True Romance

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched True Romance and I just can’t write about it yet. But I ought to say something to start with, anyway. I really like Quentin Tarantino’s writing on the surface level. I just wish he had written something about life. He reminds me of comic book illustrators who only learned how to draw from copying other comic book artists. They never learned how to draw a real person or building or anything from life. It’s just stylization of stylization. With Quentin Tarantino it’s even worse, because he’s honest enough to tell you in his script what are the movies he is stealing from. Yeah I know Kids who will go on and on about the ‘cool movies’ or comics they have seen or read. But when you make a movie which just has a Kid telling you about the cool movies he has seen, it seems beside the point. Why am I not watching those cool movies instead of this movie telling me that other movies are cooler?

Tony Scott directed, and it’s kind of a joke to see the dvd marked ‘director’s cut’ since there really is no personality to any entity called ‘Tony Scott’ – this is all Quentin Tarantino all over the place, and (to carry the comics illustration metaphor a little farther) this is just Tony Scott playing Mike Royer to Quentin Tarantino’s Jack Kirby. He’s just inking what Quentin Tarantino has drawn and trying to exactly duplicate the pencil lines. Though I will say that Scott knows how to shoot a scene better than Quentin Tarantino ever will.

The opening and closing voice over narration by Patricia Arquette gives you the poetry of Quentin Tarantino, and the scene between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper is just great dialogue delivered by two masters. A wonderful scene.

The story is just junk and teen boy fantasy. It plays out like a dream, and the embarrassing moments come when Tony Scott tries to pretend that he cares, or wants us to care, about somebody dying. The most ludicrous example of this is the cop who has about 3 lines, he gets shot at the climax and dies. And we have a long lingering shot of him dying. Like we care. Like anybody who would like this movie, or would like Quentin Tarantino’s arrant badassery, as tim calls it, would care about anybody dying. It’s just a movie quote after all.

Christian Slater plays a nerd name of Clarence Worley who loves Sonny Chiba movies and works for peanuts in a comic book store. Not unsurprisingly, this guy has no girlfriend! so his boss the store manager hires a hooker to ‘accidentally’ meet him at a Sonny Chiba triple feature and pretend to fall in love with him, and sleep with him. So they do that. Only she does begin to fall in love with him. And she confesses all this after the fact. He falls for her too – why wouldn’t he, she’s like a dream come true to him – and they get married.

Now casting Patricia Arquette as the girl, ‘4 days into a life as a call girl which is not a whore there’s a difference you know’ – is just perfect. But Christian Slater is not well cast as the Kid, because he’s not nerdy enough to be the geek at the opening, and he’s also not cool enough to be the master gangster of the end. I don’t really know who could have pulled it off. Brad Pitt has a small comedy role as a stoner, and he could have done it, but he would never be believable as the nerd who doesn’t have a girl friend.

So there’s a problem with the structure of the script. The lead can’t be cast. You have to go one way or the other: A real geek who won’t be believable as the guy who gets away with it at the end, or a badass mofo who’s unbelievable as the nerd. Scott goes with Slater as a badass type. But I think I would rather have seen the geek. This movie really should have toned the violence way down and the language as well, and gone comedy and satire all the way. Because the more satirical scenes are the ones that succeed best.

Now this Kid is also obsessed with Elvis, but not any Elvis you ever knew. Instead his Elvis is a badass. And in his fantasies Elvis tells him what to do. And Elvis tells him to go over to the pimp’s place, the pimp who owned Patricia, and kill him. This is not what any comic book store geek would have nerve to do, and he certainly would not be able to get away with it.

Anyway, Slater goes on over. The pimp is a sort of keystone to the movie and its notions. It’s a black pimp played by british actor Gary Oldman in his hollywood badass period. Oldman is quite watchable. But the scene is ridiculous. So the british actor is playing a black pimp wannabe. Who is totally scary and intimidating in that Gary Oldman way, and somehow Slater turns the tables on him and manages to kill him. This is presented as the Kid having the balls and guts to do it, but really it should be a total accident, just lucky – again, the scene would have worked better as a comedy rather than chilling and thrilling.

Oh yeah, in collecting his wife’s dresses from the pimp’s place, the Kid finds a suitcase full of cocaine, and he steals this.

Problem is, Gary Oldman had stolen that suitcase from ‘Blue Lou’ a bigtime gangster, and though the cops don’t care who killed a pimp, Blue Lou wants his coke back, and sends out Christopher Walken and his Sicilian boys to get it. Walken kills the Kid’s dad (Hopper) and learns that the Kid has gone from cold snowy Detroit to LA.

In LA, the Kid hooks up with a longtime buddy, who’s trying to be an actor. Through the actor they set up a deal to sell the cocaine to a big Hollywood producer. But the gangsters are after them, and the police get wind of the sale too.

It all comes together in a swanky luxury hotel suite, with cops and bodyguards and gangsters in a shootout, the Kid gets his eye shot out, but the cops and bad guys all kill one another, and the Girl gets the Kid out, and they make it with the money to Mexico, where all outlaws with money dream of going. And in Cancun they raise their little boy named Elvis.

Tarantino is trying here to marry abstraction and idealism with gritty ‘reality’ as real as he can manage. So what it is, is a mashup of romance movie with crime movie. Star vehicle with action genre flick. That is tough to do, and escapes Tony Scott, but I don’t think anybody could have pulled this off. Scott would later, I think, go on to direct Quentin Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers script, which covers a lot of the same ground, and there too the satirical scenes play pretty well, but the action and bloodletting just seem unexciting and overkill. Yes they can fire off a hundred rounds and blast sound around the theater, yes they can splash fake blood over the actors. But it ends up just an assault on the senses that leaves me stunned, exhausted. Which is why I didn’t want to write about it immediately, and I thought I didn’t have anything to say about it.

I wonder if Quentin Tarantino would have been a better writer or director if he had had to work in genre with low budgets for a decade before being feted as an a-picture star.

(14 April 2009)