Jackie Brown (1997)

This is the Tarantino film that people come around to later, and the reason is that it is not trying to thrill you. It is the only novel he has ever adapted, and Elmore Leonard's rhythms slowed him right down. Scenes are allowed to run at the speed of an actual conversation, and the film is far more interested in what people are worried about than in what they are doing. It is two and a half hours long and almost nothing in it is violent.

What it is about is age. Jackie is forty four and starting over for the second time. Max Cherry is fifty six, runs a bail bonds office, and is tired in a way the film treats with enormous respect. Ordell is losing his grip on the people around him. Everyone in this movie can feel the clock, and the heist is not about greed, it is about the last chance to change the ending. Nobody else was writing crime films like that in 1997.

Pam Grier had been a star in the seventies and was not being offered work like this any more, and Robert Forster had effectively vanished. Casting them is the whole argument of the film made physical. Watch the scene where Max sees Jackie walk out of the jail. That is a man his age realising something is still possible, and it is played almost entirely in his face.

The Delfonics record is doing structural work. It moves from Max buying a tape because Jackie played it, to it turning up in his car, to Ordell noticing it and knowing immediately that something has changed. A song passed between two people becomes the only evidence of a relationship neither of them will describe out loud.

Ordell is one of the most frightening characters in these films precisely because he is friendly. Samuel L. Jackson plays him as a man who chats, jokes, gives lifts and then kills people for administrative convenience. He never gets angry when he does it. He is tidying up.

Look at how the film treats Melanie and Louis, the two characters with no plan. Bridget Fonda and Robert De Niro are both playing people who have given up and are just filling days. They are the alternative to Jackie's decision, and the film is quietly brutal about where that leads.

The ending gives you two people who have earned something together and then does not let them have it, or at least not simply. Jackie asks Max to come and he does not, and the film respects both of them too much to explain why. She drives away mouthing the words to a song and that is the whole film in one shot.