Now’s the Perfect Time to Rewatch Tarantino’s Best Movie

Nearly three decades after its commercial run, Jackie Brown remains Tarantino’s finest work. Like his other movies, his love for genre is a cornerstone—in this case, neo-noir, Blaxploitation, and Florida glare, the regional crime fiction popularized in part by author Elmore Leonard. In a departure for Tarantino, Jackie Brown is based on Leonard’s 1992 novel Rum Punch, and remains the only instance of adaptation in his career.

Declaring Jackie Brown his best film might read as a backhanded complement. Tarantino’s original writings are defined by his meticulous attention to details of the periods they’re set in.) Whether in Pulp Fiction or Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, Tarantino’s perfectionism is his defining trait, and it informs Jackie Brown as it does the rest of his filmography. The difference is that using Leonard’s book as his blueprint tamps down Tarantino’s fastidiousness. He directs with obsession, even when his love for cinema and his personal influences shines on his output.

Jackie Brown brims with a more authentic expression of that love. Rum Punch’s structure hems Tarantino in; he hangs his fixations on beams built by Leonard instead of treating them as a foundation. The strongest example of that dynamic is the opening sequence: a tracking shot following Jackie (Pam Grier, living legend), a flight attendant, along moving walkways shepherding her toward her gate. No matter how the backdrop changes as she makes her way through the airport, Grier remains the focal point at frame right, standing straight, tall, and unbothered, until she makes a mad dash to the finish line to welcome her passengers aboard the plane. 

Even then, Grier and cinematographer Guillermo Navarro maintain the character’s unfailing grace. She’s a tough woman. It’s just that she’s also a working stiff with a job to do and a stack of illicit cash hidden in her handbag, smuggled from Mexico to the U.S. at the behest of Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), an L.A. gun runner and snake in the grass. Her arrest triggers a chain of killings, scheming, and double crossing, the kind that takes practice and attention to keep sorted in one’s head. At the same time, though, Jackie Brown is a “vibes” movie, where the narrative’s particulars matter on a tertiary basis, after character and construction.

It’s the time we spend with Jackie and the bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) that casts this magic. Jackie unloads her woes with Max; he leans back and listens. That’s what Jackie needs: a friendly face and attentive ear. In the middle of the conspiring and plotting, their conversations are moments of connection and peace. For all the grain and grit that Tarantino captures in Jackie Brown, its world is absorptive. Jackie and Max, lovers not to be, make that world inviting in spite of its violence. Unlike many Tarantino movies, Jackie Brown is one we want to live in ourselves. Almost. 

It’s a relief that Lionsgate’s recent 4K release of Jackie Brown didn’t suffer the same outcome as the studio’s release of his Kill Bill films; in the latter, still images look uncannily sharp, and movements smear like butter on a stovetop. Jackie Brown was shot on film, not digital, and the difference shows. Short of seeing this masterpiece well presented in a repertory theater run by experts of their trade, there’s simply no better alternative out there, and no home video release as urgent for Tarantino completionists to own.