Profile/Quentin Tarantino:He burst onto the scene with one of American cinema's greatest debuts, but in refusing to grow up Quentin Tarantino could become stuck in the past, writes Donald Clarke
Only a handful of film directors can claim to have changed the movie business radically. Even Quentin Tarantino's detractors - and they are legion - would have to admit that he is, for better or worse, a member of that rare band. He has, after all, seen his name turned into an adjective. Barely a week goes by without some critic describing the latest film, play, book, song, poem or art event as Tarantinoesque.
What does that word mean? As Tarantino flies into Dublin next week to promote Death Proof, his latest orgy of destruction, he might enjoy considering the various ways his surname is misused. Fulminating leader writers in the Daily Mail blame him for introducing new levels of hyper-violence to mainstream cinema. Critics in Sight and Sound, bible of the cineaste, credit Tarantino for popularising the non-linear narrative in films such as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.
Fan-boys on the internet attach "Tarantinoesque" to any post-modern entertainment that conspicuously references the more garish corners of popular culture. Everybody else mentions his talent for crafting elegantly profane dialogue. No other film-maker has seen his personal adjective accumulate quite so many viable connotations.
In recent years, however, Tarantino seems to have decided to concentrate on exploiting only the least sophisticated aspects of his talent. Kill Bill, the entertaining two-part martial arts epic that careered into cinemas in 2003 and 2004, foreswore intricate plotting and layered dialogue for wanton bombast. And now we have Death Proof.
Released in the US with Robert Rodriguez' Planet Terror under the portmanteau title Grindhouse, the film apes the style and form of the violent fleapit programmers that the young Tarantino snuck into during the 1970s. Following Kurt Russell's psychopath as he mows down various scantily clad Texan women in his Chevrolet, the film - half an hour longer than the US version - does offer a number of lowbrow pleasures, but is it really a fit enterprise for a middle-aged man of Tarantino's undoubted intelligence? "One of the things I always loved about exploitation movies is that, even in the midst of all that's going on, you all of a sudden start caring about the characters," he said recently. "And, all of a sudden, it's not silly any more because you actually give a f**k about what happens to these people, and I love that." That defence was, no doubt, delivered at Gatling-gun pace, while the director waved his hands about like a tic-tac man on a particularly hectic Derby day.
One of Tarantino's most persuasive and iconic creations remains QT himself. This is not to suggest the creature is an entirely original conception. Long before Tarantino arrived on the scene, Martin Scorsese had established a reputation for spewing out film references the way most people exhale. But the younger man, fonder of cinematic trash than Marty, coupled the verbal diarrhoea with the hipster argot of a man terminally in love with black culture and gangster chic.
At times, Tarantino's desire to seem like a hard nut can lead him down the path towards Silly Town. In a 2003 interview with Playboy he boasted about getting into bar fights and scoring with women in a way that seemed most unbecoming for somebody the wrong side of 40. "I went around the side of the cab and beat him up," he said while discussing an altercation with a taxi driver. "He was a big black guy, and they're used to white guys backing down. I don't back down, especially to big black guys. That gives me a psychological advantage."
Despite his macho bluster, Tarantino does not seem to have had a particularly rough childhood. Born in Kentucky, he was raised by his mother - and, for a while, a stepfather named Curt Zastoupil - in various quarters of Los Angeles. He was a bright child, but, no doubt suffering from some form of hyperactivity, never did particularly well at school. After flunking out of ninth grade, he studied acting for a spell and eventually secured a minuscule non-speaking role as an Elvis impersonator on the sitcom The Golden Girls. (Critics, who have never been kind about Tarantino's performances in his own films, might argue that this was the pinnacle of his acting career.) The key formative experience in Tarantino's professional life came, however, when he secured a job at, in his words, "the best video store in the Los Angeles area". The years he spent ploughing through kung fu thrillers, Jean-Luc Godard classics and pictures featuring nuns with flick-knives, are, to the overheated chroniclers of the QT myth, analogous to the months Alexander the Great spent under the tutelage of Aristotle. Born in 1963, Tarantino was the first important director to gain his cinematic education watching films on big plastic cassettes. As VHS gives way to DVD, and DVD gives way to digital downloads, that might already identify him as a figure from a bygone age.
When Reservoir Dogs emerged in 1992, he seemed, however, like a welcome invader from an unmapped planet. Made for just $1.5 million (€1.1 million), the film managed the impressive task of appearing thrillingly fresh despite the promiscuous references, quotes and borrowings that filled every frame. Detailing the aftermath of a failed bank robbery, Reservoir Dogs nodded towards such pictures as The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Killing and, most conspicuously, Ringo Lam's City on Fire, but, blessed with a dazzlingly complex temporal structure, always seemed very much its own beast. Some blundering puritans saw only the blood and designated it a threat to society. Most thinking critics recognised it as one of the best debuts in the history of American cinema.
The relative commercial success of Reservoir Dogs had an immediate effect on the industry and, more particularly, on Miramax, the studio that bought the film. To that point, the respectable branch of the independent film business, exemplified by the tofu munchers at the Sundance Festival, concerned itself largely with polite period pieces and monochrome dramas in which lesbians fall in love at adult literacy classes. Reservoir Dogs and its even more lucrative successor, Pulp Fiction, demonstrated that, if placed in the hands of a writer as talented as Tarantino, genre pictures could be every bit as rewarding as shoestring art films. Pulp Fiction won Tarantino the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival and an Oscar for best original screenplay. As Miramax drifted into its golden age, the chatty director was installed as the studio's own Mickey Mouse.
In the years that followed, the numerous attempts by lesser directors to ape Tarantino's style - remember atrocities such as Things to do in Denver When You're Dead and Two Days in the Valley? - only served to emphasise the singular nature of Quentin's talent. In 1997, Jackie Brown, his leisurely, moving adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, disappointed gore hounds, but, with Pam Grier's touching portrayal of a middle-aged air hostess, proved beyond doubt that the director could put real emotion on screen.
There Tarantino's progress seems to have stalled. Linked romantically with such celebrities as Mira Sorvino and Sofia Coppola, he has yet to settle down domestically and, if that Playboy interview is to be believed, savours the more lubricious perks of celebrity. "If I go into a strip club now and play my cards right, I can take one of the strippers home," he said. "If I go to get a lap dance when it's close to the end of the night, when they're getting ready to close up, and the girl knows who I am, she'll probably ask if I want to go out for coffee."
As the new century got into its stride, Tarantino appeared frozen by a class of procrastination that would have appalled even Hamlet. Numerous projects - a martial arts flick in Mandarin, a James Bond movie, an adaptation of Leonard's Cuba Libre - were mooted and then quietly nudged towards the back burner. Inglorious Bastards, a war movie that may eventually resemble The Dirty Dozen merged with Cross of Iron, has been predicted more often than the second coming of the Lord. It is currently scheduled for release in 2008. We'll see.
Death Proof and the two Kill Bill adventures, the pictures Quentin did manage to squeeze out, are amusing enough, but one can't help but think he could have written and directed them while under heavy sedation.
Should he care what the critics think? Maybe not, but the fact that the American public, confused by the archness of Grindhouse and, perhaps, repelled by the scratches digitally imposed on the image, stayed away from the double bill in their millions should give him pause for thought. Tarantino, once the most exciting director of his generation, may be in danger of becoming mortally unfashionable. Now, that was never a meaning we thought we'd attach to Tarantinoesque.
The Tarantino File
Who is he?Hysterically verbose film director who, in pictures such as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, managed to weave dizzyingly inventive dialogue and extreme violence into the most elegant of narrative structures
Why is he in the news?Next Friday, as a guest of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, he will attend the Irish premiere of his latest film, Death Proof, at the Savoy cinema in Dublin.
Most appealing characteristic: A genuine enthusiasm for obscure cult cinema - both high and low of brow - that manifests itself in his energised conversation and richly allusive films
Least appealing characteristic: In recent years, a tendency to exercise only the least sophisticated aspects of his considerable talent. His last two projects, Kill Bill and Death Proof, lack substance.
Most likely to say: "Hey, have you seen Venusian Monkey Nurse IV? It's, like, the best ape-turns-into-nurse film since Matron Orang Utan."
Least likely to say:"Why would I want to watch My Baboon, My Midwife when there's a Merchant Ivory film on the other channel?"