Putting the Punch in Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch: Jackie Brown as Homage (Parts 1 and 2)
by Charles J. Rzepka, Editor, Sympos
Part 1
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).
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).
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]
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).
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.
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.
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."
Structure:
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).
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.
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.
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:
MELANIE: Wanna fuck?
LOUIS: Yeah.
“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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”).
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”).
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]
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Visual and aural distancing is crucial to achieving this somber effect, and that depends on Tarantino’s mastery of point of view.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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."
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.
Part 2
Characterization:
If a director’s options in manipulating point of view are more limited than an author’s, the tables are turned when it comes to characterization. In addition to the vast array of past heroes and current types available to an author, a director can include in each frame many more visual and aural details of an actor's performance, as well as exploit memories of their previous film roles, to provide nuance to the character they are playing. Casting in particular is a means of characterization for which Tarantino is famous. Many a forgotten regular of the “grindhouse,” B-movie, exploitation, and horror genres that Tarantino loved as a kid have the director to thank for reviving their careers by choosing them for roles in his films, including Robert Forster, who plays Max Cherry, and Pam Grier, who plays Jackie Brown. As we’ll see, even a minor role in Jackie Brown can benefit from the aura of past roles hovering around the actor playing that character, or from the actor’s off-screen biography.
The Melanie that Tarantino created on screen differs in several obvious respects from her counterpart in Rum Punch. Both survive by gold digging, neither can be trusted, and each has a well-developed sexual appetite. However, Leonard’s Melanie (no known last name) is a thirty-something blonde coyote with big breasts and lots of experience. Tarantino’s is a surfer-girl. Resetting the action from Miami to LA, the director wanted a younger, slimmer, SoCal atavism of the beach party movies of the 60s. Bridget Fonda’s performance as Melanie Ralston fits the bill perfectly, and benefits from the mystique attached to the Fonda name. Her father, Peter Fonda, launched his career playing countercultural misfits and rebels in 60s films like Easy Rider (1969). Tarantino alludes to Papa Fonda's reputation at one point by showing Melanie and Louis smoking pot and watching a scene from Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974), a car-chase caper starring Peter playing opposite Susan George, a Bridget Fonda look-alike.
Casting Robert De Niro as Louis Gara, a role requiring little display of emotion until the final money switch at the Del Amo mall, was a counter-intuitive stroke of genius on Tarantino’s part. Some viewers may have trouble connecting the affectless couch potato of the film’s early scenes with the impatient, furious Louis who shoots Melanie twice in the Dell Amo parking lot. Why waste De Niro’s talents on a loser like this? But the role as Tarantino wrote it is true to the character Leonard created: an easy-going, habitual offender and ex-con recently released from prison and unable to adjust to life outside it, where things have changed so radically in just four years that he has trouble understanding the keyless entry on Ordell’s Mercedes. Louis Gara is out of his element, amiably disoriented and passively following along wherever he is led, not only by Melanie (“Wanna fuck?”) and Ordell, who wants to recruit him into his posse, but even by Simone, who insists on entertaining him with her patented Diana Ross routine while he sits rocking, mildly curious but vacant-eyed, in her upholstered glider (00:23:36-00:24:16). Once Melanie reveals her treacherous plot to cheat Ordell, however, Louis’s prison habits and loyalty to Ordell, both acquired the hard way when the two were inmates together, kick in and Melanie becomes their target.
Leonard, through free indirect discourse, uses Max’s point of view to convey the problem with Louis:
It was his eyes that gave him away.
Max saw it. Those dull eyes that didn’t seem to have life in them but didn’t miss anything. Three falls, you don’t come out, put on a new suit of clothes, and become a normal person again. That life changed you. (266)
De Niro has those eyes. His amiable cluelessness accords perfectly with Tarantino’s succinct restatement of Max’s view in his screenplay: “While acutely aware of the rhythm of life inside a correction facility, in the real world his timing is thrown. It’s like a song he doesn’t know the lyrics to but attempts to sing anyway.” As in Fonda’s case, film history helps to enhance the credibility of De Niro’s sudden transformation into a furious, cold-blooded killer. Watching him onscreen, it’s difficult not to recall his breakthrough role as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), a quiet, almost catatonic guy who goes off the rails not long after returning to civilian life from a tour in Vietnam. The trauma of prolonged incarceration takes the place of Bickle's Vietnam in shaping the PTSD personality of Louis Gara.
Samuel L. Jackson came to the part of Ordell Robbie trailing clouds of glory from his Oscar-nominated performance as Bible-spouting hitman Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction, a role that catapulted him to stardom at the age of 42 after two decades of relative screen obscurity. Winnfield was a character Tarantino wrote specifically for Jackson, but in creating his version of Ordell the director also drew on three of Jackson’s recent named roles in movies directed by Spike Lee: a super-cool DJ named Mister Señor Love Daddy in Do the Right Thing (1989), Madlock, a brutally sadistic loan shark enforcer, in Mo’ Better Blues (1990), and “Gator” Purify, a jivin’ and lyin’ crack addict in Jungle Fever (1991). These three roles, along with Jackson’s very brief but memorable appearance in the Tarantino-scripted True Romance as hitman “Big Don,” were smelted in the furnace of Winnfield’s ruthless fury to give the actor’s cool, savvy, jive performance as Ordell Robbie an underlayer of bad-ass treachery and menace that breaks the surface whenever he feels threatened.
But there’s another side to Jackson’s Ordell Robbie that isn’t apparent in these previous roles, and it conforms to the profile of villainy that dominates Elmore Leonard’s fiction. Leonard described it in an interview he gave to Tim Adams, of The Guardian, in 2003. When asked if “living with gangsters in his head” is difficult, the writer replied,
It’s really never hard . . . . I think of them either as stupid or just playing a role. I like to think of what they were like as children—that helps.
Whatever else he may be or thinks he is, the Ordell Robbie that Tarantino creates on screen and that Jackson plays with such élan shows himself to be, at the most crucial moments of the film, as stupid as his fictional counterpart. He lets a flight attendant get the drop on him when he goes to kill her because, instead of grabbing and strangling her when she opens her door, he decides to toy with her. Then, just as he places his fingers around her neck, he hears a “click”:
ORDELL: “Is that what I think it is?
JACKIE: “What do you think it is?
ORDELL: “I think it’s a gun pressed up against my dick.
JACKIE: “You thought right. Now take your hands from around my throat, nigga.” (00:50:43)
Once Jackie has the drop on him, Ordell has to listen as she explains her plan to get him his money back. Worse, he agrees to it. Thinking he can renege on his end of the deal once he’s got his $500,000, he lets Jackie string him along to the bitter end, leaving him not only penniless, but dead. His desire to get his money out of Mexico blinds him to every glaring sign that Jackie is using the cops against him. When Ordell learns that she’s told them everything she knows about his operation in order to earn their trust, he’s visibly upset, but doesn't opt out. Even after the switch has gone down and Ordell realizes he’s been swindled, he agrees to meet Jackie at Max’s office so she can return his money. She’s afraid she’ll be named as an accessory, says Max over the phone, or that Ordell will shoot her before she can explain what happened. Every lame excuse Max and Jackie can come up with for meeting at Max's office, at night, where the cops are waiting for him just as he suspects, Ordell swallows—with hesitation, yes, but completely. Once he's there, it’s Jackie who makes sure he’s shot dead and not thrown in jail, where he might sooner or later reveal how she cheated him and snookered the cops into helping her do it. The astonished look on his dead face at the end of this scene, held for six full seconds, tells us all we need to know about Ordell's criminal IQ (2:24:19-25).
This is Ordell Robbie as Leonard originally conceived him, the Ordell who botched Mickey Dawson’s kidnapping in The Switch and, along with Louis, ended up serving time for it. In Tarantino's film, as in Rum Punch, Louis admires Ordell’s operation, but Melanie sees through the gun-dealer's street smart façade, telling Louis, in words taken almost verbatim from Leonard’s book (342), “He's acting like he’s this big international arms dealer, when, come on, face it, the only people he ever sold to were dopers. . . . You got to admit, he’s not too bright.” Louis disagrees, to which Melanie replies, “He moves his lips when he reads. . . . Let’s say he’s streetwise, you know? I'll give him that. He’s still a fuck-up” (1:13:14-1:13:54). Melanie may be a bimbo, but she nails Ordell.
Ordell is not only stupid, but he’s also, in Leonard’s words, “playing a role.” His cool demeanor is fake, as demonstrated by how quickly he loses it when Jackie tells him what she’s told the cops, and as anyone with an ounce of real street savvy can detect. Max Cherry, for instance. Robert Forster’s Max is singularly unimpressed by the gym bag full of cash that Ordell has brought with him as collateral for bailing Beaumont. Forster’s laconic, all-business voice and poker face tell us that, after writing fifteen thousand bonds, he’s seen more than his fair share of flashy street trash like Ordell.
In this respect, too, Tarantino’s conception of the man remains true to the original. “Ordell got a kick out of people wondering about him,” writes Leonard in Rum Punch, indicating the character’s interest in how well he performs (240). That sliver of self-consciousness tells us Ordell is not only playing a role, but it’s a role he feels insecure playing. In short, he lacks authenticity. As Max puts it a moment later, in free indirect discourse, “The kind of guy who worked at being cool, but was dying to tell you things about himself” (242). Jackson’s loquacity, not just in this scene but throughout the movie, fits Max’s description perfectly. When Max asks what Jackie "does" for Ordell and Ordell replies, "Why should I tell you anything?" Max says: "Because you want me to know what a slick guy you are. You got stewardesses bringing you fifty grand" (37:54-58).
Unlike Melanie, Louis, and Ordell, Max Cherry and Jackie Burke undergo significant changes in making the transition from text to screen. Taken together, these alterations underline a point more subtly registered in Tarantino’s source material: the enigmatic but tantalizing threat posed by the femme fatale to her partner in crime.
At first glance, Pam Grier’s replacing Leonard’s white female protagonist seems the more radical of the two transformations. It brings the enormous cultural and political significance of skin color to bear on the heroine’s personality, all of it magnified by Grier’s secure position in America’s pop-cultural imaginary as the doyenne of 70s Blaxploitation flicks. But the omission of Max’s fictional backstory from Tarantino’s adaptation has, arguably, a more marked impact on our impression of Leonard’s male protagonist than Grier’s blackness does on our impression of Jackie Burke. Being African American lends a certain degree of street-cred to Jackie Brown’s angrier personality and more obscenity-laden speech patterns when pushed to her limits. As we’ll see, however, it doesn’t alter our general impression of the character she’s based on or the type that both of them represent: the alluring but dangerous femme fatale. Jackie Burke is just as cool, determined, and wily as her screen counterpart. Just more demure.
Tarantino couldn’t help but omit Max Cherry’s backstory because so much of it involves his separated wife of twenty-seven years, Reneé, and Max’s gradual realization that he needs to divorce Reneé occupies a good deal of page-space in Leonard's book. Max married Reneé back in the 60s, when he was a young cop facing anti-war demonstrators in the streets. But as he gradually rose in the ranks to Homicide Detective, Reneé expressed dissatisfaction. “She said she was worried sick all the time something would happen to me,” Max tells Jackie. “Also, she said, I put the job first” (299). “Did you?” asks Jackie. “You have to," Max replies. "So I quit. She didn’t like being married to a cop—she hates being married to a bail bondsman” (300).
The Reneé subplot lays bare two contradictory sides to Max’s personality. On the job, he’s not just your ordinary bail bondsman. He’s a seasoned veteran of policing and detective work who knows how criminals, male and female, operate. He’s comfortable in dangerous situations, can calculate the risks, and knows how to deal with fear. In short, he’s just what Jackie needs to pull off her switch. In contrast to Ordell, he’s authentically cool in the only sense Leonard recognizes, or rather, he was: he knew how to do his job and did it well. Off the job, however, Leonard's Max was and continues to be hen-pecked, submissive, and indecisive. The fact that he sacrificed the career he loved for the tedious paper shuffling of a bail bondsman just underlines Max’s amative susceptibility, which is further emphasized by his refusal to follow through on the couple’s separation two years ago and get a divorce, all the while supporting Reneé’s financially disastrous pretentions as owner of an art gallery. His factotum, Winston, finds such behavior in his otherwise hard-boiled boss a constant cause for amazement. Max expresses his softer side in his love of poetry, and the Beats in particular, “Ginsberg and Corso,” whom he once read to an uncomprehending Reneé while trying to woo her (298). He also tends to develop crushes on actresses, Terry Moore back in the 50s and, most recently, Annette Benning (299).
Leaving this material out of his movie makes Tarantino's Max tougher and less sentimental. But without his professional backstory he also seems, oddly, more naïve. Forster, who languished in B-movie action and horror flicks after a promising start as a supporting actor in films like Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) and a starring role in the critically acclaimed Medium Cool (1969), brings to the part of Max something of the hard-boiled world-weariness of his role as Officer David Madison, who is assigned to investigate the mysterious deaths and disappearances occurring in the 1980 cult monster flick, Alligator. As played by Forster, Taratino’s Max Cherry would have worn Leonard’s sentimental backstory like an ill-fitting suit. His sudden infatuation with Jackie is already sanctioned by the laws of romantic comedy. This is simply how “the cute meet” always happens: in the unlikeliest of circumstances to the unlikeliest two people. Nor does this Max need a previous history in law enforcement to make his familiarity with the mean streets of life plausible. He’s walked down enough of them in his present job to persuade us that, despite his skepticism, he’s up to the task of helping Jackie outsmart Ordell and the cops.
What the policing backstory added to the character of Leonard’s Max—and to good effect—was experience with women like Jackie, and an awareness of the possibility that she could be using him for her own ends. In the book, driving home after bailing her out of jail, Max starts “putting up pictures of Jackie Burke in his mind.”
The ones where she had that gleam in her eyes, the look saying, We could have fun.
Unless she was appraising him with the look, making a judgment, and what it said was, I could use you.
Maybe.
Either way it was a turn-on. (300)
In Jackie Brown, it never seems to occur to Max that Jackie might be using him until the point at which she gets Ordell killed. The Max in Tarantino’s movie is never seduced into sleeping with Jackie, so he has no reason to think she's using sex to manipulate him; Leonard’s Max is, so he does. Nevertheless, the possibility doesn't deter him because, having been a professional cop, he can handle it.
In short, Tarantino’s Max is more trusting than Leonard’s original, even if he is less sentimental. That trust comes across most forcefully at the moment it's broken, in the scene where Ordell is shot and killed by Ray Nicolet (Michael Keaton) in Max’s darkened office right after Jackie yells, “Ray, he’s got a gun” (2:23:01; page 447).
Both Leonard and Tarantino make it clear that Ordell has yet to draw his weapon at this point, and although what Jackie says is technically true, its motivation is cynically performative. She says it to get Ordell killed, but only partly because she fears he's going to kill her. Knowing the cops are listening, she needs to silence Ordell before he can say anything to incriminate her and Max. This is clearly conveyed in the book when Max and Jackie go over their plans to lure Ordell to Max’s office, where Ray and Mark will be waiting to arrest him. “Nicolet—is he already there, or does he come busting in while were chatting?” asks Max.
“He’s already there.”
“What if he hears something he’s not supposed to?”
“We won’t let that happen.”
"You still have a gun?”
Jackie looked up now. “Yeah, why?”
“Don’t bring it.” (441)
At first glance it looks as though Jackie is assuring Max that, with the cops overhearing all, the two of them will have to take care not to refer to her elaborate scam. But Max’s question, and especially his instruction, “Don’t bring it,” should make a careful reader suspect what Leonard’s Max already suspects: that Jackie is capable of shooting Ordell to shut him up before he says anything to incriminate them. That would only get Jackie back in hot water with the law, since self-defense would be off the table unless Ordell pulled his weapon first and, with a gun at hand after inviting Ordell to meet her, Jackie could also be charged with premeditation. That’s a risk the experienced homicide detective inside this Max isn’t willing to take.
Tarantino doesn’t have time for all this. His Jackie brings her gun (the one she took from Ordell in her apartment) and spends several minutes before Ordell and Max arrive practicing a quick-draw from Max’s desk, each time failing to pull out the gun fast enough. This scene, which is not in the book, has the same effect on a viewer’s understanding of her intentions in exclaiming, “Ray, he’s got a gun!” as Max's telling her, at the end of the previous chapter, not to bring her gun with her. Jackie means to get Ordell killed before he can say more than “Hi!” Our last clear view of Ordell before Ray reveals himself and Jackie tells him Ordell is armed shows both of Ordell's hands empty and at his sides. But an instant after Ray steps over to check his victim's vital signs, we see him kick a gun away from Ordell's right hand. This ostensible inconsistency actually corresponds to Leonard's description of what happened:
Max saw Ordell's face change. Saw his eyes come open wide with a look of surprise and then panic. Saw him pulling at his shirt to get to the pistol and did have it in his hand, cleared. But Nicolet beat him. (447)
Ordell doesn't draw his weapon until Jackie tells Ray he's got one and he knows he's about to be blown away. By then, of course, it's too late.
It can be argued that Tarantino's editing has left Jackie's culpability in doubt—did Jackie see Ordell draw his weapon before she warned Nicolet? But we should remember that it was Jackie, not Ordell, who turned off the lights before he and Max arrived. For what purpose if not to make it difficult, if not impossible, for Nicolet to tell if Ordell had drawn his weapon? In the dark, all cats are black, and all black cats (to white cops) are armed. Even if Jackie turned out to be "mistaken," well, it was dark, after all.
In short, Jackie Brown, like Jackie Burke, is quite literally a femme fatale, and Tarantino spends almost a minute and a half after Ordell is shot cutting back and forth between Max’s and Jackie’s faces (three times, in fact) as they stare at each other while the conversation between Max, Winston, and the two detectives continues around them. Max’s face conveys stunned bewilderment, Jackie’s guilt. Max’s face says, “I never suspected.” Jackie’s says, “Now you know.”
Thus, we aren’t too surprised when, at the end of the film, Max turns down Jackie’s offer to run off with her to Spain in Ordell’s Mercedes with a suitcase of money in the trunk (2:26:06-2:26:22). “Thanks,” he replies, “but you have a good time.” After a second refusal, Jackie asks, “Are you scared of me?” Holding up his thumb and index finger close together, Max smiles and says, “Mmmm . . . a little bit.” He settles instead for two, long, tender kisses before his phone rings with a frantic mother on the line trying to arrange bail for her son—exactly where we, and Ordell, came in more than two hours earlier in the film.
Rum Punch ends more ambiguously, but leaning distinctly in the opposite direction. Max keeps hesitating until, just as it looks as though he's going to say no, he asks instead, “Where would we go?”
“I don’t know,” Jackie said, and he saw her eyes begin to smile. “Does it matter?” (451).
Leonard’s novel ends here, leaving us hanging. But although we never learn for sure if Max agrees to join Jackie, the “smile” in her eyes, recalling the “gleam” that told Max “We could have fun,” indicates the likeliest outcome, and its likelihood is made more plausible by our awareness of Max’s history as a cop and a detective. If Jackie is as dangerous as she’s shown herself to be, we feel Leonard’s Max can handle it, or rather, that he has reason to believe he can. And he doesn't mind in the least being used.
I’ve saved Pam Grier’s performance as Jackie Brown for last not because it has the least impact on Tarantino’s adaptation of Leonard’s book but because it has the most, which also means, the most obvious. For that reason, it needs the least commentary. Grier dominates the film throughout, from its opening credits—printed in the same font as the posters for her 1974 Blaxploitation hit, Foxy Brown (1974) (Gunst 45) —to the very end, when she walks out Max Cherry’s door, drives away in Ordell’s car, and starts lip-synching the tune that accompanied those opening credits: Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street,” one of Blaxploitation film's best known theme songs, from the film of the same name (1972).
Jackie Brown is the riveting center of attention every time she appears, an atavism of her cinematic sisters in Coffy (1973), Grier’s first hit, and Foxy Brown, her star vehicle—violent, action-packed revenge flicks of the kind that Tarantino grew up loving. But it’s not just her race that carries Grier’s performance, even though, as noted, it adds to Jackie Brown a layer of hard-knocks experience and street toughness missing from Leonard’s Jackie Burke. Grier’s Jackie is more obscene, less patient, and more prone to outbursts of rage and sass than Leonard’s, and physically bigger, a veritable Amazon whose stature is magnified in the opening credits by Tarantino's waist high camera angle.
But there's an argument to be made that Jackie Burke herself was, all along, Jackie Brown in whiteface. When Leonard told Tarantino Jackie Brown “was my novel,” he tacitly admitted as much. As Zach Vasquez observes, Tarantino’s change in race saved Leonard from the dubious honor of having "noble white antiheroes" killing "vicious, half-smart black male villains" in all three of his late-90s screen hits (Vasquez). But Leonard has always been canny about race. From early in his career, when books like Hombre were anticipating the pro-Indian anti-Westerns of a decade later, to the height of his crime-writing fame, when Black readers would sometimes mistake him for an African American author, Leonard never stopped ridiculing white assumptions of superiority. While Black characters take center stage only twice in Leonard's fiction, Hispanic and mestizo characters often do, and some of his most memorable protagonists come from mixed racial heritages. The two central male characters in Rum Punch are a case in point.
Ordell, for instance, is so light-skinned that his “people” call him “Whitebread.” “Or they say just ‘Bread’ for short,” he tells Max, who is dark-skinned: “Eyetalian," thinks Ordell, "except [he] had never met a bail bondsman wasn’t Jewish” (239). Max thinks Ordell is Jamaican, until Ordell sets him straight, to which Max replies, “You’re African-American, I guess I’m French-American, with maybe some New Orleans Creole in there, going way back” (241). From the outset, Leonard goes out of his way to establish Ordell and Max as reciprocal and reversed mirror-images of racial mixing—a “White” Black man trying to con a “Black” White man—and the book's thematic color-coding extends to Jackie Burke as well. Despite her Caucasian features, including blonde hair and a face so white that Ordell thinks it “whiter . . . than any white face he had been this close to” (he's just about to strangle her) (305), Burke is consistently associated with the color tan, the shade of brown that matches her Cabo Airline uniform and accessories. The coding begins in the first sentence introducing her to the reader (255) and extends to “the tan Bic” lighter “that matched her uniform” (260; also 323) and in particular, the “tan bag” in which she smuggles Ordell’s money into the country (327).
For a writer as parsimonious with visual details as Leonard, this amount of color repetition would appear superfluous unless it were there for a reason. There’s a “brownness” about “white” Jackie Burke that’s more than skin deep and not a matter, as it is with Melanie, of tan lines (336). Nor is it just accessorized, because these particular accessories have to do with the particular features of her flight attendant's job that enable her to function as Ordell's money mule. Thus, by association, tan comes to represent Jackie's ability take risks and (what is flicking her Bic if not playing with fire?) stay cool—an authentic cool: brisk, confident, and self-assured, as opposed to that of Ordell, Leonard’s “white” black man. Like Max's self-possession, Jackie's has also been honed by her professional training: flight attendants must keep their composure in the most trying circumstances, even when facing the threat of impending disaster. Finally, as in “When the Women Come Out to Dance,” a Leonard short story where color coding is also important, Jackie Burke’s eyes are green—the color of money.
It’s unlikely that Tarantino noticed Leonard’s racial color code when reading Rum Punch, and even unlikelier that it could have inspired his decision to cast a Black woman as Jackie. But it’s not as though Leonard hadn’t anticipated such a move, and his crediting Tarantino for having fully realized, on screen, the novel as he conceived it implies as much.
Conclusion:
Movie adaptations are like foreign language translations, argues Lawrence Venuti, insofar as the director's aim, like the translator's, is never simply communicative, an attempt to maintain fidelity to the original, but necessarily hermeneutic, an attempt to interpret the original by producing an independent creation whose meanings are determined by its "intertextual" relations with "the receiving situation" it is forced to navigate (31). In both media, interpretation proceeds by means of an "interpretant," a set of assumptions—formal or thematic, conscious or unconscious—regarding the meaning of the original text that shapes the process of its transformation into an intertext (31). Thus any film adaptation, like any foreign language translation, demands analysis and interpretation as a creation independent of its relationship to an original.
Every choice that Quentin Tarantino made in adapting Leonard's original text to the requirements of the big screen—what Venuti calls a director's "shifts" of material—demonstrates the validity of evaluating Jackie Burke as an independent cinematic intertext rather than a communicative artifact. These shifts include not only the "additions, deletions, and substitutions" (Venuti 33) demanded by the different formal resources and limitations of film itself, but also those freely chosen by the director as points of thematic emphasis or narrative reorientation. And yet, in his extravagant compliment, "that was my book," Leonard recognized his acolyte's ironic commitment to a communicative rather than hermeneutic model of adaptation within the interpretive constraints necessarily imposed by the director's medium of choice. That is to say, the primary interpretant guiding Tarantino's interpretation of Rum Punch, despite any liberties he may have taken with structure, style, theme, and above all characterization, seems to have been, from the start, fidelity—a concept anathema to Venuti's hermeneutic ideal.
Does Jackie Brown, then, represent an anomaly in Venuti's application of translation theory to our understanding of film adaptations? For whatever other interpretants we may bring to our analysis of its hermeneutic impact, the one that stands out as dominant in the eyes of author and director alike is also the one that seems the least hermeneutic and strives hardest to adhere to a transparently communicative model. A "Brown" Jackie Burke seems, by this standard, blatantly unfaithful, but perhaps it only makes evident a salient reality that was latent in Leonard's femme fatale all along, as his color-coding suggests. Is it possible to maintain fidelity to a feature unapparent to begin with? Or is that, after all, what faith is, taking "the evidence of things not seen," as Paul said (Hebrews 11.1), and bearing witness to it in one's actions?
However we choose to answer such questions, the fact remains that Jackie Brown is as close to a faithful adaptation of its source text as any we are likely to find in the annals of film history, and it is so precisely because of, rather than despite, Tarantino's numerous "shifts" from Leonard's original, including and especially his decision to make white Jackie Burke "Brown."
Notes:
1. He was caught, brought home by the police, and grounded by his mom for the summer (Clarkson, 42).
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)
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.
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).
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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