Jackie Brown Review

Adapting Elmore Leonard forced Tarantino to do the thing he had never done, which was sit still. This runs 154 minutes and spends most of them on people talking in cars, apartments and a shopping mall food court, and it is better for the patience. Pam Grier plays a flight attendant of forty four with nothing left except a plan, and Robert Forster plays a bail bondsman who falls for her with such quiet decency that the real suspense becomes whether either of them will say it out loud.

They never quite do. Samuel L. Jackson's Ordell is the most frightening character this director has written, chatty and affectionate right until he shoots someone in a parking lot. The money handoff plays three times from three vantage points, and the third pass tests patience more than it rewards it. The casual pile of racial slurs drew a public objection from Spike Lee that has never entirely gone away, and the film has no answer for it. What stays is the last shot, Grier driving alone and mouthing along to Bobby Womack, the closest Tarantino has come to tenderness.