Roger Ebert is a Pulitzer prize winning film critic. This is a review he wrote for Pulp Fiction(1994) in 2001. Well, this shows Pulitzer judges pick their prize winners really well. Mr Ebert brings out Quentin Tarantino's unique style and more importantly, the idea behind it, and why it works. It's not random, it's not eccentric. Come to think of it, you really can't be random when you're piecing together Pulp Fiction with its aesthetically skewed chronology. Anyhow, this has fired up an interest in Ebert's writings, and I hope to read more of his reviews.
Pulp Fiction
Film release in 1994
Review written on June 10, 2001
Dialogue drives Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction — dialogue of such high quality it deserves comparison with other masters of spare, hard-boiled prose. QT finds a way to make the words humorous without ever seeming to ask for a laugh. Like them, he combines utilitarian prose with flights of rough poetry and wicked fancy.
Consider a little scene. The prizefighter Butch (Bruce Willis) has just killed a man in the ring. He returns to the motel room occupied by his girlfriend Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros). She says she’s been looking in the mirror and she wants a pot belly. “You have one”,’ he says, snuggling closer. “If I had one”,’ she says, “I would wear a T-shirt two sizes too small, to accentuate it”.’ A little later she observes, “It’s unfortunate what we find pleasing to the touch and pleasing to the eye are seldom the same”.’
This is wonderful dialogue. It is about something. The dialogue comes at a moment of desperation for Butch. He agreed to throw the fight, then secretly bet heavily on himself, and won. He will make a lot of money — but only if he escapes the vengeance of Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) and his hitmen Jules and Vincent (Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta). In a lesser movie, the dialogue in this scene would have been entirely plot-driven. Instead, Tarantino uses an apparently irrelevant conversation to quickly establish her personality and their relationship. His dialogue is always load-bearing.
It is Tarantino’s strategy in all of his films to have the characters speak at right angles to the action, or depart on flights of fancy. Remember the famous opening conversation between Jules and Vincent, who are on their way to a violent reprisal against some college kids who have offended Wallace and appropriated his famous briefcase. They talk about what Quarter Pounders are called in Paris, and the degree of sexual intimacy implied by a foot massage. Finally Jules says “let’s get in character”, and they enter an apartment.
Tarantino’s dialogue is not simply whimsical. There is a method behind it. The discussion of why Quarter Pounders are called “Royales” in Paris is reprised, a few minutes later, in a tense exchange between Jules and one of the kids (Frank Whaley). And the story of how Marsellus had a man thrown out of a fourth-floor window for giving his wife a foot massage turns out to be a set-up: Tarantino is preparing the dramatic ground for a scene in which Vincent takes Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) out on a date, on his bosses’ orders. When Mia accidentally overdoses, Vincent races her to his drug dealer Lance (Eric Stoltz), who brings her back to life with a shot of adrenaline into the heart.
And that scene also begins with dialogue that seems like fun, while it’s also laying more groundwork. We meet Lance’s girlfriend Jody (Rosanna Arquette), who is pierced in every possible place and talks about her piercing fetish. Tarantino is setting up his payoff. When the needle goes into the heart, you’d expect that to be one of the most gruesome moments in the movie, but audiences, curiously, always laugh. QT never actually shows the needle entering the chest. He cuts away to a reaction shot in which everyone hovering over the victim springs back simultaneously as Mia leaps back to life. And then Jody says it was “trippy”. The body language and the punchline take a grotesque scene and turn it into dark but genuine comedy.
The movie’s circular, self-referential structure is famous; the restaurant hold-up with Pumpkin and Honey Bunny (Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer) begins and ends the film, and other story lines weave in and out of strict chronology. But there is a chronology in the dialogue, in the sense that what is said before invariably sets up or enriches what comes after. The dialogue is proof that Tarantino had the time-juggling in mind from the very beginning, because there’s never a glitch.
I mentioned the way the needle-to-the-heart scene is redeemed by laughter. That’s also the case with the scene where the hitmen inadvertently kill a passenger in their car. The car’s interior is covered with blood, and The Wolf (Harvey Keitel) is called to handle the situation. Scenes of gore are deflected into scenes of the Wolf’s professionalism, which is funny because it is so matter-of-fact. The movies does contain scenes of sudden, brutal violence, as when Jules and Vincent open fire in the apartment, or when Butch goes “medieval” on the leather guys. But Tarantino uses long shots, surprise, cutaways and the context of the dialogue to make the movie seem less violent than it has any right to.
Howard Hawks once gave his definition of a good movie: “Three good scenes. No bad scenes”. Few movies in recent years have had more good scenes than Pulp Fiction. Some are almost musical comedy, as when Vincent and Mia dance at Jackrabbit Slim’s. Some are stunning in their suddenness, as when Butch returns to his apartment and surprises Vincent. Some are all verbal style, as in Marsellus Wallace’s dialogue with Butch, or when Capt. Koons (Christopher Walken) delivers a monologue to the “little man” about his father’s watch.
Pulp Fiction is the most influential film of the decade; its circular timeline can be sensed in films as different as The Usual Suspects, The Zero Effect and Memento — not that they copied it, but that they were aware of the pleasures of toying with chronology.
But it isn’t the structure that makes Pulp Fiction a great film. Its greatness comes from its marriage of vividly original characters with a series of vivid and half-fanciful events — and from the dialogue. The dialogue is the foundation of everything else.
