Karaoke night at Quentin's.
Alas, the root of Tarantino's energy doubles as his Achilles' heel: After all these years, he still thinks like a video store clerk. Each new movie is the equivalent of a "Staff Picks" display?one that seems equally intended to spur the rental of odd, fresh titles and impress customers with how brilliant and open-minded the clerk is. Sometimes Tarantino's staff picks complement one another better than you'd think?recall, for instance, how the low-budget, intimate, slightly stage-bound concept of Reservoir Dogs and the time-shifting structure (modeled on The Killers, The Killing and other vintage heist pictures) combined to make the movie feel big, brazen and winkingly existential. But other times, rather than fusing to create something new, Tarantino's choices just sort of slam into each other?and drama suffers. Witness the director's last full feature, 1997's ambitious but dramatically inert Jackie Brown, a 165-minute crime thriller that played as if it had been secretly directed by a very sleepy Mike Leigh.
The writer-director's first feature in six years, the martial arts revenge flick Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is, in some ways, the ultimate Tarantino movie?and I wish I meant that as a compliment. Tarantino, who devised the story with his favorite leading lady, Pulp Fiction costar Uma Thurman, conceived Kill Bill as a stand-alone pulp epic about a female assassin seeking vengeance against fellow assassins who attacked her on her wedding day, ended her pregnancy and put her in a coma. Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein decided Tarantino's three-hour cut was overlong but still commercial, so he ordered the movie broken into halves, with the second half set for release in February.
I'm dreading Vol. 2. I know this is an incredibly rude thing to say, but Kill Bill, Vol. 1 seems like the work of a guy who's been smoking way, way, way too much pot. It lavishes enormous amounts of time and energy on things that don't matter that much while avoiding or short-shrifting the things that do.
The tale begins with a brief, chilling, black-and-white shot of Thurman's Bride lying bloodied on the floor of a Texas roadhouse as her unseen boss, Bill (David Carradine), looms over her and delivers the film's opening line: "Do you find me sadistic?" (Yes, Quentin; that's why we're here.) Before we can find out why the Bride was ordered killed, who she works for or even what sort of person she is, the script skips ahead to sometime after the heroine's awakening from a coma, and follows her as she visits the Pasadena home of assassin-turned-suburban-mom Vernita Green, aka Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox), and challenging the woman to a flesh-ripping knife fight. This is followed, in no particular order, by an account of the Bride's long stay in a hospital, where another assassin (Daryl Hannah) is prevented from killing the Bride with a lethal injection, and a Strother Martin-nasty orderly lets visitors rape her for cash. Then comes escape, physical rehabilitation and a puzzlingly vague voice-over summary of the Bride's enemies?a motley gang whose ranks include O-Ren Ishii, aka Cottonmouth (Lucy Liu), an American-raised, half-Japanese, half-Chinese woman whose post-assassin career finds her improbably ruling Tokyo's Yakuza underground. (O-Ren's improvised solution to a political confrontation at a Yakuza board meeting is the film's badass highlight; it's like the Al Capone baseball bat scene in The Untouchables, rewritten to star a tiny Asian-American woman who sounds like a baby version of Janet Leigh.)
If you thought Pulp Fiction's briefcase of golden light was a nifty audience-frustrating gimmick, Kill Bill offers plenty more where that came from. Tarantino strategically withholds many bits of information that might make the story more comprehensible, emotional and involving. He keeps the bad guy offscreen for the duration of Part 1. He shows you the tail end of the script's inciting event?the Bride's near-murder?at the start of the picture, then reveals more pieces in disconnected, weirdly fancy flashbacks, denying viewers the chance to be carried along on a revenge-movie narrative rollercoaster, much less build up empathy for the Bride. He interrupts the film's first act for a lengthy anime flashback to Cottonmouth's childhood?a blood-soaked nugget about prostitution and vigilante vengeance that plays like a DVD supplement. (It's animated by Production I.G., makers of Ghost in the Shell.) Tarantino casts one of his idols, Sonny Chiba?the Japanese swordplay demigod who was name-checked in True Romance?as an ex-swordmaker turned bar owner who swears he's quit the business. (Of course he relents, creating a weapon so sharp that "if, on your journey, you should encounter God, God will be cut.") Chiba is funny?when he barks insults in English, he sounds like Scooby-Doo?yet Tarantino squanders much of the actor's screen time on a pointless comic spat that would fit right into a network sitcom.
Judged purely as a technical achievement, the movie is awesome. The soundtrack, mixed with bass so deep it makes your heart leap, hops from Nancy Sinatra to Charlie Feathers to Isaac Hayes to Bernard Herrmann, yet still finds room to reference Al Hirt's trumpet noodling on the old Green Hornet TV show, Luis Bacalov's score for the 1972 spaghetti western The Grand Duel and Quincy Jones' theme to Ironside, which doubles as the heroine's butt-kicking theme music. The widescreen images, shot by regular Oliver Stone collaborator Robert Richardson, are deep and sharp, and they complement the film's cartoony, East/West production design (credited to boutique indie ace David Wasco and Yohei Taneda, a Japanese designer of sets, books, anime features and videogames).
Yet for all its technical prowess, sick humor and surface excitement, Kill Bill is a detached, even cold movie?and slow, too. It lurches back and forth like an old car driven by an eager teen who never mastered the stick shift and can't stop himself from constantly twiddling the knobs on the dashboard radio. Exploitation movies are supposed to have momentum, and Kill Bill has almost no zip, except when the Bride is lopping people's limbs off?and even then, the violence is too theoretical to upset most regular moviegoers. Unlike, say, Kubrick or Scorsese or even Oliver Stone ultraviolence, Tarantino's bloodletting has no social, political or personal context, only a cinematic one. When Thurman lops off an opponent's leg and the wound gushes like Old Faithful, it's not Violence-as-Statement, but Violence-as-Fashion-Statement?a film geek letting you know which old Hong Kong swashbucklers are his favorites. Except for the Bride's raw (if regrettably truncated) post-coma reaction to discovering that her enemies ended her pregnancy, the film avoids dealing with the physical and emotional consequences of violence?a sure sign that its director is more entertainer than artist. (When an assassin's young daughter sees that the Bride has slain her mother, the girl stares at her mother's killer with a blankly disapproving expression, as if she'd just caught a grownup eating ice cream that was meant for her.)
Kill Bill raises a central question of auteur theory, namely: Is passion the same thing as meaning? The Film Comment and Village Voice folks would reply, "Of course." According to a persistent strain in 20th-century thought, an art form truly becomes an art form when it examines its own properties during the act of creation. This viewpoint insists that the passion to recreate and reimagine a medium's history is a perfectly legitimate type of expression?one that's arguably more modern, and certainly more clever and exciting, than the pre-20th- century mindset that respected the proscenium arch and other implied barriers between artist and audience.
I'm not entirely convinced. Maybe I'm an esthetic reactionary, but it takes a very special kind of self-conscious movie to hook me anyway. Pulp Fiction was one such movie, even though it's at least 30 minutes too long, too cutely violent and profane, and seems more mannered and glib with each viewing. There aren't many others. Most of the time, when a movie repeatedly, stridently, even gleefully reminds me that it's a movie, I'm tempted to reply, "Congratulations," and head for the exit.
Even though I didn't like Kill Bill, I'll give it credit as a work of reckless intimacy?a movie that unabashedly lays out every superficially cool thing that Tarantino likes while flaunting the dramatic (or anti-dramatic) qualities his detractors find annoying. It suggests that Tarantino might be one of the best-known contemporary examples of the archivist director?i.e., a filmmaker whose work is equally concerned with telling a story and referencing other people's movies. It's a crowded subcategory whose current membership includes Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Roman Coppola, Wong Kar-Wai and Todd Haynes. These directors are forever torn between transforming past movies they love and merely replicating them (and getting off on the act of replication). The attentive viewer may legitimately ask if these directors' movies draw more heavily on life, or on the director's lifetime of movie watching?and whether the latter is inherently less interesting than the former. (I think it is.) Put another way: are archivist directors the cinematic equivalent of singer-songwriters with a sense of history, or has the unsuspecting viewer wandered into karaoke night?
Unanswerable questions, all. Nonetheless, Kill Bill strikes me the most spectacular cinematic karaoke act I've seen since Boogie Nights?a weird, disreputable, sometimes despicable movie that's iffy as drama, yet succeeds as a tribute to (and catalog of) one filmmaker's influences.
Watching it must be akin to visiting Tarantino's house for a DVD-viewing party and looking on as the director stands before his widescreen tv delivering witty little lectures on his favorite titles and then popping in a sample chapter. Tarantino fans needn't wait for the deluxe disc with director's commentary and deleted scenes. It opens in theaters this Friday.