Great Character: Jackie Brown (“Jackie Brown”)
The Great Character theme for the month: Tarantino characters. Today: Jason Cuthbert looks at Jackie Brown from the movie Jackie Brown.
After the career-building impact created from the seismic boost of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, screenwriter/director Quentin Tarantino took his handcrafted auteur show onto the adaptation stage with his 1997 crime thriller Jackie Brown. This third Tarantino gritty life expose featured a screenplay metamorphosed from the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch, a 1970s homage soundtrack that included The Delfonics, Bobby Womack, Roy Ayers and Bill Withers, and an eclectic cast consisting of Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, Michael Keaton, Robert Forster, Chris Tucker and the definitive Queen of 70s Heroines — the one and only Pam Grier.
With Pam Grier’s kaleidoscope hybrid of her crafty cunning character in Coffy (1973), the strategic male/female partnership she embraced in Friday Foster (1975)and her shared last name with her sexy vigilante in Foxy Brown (1974), Pam Grier was back to making movies named after her lead characters in Jackie Brown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bia8u5YQgJ4
Jackie Brown IMDB:
A flight attendant becomes a key figure in a plot between the police and an arms dealer.
Jackie Brown is a universally attractive middle-aged flight attendant making $16,000 per year, struggling to straddle the fence of legal and illegal to keep her financial conundrum above the poverty line. Brown’s safe and unsavory sides of the law cross paths while she is airborne via her Mexican airline employer, while also engaging in her money smuggling gig for the grim yet gregarious gunrunner Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson).
Unbeknownst to Jackie Brown, Beaumont Livingston (Chris Tucker), another courier from Ordell’s flock, has cooperated with L.A.P.D. detective Mark Dargus (Michael Bowen) and ATF agent Ray Nicolet (Michael Keaton) to incriminate Jackie Brown so Beaumont can preserve his hide from rotting in jail. This, of course, is until Ordell Robbie bails out Beaumont and assassinates much more than his character in the truck of a car. Ordell then uses the same bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) to rescue Jackie Brown from the shackles of incarceration, only to pay her a homicidal visit, which is thwarted by Jackie’s aggressive negotiation techniques.
JACKIE BROWN: Shut your raggedy-ass up, and sit the fuck down!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57ge-WVuEY0
Jackie Brown’s actions, and the Jackie Brown plotline itself, are motivated by her pursuit for freedom. She is facing real captivity numbers, a dramatically shortened lifespan if Ordell’s smoking barrels make a beeline for her head, and financial collapse with her airline job and money trafficking both being in catastrophic jeopardy. The answer is Jackie risking what life she has left to play both sides of the fence — cooperate with the authorities to shut Odell down while getting close enough to Odell’s $550,000 in cash to push her financial reset button.
JACKIE BROWN: If I lose my job I gotta start all over again, but I got nothing to start over with. I’ll be stuck with whatever I can get. And that shit is scarier than Ordell.
The complexities of Jackie Brown’s character can be translated by observing her multi-layered character composition. Miss Brown is desperate to survive, equipped with a built in No Nonsense Detector, and a convincing trickster. But when she comes across a man, Max Cherry, who wants her attention and not to merely use her for self-gain, she shares a hospitable, loving side of vulnerability that is at her core, if only the world around her didn’t force her to remain hidden behind her hardened protective shield.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v6C3lZ9Ic0
The nurturing development between the Max Cherry and Jackie Brown pulls them away from what they do to keep bill collectors at pay, allowing them to reveal their kinder individual human nature to one another. With both Brown and Cherry intermingling with tough personalities in their lines of business, they find solace in each other’s sympathy — a far cry from their customer’s behavior.
For Pam Grier’s complicated combination of a protagonist, a trickster and a love interest character archetype — Jackie Brown is one really GREAT CHARACTER.
Thank you, Jason, for this terrific post. Please join us in comments to discuss Jackie Brown.
You may follow Jason on Twitter: @A2Jason.
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