Get Shorty (1995)

Elmore Leonard's joke is simple and it holds up perfectly. A man who threatens people for money discovers that the movie business is the same job with better weather. Everybody in Hollywood is running an angle, everybody is pretending to have money they do not have, and everybody responds to a calm man who does not raise his voice. Chili Palmer does not have to learn a thing. He just changes what he calls himself.

Travolta is doing the most relaxed movie star work of his career here, one year after Pulp Fiction, and the performance is built almost entirely on stillness. He never shouts. He tells a man to look at him and the man looks at him. Around that quiet centre, Barry Sonnenfeld fills every frame with people talking too much, and the contrast is the comedy. Gene Hackman's Harry Zimm in particular is a masterpiece of a man who has never once stopped digging.

It is worth saying this is a genuinely funny movie that is also about something. Leonard spent his career writing criminals who are not clever and civilians who think they are, and here he found the perfect setting for it. The film business rewards exactly the skills that make a good crook, which is confidence, a story, and knowing what somebody wants before they say it. The only difference is that in one of them people get shot.

Scott Frank's screenplay is one of the best adaptations of Leonard anybody has managed, and the reason is that he kept the rhythm. Leonard's rule was to leave out the parts readers skip, and Frank does the same with scenes. Conversations start late and end early. Nobody explains the plot. You are trusted to keep up, and being trusted is a large part of why the film is fun.

Look at how the movie treats violence. It is sudden, it is quick, and it is almost always the punchline of a scene rather than the point of one. Ray Barboni is genuinely dangerous and also a complete idiot. The film never makes a fight impressive. The impressive thing is always somebody talking their way out.

The Karen Flores role matters more than it looks. Rene Russo plays a scream queen who is sharper than every man in the picture and knows exactly what her career is worth. She is the only character who sees both worlds clearly from the start, and the movie quietly agrees with her about everything.

There is a lovely bit of business where Chili pitches his own life as a movie and everyone thinks it is a great story. That is the film eating its own tail on purpose. Get Shorty argues that the difference between a life and a pitch is mostly who is telling it.