By Gary Deane
Hollywood has seldom gotten Elmore Leonard right. Although more than a few of his thirty-odd crime novels have found their way to the screen, little of his unique voice and potency as a storyteller has found its way to the screen. It seems his intonations have been hard ones for filmmakers to get their hands around – that is if they’d ever bothered to try.
Writer/teacher Barry Hannah has called Leonard a ‘dry comic noirist’, an apt enough description, but one which would probably kill the pitch before the elevator door has closed. Hollywood has taken a brain-dead approach to Leonard, seeing only what’s obvious in him, such as his stock of script-ready characters. These usually include a dude with an iffy résumé but essentially the right motives and moves, a woman who is as cool as he is (and just as smart), and a monkey-house of bad guys who, to their ultimate regret, attempt to force the play or threaten to ruin it.
Around these, Leonard plots like a bandit, holding tightly to a schematic that at first has us puzzling over how the characters relate to each other and what they’re up to. Then, just as we think we’ve got it figured, all bets come off.
Admittedly, Leonard looks to be film-ready, with his books structured like treatments. However, that plus millions of studio dollars apparently gets you a dry cappuccino and a pile of stink like ‘The Big Bounce’ (1969), a weak-minded melodrama, and then ‘The Big Bounce’ (2004), a crudely-struck ‘crime comedy’. That two such abject failures would have been born of the same book suggests that Leonard was never meant to be the smartest choice in a high-concept world. This isn’t to say that every film based on a Leonard title has been a waste of time -- just most of them, with almost none able to negotiate Leonard’s tight straddle between mayhem and drollery, never overplaying his hand in either direction.
Of the better ones, John Frankenheimer’s '52 Pick-Up' (1986) a grim neo-noir adapted from an earlier Leonard book, didn’t even attempt that negotiation, offering a hard-edged reading that backed right away from any irony. 'Out of Sight' (1998), directed by Steven Soderbergh, was moody and romantic and settled for quirky charm. Even so, though it wasn’t lame, it was still too limp.
On the other hand, ‘Jackie Brown’, released in 1997, was the real deal -- the only adaptation that can lay claim to having captured Elmore Leonard where he lived and breathed. Based on Leonard’s book Rum Punch, it’s the story of an airline stewardess (Pam Grier) who’s picked up by Federal agents at LAX with cash and drugs intended to go to Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). Knowing Ordell isn’t going to believe her even if she doesn’t inform, she decides to set him up along with his ex-cellmate/sidekick Louis Gara (Robert De Niro) and Ordell’s stoner girlfriend (Bridget Fonda). However, Jackie wants to come out of it better than she came in (not all that great) and enlists the help of Max Cherry (Robert Forster), a bail bondsman Ordell initially had hired to get her out following the bust.
The film was directed by Quentin Tarantino, who took his own kind of liberties with the story. The novel’s ‘Jackie Burke’ becomes ‘Jackie Brown’ - no longer a trim blonde 30-ish cougar but an older black fox with ample curves. Tarantino relocates the story from West Palm Beach to Los Angeles and messes with countless details. However, what emerges is a film and iteration of Leonard that is near-perfect. Tarantino wisely cools his jets and settles for straighter story-telling and slightly more cautiously interesting characters than he usually likes to do.
It’s often been an authentic sense of character that has been absent in movies adapted from Leonard’s crime novels (his westerns have done better). Titles such as the popular ‘Get Shorty’ and ‘Be Cool’ jettisoned Leonard’s smart, nervy characterizations in favor of dumbed-down caricatures. Tarantino clearly better understands the complexity of the folks that inhabit Leonard’s world. In ‘Jackie Brown’ it's straight-shooter Max who’s prepared to dirty himself in order to right a few wrongs for Jackie and perhaps to again find romance. Or criminals like Ordell, a stone killer who's both mesmerizing and terrifying.
Tarantino has his actors command the screen without showiness -- just as Leonard’s characters effortlessly command the page. But Tarantino actually does the author one better by making Jackie more resonant and memorable with the casting of Pam Grier. Grier has appeared in movies since the blaxploitation days (‘Foxy Brown’, ‘Coffy’). However, she’s never been the actress (and the star) she is in ‘Jackie Brown’ as she realizes the poignancy of a middle-aged woman who’s managed to get by on her looks and now has to trade on her wits in order to get out of her dead-end life.
Apart from racial identity, there’s nothing black and white about these characters or the situations in which they find themselves - though it’s important to note that questions of identity always were central to Leonard. He put race up front from the time of his early westerns and also wrote more authentic female heroines into his crime books than just about anyone else in any genre. The writer’s affinities to popular culture and music always were those of generations half his age. It’s not hard to see why Tarantino would be preternaturally drawn to Leonard, starting with the director’s own obsession with the idioms of genre and pop artifacts.
To his credit, Tarantino also avoids any uncomfortable displays of violence in ‘Jackie Brown’ even to the point of taking what there is in the book down a notch. Little is seen and not much dwelt on. When Ordell takes care of his ‘associate’, Beaumont Livingstone (Chris Tucker) whom he suspects of snitching, it’s off at a distance. When Louis suddenly shoots Melanie for getting on his case one too many times, she goes down off-screen in another of those superb ‘drop-dead’ moments that Tarantino owns. When Ordell in turn kills Louis for shooting Melanie, it all happens inside a vehicle and, again, way off. The violence itself (though not its threat) is almost incidental, similar to how Leonard writes it.
While Jackie Brown’ has a shambling feel to it which doesn’t hold to the book’s tight construction, Tarantino nails the essentials – not only the hustle and flow of the narrative but also Leonard’s sharp dialog (one of Leonard’s ‘10 Rules of Writing’ was to leave out the parts that no one ever reads including exposition or undue description).
Though he’s always insisted he doesn’t 'do neo-noir’, Tarantino obviously recognized ‘Rum Punch’s story for what it was -- not just some screwball, comedic affectation but something real and raw and human that also was funny. Which was comfort to those who long had been believers in Leonard -- recognizing there were some who tended to regard him as a formulist and, for purposes here, not enough a ‘noirist’. However Leonard from the beginning transcended formula to create a genre category unto itself, case-hardened pulp noir thrillers graced with both dark humor and the heartbeat of real human beings. ‘Jackie Brown’ is all that and more.
Great stuff
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