Quentin Tarantino is pretty much the quintessential film-school darling, the sort of filmmaker whose work appeals most strongly to those in high school or college—but, to paraphrase Diane Keaton in Manhattan, you absolutely grow out of it. Or you mostly do, anyway. You might concede that, yes, Pulp Fiction is an accomplished work, though it was regrettable that it inspired a legion of poor copycats through the decade that followed. But there’s something vaguely irksome about how self-consciously a Tarantino film cultivates its aura of cool, how it panders to those in the know. The kind of pastiche in which Tarantino commonly trades results in work that’s only narrowly satisfying, hitting a few film-geek buttons but missing out on more meaty human drama.
This would be fine if he were producing quick-and-dirty exploitation flicks, or traditional genre pictures, running on cheap thrills. But even his purest genre-aping efforts—Jackie Brown and the first volume of Kill Bill being the closest he’s come to sticking with a straight-forward idea—are presented as major efforts, labored on for years and overstuffed with ideas. Tarantino isn’t making a lean fight picture like The Raid: Redemption or even a low-key alien invasion satire like last year’s Attack The Block, even though he’s a known fan of films like these. He’s making three-hour revisionist history war epics bogged down by a dozen stars and ten times as many cinematic points of reference. There are ideas in Inglourious Basterds as inspired as anything I’ve seen on-screen in years. But in one sitting, the film is a bore, and relishing the strokes of genius means slogging through everything else. Short of the fantasy wish-fulfillment of its historical revisionism, there’s no emotional throughline for us to follow, and no fully realized human drama to sink our teeth into.
In a way, this problem with dramatic situations in his work is a necessary consequence of the formal predilections that launched Tarantino’s career. When the most salient feature of your debut is that its characters spend a significant portion of the running time sitting around talking about pop culture, there’s a good chance that emotional depth is off the table altogether. The irony is that while Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were being hailed for their “slice of life” sensibility, they were really just trading one kind of artifice for another, less recognizably “cinematic” one. So while characters in a Tarantino film might just sit around talking about cheeseburgers or instant coffee, as real people are indeed wont to do, they were affirming themselves as fundamentally frivolous, which ultimately made it hard to care about their fates. Characters who resembled real people wound up feeling less fully realized than more conventional ones might have, which is the opposite of the intended effect. There’s no doubt that Pulp Fiction is a hugely enjoyable and inexhaustibly quotable film. But it’s not exactly emotionally rich or psychologically complex, either.
My point isn’t that Tarantino should stop writing his trademark dialogue or that his films should be less self-consciously cool. He will always use snatches of music from Leone Westerns or giallo horror movies, and there will always be a receptive audience of college students whose savvy will be validated through identification of those references. But I do think Tarantino has made one perfect film, and I wish he would return to the form to make another exactly like it. It’s called The Man From Hollywood, and seeing it all but requires that you sit through 80 minutes of the unfathomably terrible footage which immediately precedes it.
Released to widespread critical disdain in 1995, the multi-director comedy Four Rooms is, in many respects, one of the most egregious cinematic missteps of the 1990s. The concept must have sounded promising: four young, recently successful independent filmmakers would each contribute an original short to be worked into one bigger picture tying them all together, like a more deliberately integrated New York Stories with far worse filmmakers. In this case, the filmmakers were Allison Anders, director of the cult classic Border Radio in 1987 and recipient of a MacArthur genius grant the year this film was made; Alexandre Rockwell, who won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for his film In The Soup in 1992; Robert Rodriguez, who of course made quite a splash with his micro-budget El Mariachi, also in ‘92; and finally Tarantino himself, who was just coming off an Oscar win for Pulp Fiction. Like a montage in a heist picture, the producers had assembled one hell of an expert team.
It’s difficult to imagine now, but in 1995 the prospect of four upstart independents working together on a major Hollywood production seemed like a ready-made success story, and even though Rockwell and Anders haven’t done anything of note in nearly two decades now, they were, at the time, every bit the exciting new artistic voices that we know Rodriguez and Tarantino were. Along with Soderbergh and Kevin Smith, these guys were being touted as the faces of the American independent cinema, a revolution that would fundamentally change the landscape of Hollywood film production. So the fact that Four Rooms was terrible was doubly significant: it was both a clear-cut indictment of the failure of these filmmakers to resist the influence of Hollywood’s big-budget mediocrity and, more damningly, a compelling riposte to the very idea that independent filmmakers could start a revolution within an industry so all-consuming. Critics, naturally, were quickly swept up in the backlash against Hollywood’s new indie darlings, and Four Rooms was dismissed and rejected outright. And there are good reasons for doing so: the first two shorts–Anders’ The Missing Ingredient, in which a coven of witches attempt to procure a sampling of semen, and Rockwell’s The Wrong Man, in which a married couple play out a bizarre sex fantasy–are veritably unwatchable, not only mercilessly unfunny but abrasive and grating, too. I expect many walked out before the halfway point, and on video I wouldn’t be surprised if many more gave up even earlier.
Your reward for enduring half of an awful film, though, is The Misbehavers, a slender but funny slapstick piece involving children (by Rodriguez, no doubt devising Spy Kids in his head), and, if you get through that, The Man From Hollywood, by far the best thing Tarantino has ever worked on. Clocking in at just under 20 minutes but packing just as many ideas (and movie references) as any of his feature-length films, The Man From Hollywood proves conclusively that the Tarantino formula is most successful in small doses. Here his characters are allowed to have their depth only suggested—that’s the nature of the form—which alleviates the strain of actually having to flesh them out. And because Tarantino is infinitely better at suggestion than at explication or delivery, the little that’s implied in this short never has a chance to disappoint us. This all makes perfect sense, if you think about it: Tarantino tics have time to sink in but not to overstay their welcome; his characters get a chance to be funny and cool without being proven hollow; and his novel premise can fuel the action of the entire picture without spreading its charm too thin. Hollywood isn’t set up to sustain the model, but Tarantino should clearly be a creator of shorts rather than features. (It should come as no surprise that my second-favorite film of his is also his second-shortest: his half of Grindhouse, the stuntman slasher short “Deathproof,” is widely underrated.)
In The Man From Hollywood, our film-long hero, Ted the bellhop, played by Tim Roth, is asked to delivery a special list of seemingly random items to the big spenders staying in his hotel’s penthouse suite. The highrollers include Chester, a newly successful director played by Tarantino himself; Norman, played by Paul Calderon; Angela, the star of the second segment, played by Jennifer Beals; and Leo, played by Bruce Willis. Our introduction to them and to the room is formally virtuosic, an extended sweep through Chester’s rapid-fire expository monologue (which details, among other things, the nation’s lamentable dismissal of Jerry Lewis and the unbeatable taste of Cristal champagne) shot in one fluid, ten-minute take. It’s an ostentatious gesture, but short works need to be punchy, so in a way it’s the best possible opening–it’s funny, nice to look at, and rewarding to those paying attention. By the time Chester outlines the premise of the short—he and Norman want to reenact a bet made between Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and they want to pay Ted to be their game’s “hatchet man”—we’re totally hooked, and Tarantino milks the tension of the scene for all it’s worth.
It’s less often discussed than his gift for punchy dialogue, but Tarantino has always had a knack for mounting and releasing tension, and for doing so in what is essentially a classical style. Like Hitchcock, Tarantino likes to drag out silences unnecessarily, taking them from benign to portentous with little more than an extended long take. His longtime editor, the recently deceased Sally Menke, must be at least partly responsible for fostering this talent, but in any case the resulting work can be excruciatingly intense, and such sequences usually emerge as the highlights of whatever film they’re in. Consider the evidence: the most dramatically effective scene in Pulp Fiction is its bracing final one, when Jules Winfield faces down a robber and reconsiders his place in the world; likewise for Inglorious Basterds and both its opening, when Colonel Hans Lander calmly smokes out his prey, and the infamous “Mexican standoff” scene in the bar, which could stand as a study in high-stakes suspense.
The Man From Hollywood hinges on precisely this sort of tension. It’s the best thing Tarantino’s done yet because it concentrates his best qualities into a form better-suited to maximizing their effectiveness, which means that it does what he does well, without the baggage of a feature. It’s a miniature masterpiece, and though it’s buried beneath two terrible shorts and a merely decent one, getting to it is well worth the effort (and patience) Four Rooms otherwise demands. This is a side of Tarantino that shouldn’t be relegated solely to college dorms; it’s a side that elevates him to the level of a true artist. It’s just too bad that nobody noticed.
Calum Marsh is a frequent contributor to Slant Magazine.
Widely dismissed when it came out on implicitly sexist grounds—its overtly feminist bent didn’t sit well with the mid-50s status quo—Nicholas Ray’s Trucolor western epic Johnny Guitar has finally, over the last decade-plus, emerged as something of a critical darling, owing in no small part to its director’s ever-increasing prestige. Unavailable on Region 1 DVD for far too long, the film recently made its long-awaited home video debut, thanks to a sterling Bluray from Olive Films, whose efforts will undoubtedly introduce this daringly revisionist classic to the newly receptive audience it has always deserved. Scoring only one vote in the 2002 iteration of Sight And Sound’s once-per-decade poll of the greatest films of all time, Johnny Guitar appeared on an impressive 8 ballots this year—as good an indication as any of the film’s gradually ballooning reputation.
While it’s true that Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo was received with an alarming amount of consternation in 1958, its status as a canonical classic has gone uncontested for so long that there wouldn’t be much point in speaking of its critical redemption here (though going from perceived failure to this year’s Sight and Sound-certified Greatest Film of All Time is indeed a commendable feat). Meanwhile, Hitchcock’s other misunderstood intellectual opus, the even more fiercely maligned psychological drama Marnie, must still contest with the glib dismissals of confounded critics to this day. Only outlier fans champion its heady, oblique virtues with any regularity, though it’s invigorating to see their numbers grow with each passing year: in a recent (and informal) poll of the Top 5 Hitchcock films conducting by film critics on Twitter, Marnie emerged as a surprise favorite, particularly among young, web-savvy cinephiles, for whom Marnie perhaps seems an appealingly obscure favorite. And considering Hitchcock’s tendency to split the vote (and Vertigo’s substantial win), 9 votes for Marnie in this year’s Sight And Sound poll is certainly an impressive showing in its own right.
Michelangelo Antonioni had, by 1970, long since established himself as one of the world’s premier art house directors, boasting a handful of already certified classics as well as a slew of newer, more daring coups. Blowup, his most recent effort, had seen his cache expand considerably, garnering characteristic acclaim but also, for the first time, making a remarkable dent in British and American popular culture by becoming a kind of crossover mainstream hit. The stage was thus set for Antonioni’s rising acclaim to accelerate, as he shfted the gaze of his perceptive Italian eye from the modish world of U.K. fashion photography (Blowup’s appealing milieu) to the similarly youth-oriented landscape of the American protest movement, where he would shoot Zabriskie Point. An unmitigated commercial and critical failure, Zabriskie was regarded as a failed replication of his previous success at best and an uniquely awful disaster at worst; it would bring Antonioni’s career to a grinding halt (he didn’t make the Jack Nicholson-starring existential drama The Passenger until 1975, a full five years later), and it would kill his box office prospects for good. It’s only recently, with the added clarity of historical distance, that Zabriskie Point has found itsself reclaimed by critics able to look past facile faults in acting or dialogue to see the clarity and intensity of its vision.
It’s hard to believe given the nearly unanimous praise heaped upon it now (since its rerelease in the year 2000), but there was a time when William Friedkin’s horror classic The Exorcist was considered the height of insensitive vulgarity, a picture as trashy as it was needlessly provocative. And it wasn’t merely those offended by its overtly sacrilegious content that found themselves fervently opposed to the spectacle: perfectly respectable (and secular!) intellectuals turned their noses up in disgust at what was widely considered to be the exploitative pits. The grand irony, of course, is that The Exorcist stands now as a pillar of fright-night respectability, the horror genre’s premier prestige picture and basically its permanent gold standard. You still see it crop up whenever a contemporary slasher pic allegedly lowers the bar: critics beleaguered by cheap gross-out tactics and moral repugnancy yearn, by comparison, for the halcyon days of 1973, when level-headed filmmakers still knew how to deliver traditional, well-rounded scares. Go figure.
Lumped in for thirty-plus years with only the most notorious box office failures, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is still to this day regarded as the ultimate industry cautionary tale, a warning of what happens when one man’s dictatorial demands are permitted to run free. The film bankrupted its studio, United Artists, and it remains one of the least financially successful films ever made. Stories from the set of its protracted, preposterously over-budget shoot sound like a producer’s worst nightmare: Cimino commanded his crew to construct elaborate sets with meticulous specifications, insisting they be torn down and reconstructed anew on a whim, and he would even, according to Steven Bach’s tell-all book Final Cut, have particular trees uprooted in order to replant them on sets where Cimino believed they’d fit. But anecdotes detailing the uncontrollable creative impulses of a director made out to be mad with power have an unfortunate (and deeply misleading) consequence: they eclipse the film as a work on its own, making it practically impossible to divorce Heaven’s Gate from its storied production. Thankfully, the critical tide is beginning to shift: a new director’s cut screened, to overwhelming acclaim, at this year’s New York Film Festival. That version is also being honored with a DVD and Bluray release from the Criterion Collection—a sure sign that, in some circles at least, Cimino’s efforts have finally been vindicated.
In the early 1990s, it seemed that David Lynch could do no wrong: he was still feeling the afterglow of the critical and commercial success of both Elephant Man and Blue Velvet, two movies that introduced him to the American mainstream; his latest film, the madcap Nic Cage/Laura Dern fairy tale Wild At Heart, had just won the prestigious Palme D’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival; and his co-authored television series, Twin Peaks, had unexpectedly captured the popular imagination, becoming an international sensation. Alas, all the critical goodwill in the world couldn’t help Lynch in 1993, when his beloved show’s feature-length prequel/sequel arrived in theatres to widespread confusion, discomfort, and anger. Rarely is such vitriol spewed from the mouths of professional critics, even toward the other films on this list: something about the combination of anticipation for the film and the pedigree of its director opened the floodgates for scorn and fury, and pan after pan flowed through. But I’m pleased to see that my personal favorite Lynch film—a profoundly moving story of abuse and the reverberations of turmoil it sets off—has finally begun to get its critical due, being increasingly revisited and reconsidered even by those who’d initially dismissed it. At a still-meager three votes, it’s yet to really make a dent in the Sight And Sound poll, but hey: that’s three more votes than it received in 2002. That’s progress.
Perhaps the most infamous critical failure on a list overloaded with them, Paul Verhoeven’s deeply misunderstood Showgirls has had a pretty brutal run over the last 17 years. Widely considered, both then and now, to be the epitome of shameless Hollywood trash, the film’s innumerable detractors have kicked its reputation for the dirt for so long and with such fervor that it seemed unlikely that its reputation could ever earn credibility even among its marginalized apologists. Even worse, though, are those young cynics who’ve endeavored to “redeem” Showgirls on the basis of relishing its apparent badness, cherishing it only with superficial so-bad-it’s-goodness irony; that makes the critical heavy-lifting of seeing Showgirls for the masterpiece it really is even more taxing and laborious, and it makes serious defenses of the film even harder to successfully mount (you know: those who detest Showgirls consider its defenders distasteful, while those who jokingly love Showgirls consider its other defenders elitist). You’d think, given Verhoeven’s reputation for smuggling exacting social satire into ostensibly low-brow entertainments, that critics would be more open to looking at Showgirls a little more closely. But serious reappraisals are popping up more and more frequently, and there are whispers throughout the critical community that suggest some welcome revisionism is imminent.
Though its still-recent release date and overall absence in any larger critical conversation make it a hard sell as a “redeemed” film in the same manner as Showgirls or Johnny Guitar, David Twohy’s criminally underappreciated thriller A Perfect Getaway is nevertheless a prime candidate for future reconsideration. Part of the problem with reevaluating failures, of course, is that it works best with the clarity of hindsight, and one can never know for sure what disasters will someday emerge as classics misunderstood in their own day. Still, the degree to which broadsheet journalists and mainstream critics of every variety misperceived A Perfect Getaway already baffles me, so perhaps it’s time to get an early start on the serious revisionism: Hardly the shallow, B-grade blockbuster it was made out to be in 2009, this is a film of surprising depth and nuance, a formally rigorous mystery intended as a critique of how audiences watch and understand the cinema, and in particular of our tendency to gather and process information only selectively. It articulates these themes with more sophistication than your average arthouse drama, and yet it unfolds with brisk economy of a classical Hollywood thriller (its visceral pleasures more than match its intellectual ones, to be sure). But it wasn’t even slammed as a pretentious failure; nobody cited excessive ambition or dreamy aspirations as the film’s fatal flaws. More tragically, nobody even noticed the depth of this thing: A Perfect Getaway was regarded by nearly every critic who saw it as, at best, a serviceable but ultimately very forgettable trifle. Only a handful of admirers saw through its thin veneer of sun-soaked beaches and tanned bodies to the near-perfect film beneath: the Toronto Film Critics Association very nearly awarded Timothy Olyphant their award for Best Supporting Actor (he walked away as the Runner Up), and several of the critics in that group have gone to bat for the film since (including Adam Nayman, perhaps its foremost defender, who has written extensively on the film’s merits for Reverse Shot). One only hopes that with the distance of time, more critics join the ranks. 
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