The bad guys lose and the good guys win (the cops, sort of), and the heroine and her accomplice get away with the money despite their duplicity and technical criminality: aiding and abetting a gun smuggler, absconding with evidence in a Federal crime, and, for Max, serving as an accomplice in the latter. This is standard practice in Leonard’s fiction, where protagonists may engage in morally dubious, even criminal, behavior, but are just good enough, at least compared to their antagonists, to earn our desire to see them rewarded for it.

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(To be Continued)

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Notes:

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1. He was caught, brought home by the police, and grounded by his mom for the summer (Clarkson, 42). 

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2. Leonard's first real screenplays were written for educational films produced by the Encyclopedia Britannica during the mid-1960s, in the drought between these two phases of his career (Rzepka, 75)

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3. Lyttleton places Mr. Majestyk at number 10 on a list of Leonard's 20 best adaptations. Besides his three 90s hits, at 1, 2, and 4, only one Leonard crime movie, 52 Pick-Up, is rated higher, at number 9, but it garnered much less attention upon release. Drexl, Alabama's pimp, references Mr. Majestyk in True Romance, which Tarantino wrote but did not direct.

 

4. On Leonard's impressive use of free indirect discourse, see Rzepka, 16-24.

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5. Its benign outcome makes this episode a good example of what Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis calls "moral luck" (6-7).

 

6. The pros and cons are neatly summarized by Jeva Lange, who defends the director, and Roy Chacko, who considers Tarantino’s most brutal scenes misogynistic. Jack Wareham, also taking the negative side, adds a cultural dimension to the discussion, and the unnamed writers at Exploring Your Mind, adopting a largely neutral position, include a consideration of the psychology of violence going all the way back to Aristotle.

Thus, the formal justification set forth by District Judge John M. Woolsey in the landmark case regarding sex in James Joyce’s Ulysses similarly applies here: "Whether or not one enjoys such a technique as Joyce uses is a matter of taste on which disagreement or argument is futile, but to subject that technique to the standards of some other technique [designed to excite sexual desire] seems to me to be little short of absurd” (US).

Ultimately, the aesthetics of violence depends on a Kantian concept of “disinterestedness” or impersonal objectivity: if the work of art leads us to put our personal “interest” in what is expressed above our appreciation of how it is expressed, then it is not really “art” but entertainment or propaganda or pornography.

 

7. The rare exception is an extra-diegetic first-person voice-over, like Fred MacMurray's in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity.

 

8. For details distinguishing point of view from grammatical person, as well as the relation of both to free indirect discourse, see Rzepka, 16-17.

 

9. For a concise summary of Tarantino's early life, see Sherman, 1-16; for Leonard's, see Rzepka, 24-46.

 

10. The exceptions include Amelia Darck in "The Colonel's Lady" (1952) and, in a supporting role, Martha Cable, the wife of beleaguered homesteader and Civil War veteran Paul Cable in Last Stand at Sabre River (1959).

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11. On Leonard's debts to romantic comedy, see Sinowitz.

 

12. Leonard's early admiration for Cain is reflected in the first (and until recently, unpublished) short story he ever wrote, "One Horizontal" (1950). His love of noir generally gets a thorough airing out in La Brava (1983).

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Works Cited:

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Bailey, Frankie Y. “Visual Clues: Dress, Appearance, and Perception in Elmore Leonard’s Crime Fiction.”  In Charles Rzepka, ed. Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard: "If it sounds like writing."  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2020.  Pp. 57-72.

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Clarkson, Wensley. Quentin Tarantino: Shooting from the Hip. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1995. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/26/AR2008052602219.html

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Grobel, Lawrence. Endangered Species: Writers Talk about Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2001.

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Gunst, Stephanie. Pam Grier and the Articulation of Female Subjectivity in Blaxpoitation Theme Songs. MA Thesis. Tufts University, 2011.

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Kaufman, Anthony, ed. Steven Soderberg Interviews. U. Press of Mississippi, 2015.

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Kornhaber, Spencer. "Tarantino's Ultimate Statement on Movie Violence," The Atlantic. August 2, 2019. Online: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/08/once-upon-a-time-end-tarantinos-message-on-violence/595168/

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Leonard, Elmore. Rum Punch. In Four Later Novels. Gregg Sutter ed. New York: Library of America, 2016. Pp. 229-451.

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Leonard, Elmore. Split Images. New York: HarperCollins, 1981.

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Leonard, Elmore. "Trail of the Apache." In The Complete Stories of Elmore Leonard. Ed. Gregg Sutter. New York: Morrow, 2004. Pp. 1-36.

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Leonard, Elmore, "When the Women Come Out to Dance." In When the Women Come Out to Dance: Stories. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Pp. 40-56.

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Lyttleton, Oliver. "From Best to Worst: Elmore Leonard Movie Adaptations." IndieWire, May 14, 2013. https://www.indiewire.com/2013/05/from-best-to-worst-elmore-leonard-movie-adaptations-98187/

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Mitchell, Ellis. “Breaking Down Jackie Brown.” In Quentin Tarantino, Jackie Brown. Burbank, CA: Miramax Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD.

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Orr, C. “The Elmore Leonard Paradox.” The Atlantic. (January/February) 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-elmore-leonard-paradox/355734 (accessed 31 May 2019) 

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Powers, Korine. “The Man with Five Names: Hombre on Race and the Cinematic Western.” In Charles Rzepka, ed. Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard: "If it sounds like writing."  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2020. Pp. 95-111.

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Rzepka, Charles. Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2013.

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Sinowitz, Michael. “Elmore Leonard and the Romantic Comedy, or ‘Get Some Love Into It.’” In Charles Rzepka, ed. Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard: "If it sounds like writing."  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2020. Pp. 27-39.

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Sherman, Dale. Quentin Tarantino FAQ. Milwaukee, WI: Applause, 2015.

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Stamm, Robert. "Beyond Fidelity: the Dialogics of Adaptation." In James Naremore, ed. Film Adaptation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Pp. 54-76.

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Tarantino, Quentin. Jackie Brown. Film. Burbank, CA: Miramax Home Entertainment. Distributed by Lionsgate. 2011. Blu-Ray DVD.

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Tarantino, Quentin. Jackie Brown. Screenplay. The Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb). https://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Jackie-Brown.html

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Terzieva-Artemis, Rossitsa. "Moral Luck and Determinism in Rum Punch." Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard: "If it sounds like writing."  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2020. Pp. 147-164.

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Tucker, Neely. "A Blast of Bullets." The Washington Post. May 27, 2008.

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Vasquez, Zach. “The Great Elmore Leonard Rennaissanc of the Late 90s.” CrimeReads. (May 22, 2020) https://crimereads.com/the-great-elmore-leonard-renaissance-of-the-late-90s/ 

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Venuti, Lawrence. "Adaptation, Translation, Critique." journal of visual culture. 6.1 (2007): 25-43.

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Wooton, Adrian. “Quentin Tarantino Interview (I).” The Guardian. January 5, 1998. https://www.theguardian.com/film/1998/jan/05/quentintarantino.guardianinterviewsatbfisouthbank1