GAME 1: THE LIMEY VS. JACKIE BROWN
Welcome to the first game of the “Narrative Rebellion” bracket of our '90s film playoffs.
It might have been the renewed interest in French New Wave films. It might have been the fomenting digital revolution. It might have been the ungodly amounts of ecstasy we took as teenagers. No matter the reason, fracturing time became an important part of how narrative changed in the 1990s.
Quentin Tarantino knows we all think 1997’s Jackie Brown is his best film and that we sound so smart for saying it. Now’s the time to test that status against Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey from 1998. It would have been obvious to match Jackie Brown, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel, against Soderbergh’s own Out of Sight, but this pairing is the better matchup. Both are self-aware crime films starring actors from the 1970s playing characters who are facing down time itself.
There’s a chance we’ll be talking about one of these films a few more times so we tried to be concise in our first discussion as referees. Of course there are many more questions these films raise and you can bring them up in the comments and notes. You can also vote for the winner of the matchup below to decide which film moves on, and your vote matters as much as ours!
BRIAN J DAVIS: So before we hit record you said that the broken timeline is done better in The Limey?
EMILY SCHULTZ: I think the broken timeline is done better in The Limey because it’s almost as if life itself is a memory.
BJD: Jackie Brown has a different take on that, which is that aging is the unknown country. You don’t know what’s going to happen as you age.
ES: You think Jackie Brown touches on the theme of aging better?
BJD: No, no, no, not better, but differently. Like, Max Cherry at the end of Jackie Brown—he’s literally receding into a blur. Then Jackie Brown herself is driving and singing along to the camera. To think that life is still unknown at 50 for these characters—that hit me harder now about Jackie Brown.
ES: When we saw these films, we were really young and the filmmakers were…
BJD: Young! And they were really the two hippest filmmakers of the ’90s and in pretty much the same calendar year both have neo-noirs about aging starring cult actors of the 1970s.
ES: If you asked me which is my favorite filmmaker, I would hands down say Soderbergh. But at the same time, when I watched these back-to-back, I responded much more to Jackie Brown.
BJD: I want to bring up some of our rules for our readers right now, it’s not about favorites. This is a game. This movie against that movie.
ES: Because we’re basically refereeing a match. We have to be impartial.
BJD: The matchup between these two movies is extraordinary, thematically. Both very strong directors who are working with strong source material. Soderbergh working with a Lem Dobbs script.
ES: And Tarantino adapting Elmore Leonard. And it’s a very good adaptation.
BJD: Again, this first 1990s conference we’re doing is Narrative Rebellion. These are the most novelistic movies in this group.
ES: I would actually say that The Limey borders on poetry.
BJD: Both movies escape the linear progression that most film is trapped in, and they really try to use techniques from novels in the way that characters think. A novel is generally going to be told in the past tense, like a memory. It is going to be someone thinking through the story rather than experiencing it, per se. The thing about Jackie Brown that it has over The Limey is it does have more of a through line that you feel. And you feel that ending. You feel that progression.
ES: And The Limey doesn’t have that because of the broken timeline.
BJD: The one thing that I don’t like about The Limey is that it goes pretty conventional for the last reel. And it’s not the best shootout.
ES: One of the reasons it’s not as propulsive is because it really has one character, and that’s the Limey himself played by Terence Stamp.
BJD: But Luis Guzmán!
ES: This is still kind of a one-character film. Whereas in Jackie Brown, you have multiple characters that you care about, that you’re invested in.
BJD: This is a big one for anyone out there writing in genre. Jackie Brown has an amazing villain in Samuel L. Jackson. He starts off Mephistophelian but he ends up losing in this really interesting way. Jackie Brown, a flight attendant, completely undoes all his power, thread by thread, just tugging it out. Also on rewatch I was wowed by the multiple POVs of the money handoff. It is an exquisite set piece. And people to this day try to do it and they do it so badly.
ES: Now a criticism. Jackie Brown is a long movie!
BJD: That is by Tarantino’s design. He said, “I want you to hang out with these characters and be friends with them.” That after you stop caring about the plot, that’s what you’ll come back for.
ES: I do think its energy runs out.
BJD: Agreed. You’re looking at your watch after the peak of that heist scene. What hit me most about The Limey on rewatch—and I’ve been thinking about it for days— is when he realizes he’s the one who doomed his daughter by being a shitty father and teaching her to love these kinds of men. And Stamp plays it both devastated and at peace with the fact, as if he kind of knew the truth already. He just had to experience it.
ES: That’s why I would say The Limey is almost more literary: it’s more interior than Jackie Brown.
BJD: Should I go off on my tangent about what I actually think Tarantino’s best movie is?
ES: Oh god, that theory! I think first we should say that we almost didn’t want to include Tarantino because it seems like such an obvious pick. But when you look at Pulp Fiction, $300 million box office, he did take a risk following it with Jackie Brown, a two-hander character drama with two killings. And he fought for Pam Grier.
BJD: And Robert Forster, the patron saint of Medium Cool. Okay, here’s my little aside about what is the best Tarantino movie: Death Proof!
ES: No.
BJD: All I ask for from you, and the world, is two minutes to let me explain myself. With Death Proof he did this scrappy low-budget experiment and the parameters didn’t allow him to get wrapped up in “I have to make something genius or an epic.” And he ends up making what I think is his most personal, perverse, and narcotically paced movie. It’s a speedball made of Éric Rohmer and Jack Hill and for me it points to this alternate universe, where Tarantino makes a movie like Death Proof once a year, jumping around to different genre exercises.
ES: So you wish he was more like Soderbergh? [Laughs] He has his smaller, more experimental films. And those are often the ones that I love.
BJD: Well, let’s talk a little bit about where Soderbergh was here. This is really the start of his “one for me, one for the studio” cycle.
ES: How did this fare commercially?
BJD: Not well! The star is Terence Stamp at age 60. And it’s a fractured timeline narrative. I’m sure no one was fooling themselves, but they did it anyway.
ES: That’s the ’90s. So let’s calculate the points for both films.
BJD: Okay, I’ve never shaken something I overhead in a record store the day before I first saw Jackie Brown. I was flipping through the crates and this “old dude”—you know, in his late 20s— was talking to the store owner about Jackie Brown. He said, “It was like a three hour long episode of The Rockford Files.”
ES: So do you think it would be a better film if it were shorter?
BJD: I don’t know. You start to tighten up a movie like Jackie Brown, it’s like undoing relationships. Love is felt in the quiet moments, right? Would you cut the Bridget Fonda and Robert De Niro material? On this watch, I realized how important the Bridget Fonda character was.
ES: Oh, she’s fantastic.
BJD: And her and De Niro having “the dad fuck.” Is that the only consensual sex in the Tarantino oeuvre?
ES: I think maybe, but I haven’t seen them all.
BJD: What movie do you want to defend and put your vote on?
ES: I probably would put my vote for Jackie Brown.
BJD: Well, I’m going to surprise you. I’m changing my vote from what I thought it would be. Yes, the final reel of The Limey is a letdown. But Jackie Brown just doesn’t take that many risks. And I want to reward risk-taking. I’m going to vote for The Limey.
ES: Great timing as what’s playing right now is The Limey chase scene with Barry Newman!
BJD: From Emily’s favorite car movie, Vanishing Point!
ES: I really do like The Limey, but I’m going to vote for Jackie Brown. I think a big reason that I’m voting for Jackie Brown is Pam Grier. It is her character. It is seeing her own that role.
BJD: I think The Limey took more risks. And in some moments, it doesn’t pay off. But in a lot of ways, it does. To show the feelings and the memories that we’re not actually going to see play out. If there’s one thing that puts it right over the top, it’s that Soderbergh samples a movie—Ken Loach’s Poor Cow starring a very young Terence Stamp. What’s more 1990s than sampling?
ES: I guess I side with Jackie Brown because I also like the fact that you’re showing criminal morality, that all these criminals have their own moral code, even if we don’t immediately understand it.
BJD: Okay, so I think the two refs have spoken. It’s a draw. One vote for The Limey, one vote for Jackie Brown! We’ll put it to our readers to vote and see who moves on!