Tarantino must have known something the rest of us didn’t. When jury president Clint Eastwood announced ““Pulp Fiction’s’’ victory, the elated director joined cast members John Travolta, Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson in an ecstatic group grope. Most of the black-tie crowd cheered the choice, but from the back of the hall an angry dissenter shouted her disgust. Smiling, the tall, gangly, jut-jawed Tarantino flipped her the bird – presumably a Cannes first. ““I don’t make movies that bring people together,’’ he told the crowd. ““I make movies that split people apart.’’ Nobody would argue with that. But nobody with eyes and ears could deny that this writer/ director possesses a ferocious talent.
““The thing about this movie is that it’s just such a great f—ing movie!’’ Tarantino had said a few days earlier, bobbing and gesticulating with such boyish enthusiasm that the wild immodesty somehow didn’t grate. This high-school dropout from the hardscrabble South Bay outskirts of Los Angeles, who worked for six years in a video store while trying to become an actor, is such a passionate fan of the movies that it seems only logical his ardor would extend to his own work. Everything excites him. Madly loquacious, he seems to lack that instinct for self-protection that film folk adopt in the presence of journalists. Resolutely un-Hollywood, he announced to a table of critics at Cannes that if he ever gets a cellular phone they can write him off as a sellout. In the face of such disarming bravado, everyone wants to protect him from his own impetuous innocence.
In his work, the rage and wild energy are brought under rigorous control. For all the fuss about the near-sickening violence of ““Reservoir Dogs,’’ what distinguishes his genre movies is the cool formalism that offsets the hot surface. He soaks B-movie archetypes in ambiguity and irony, resisting the temptation to divide the world into good guys and bad. In ““Pulp Fiction’’ (which Miramax will release in August), he tells three separate but interlocked stories, leaping forward and backward in time, giving hoary pulp-fiction cliches a postmodernist spin. John Travolta, in a smashing comeback, plays a heroin-shooting henchman who escorts his mobster boss’s wife (Uma Thurman) out on the town. You think you know where that story will lead – bed, and big trouble – but it goes off in an astonishing other direction. Bruce Willis is a boxer who double-crosses the mobster, who’s paid him to take a fall – but we never see the fight. What makes Tarantino’s action movies unlike others is his uncanny ear: he’s not afraid to slow down for pages of character-revealing, oddly hilarious dialogue. His tough guys – like Tarantino himself – love to talk.
Two of his scripts have been filmed by other directors: Tony Scott’s ““True Romance,’’ which tacked on a happy ending, and the upcoming ““Natural Born Killers,’’ which Oliver Stone has rewritten. Tarantino’s a hot property in Hollywood, even though he has yet to make a big moneymaker. It may be that he is both too abstract and too subversive to ever be a mainstream darling. But he has no intention of changing. It’s going to be a fascinating career to follow. Can he maintain his white-heat enthusiasm without imploding? Can he stay unjaded with a Palme d’Or in his pocket? Can he expand into other genres? And can he really resist that cellular phone?
