True Romance

I’ve never really thought of Tony Scott as an actor’s director, but the acting in this picture is consistently astonishing.  Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Bronson Pinchot, Tom Sizemore, Chris Penn, Saul Rubinek, Chris Walken, James Gandolfini, all of them take their roles in sly, unexpected directions, playing their scenes with genuine humor and humanity.

Now that the shock of Tarantino has worn off, it’s possible to look at his writing a little more objectively.  His plots tend toward the unlikely, his characters are not real people.  Tarantino World exists within the framework of “the movies,” he’s not concerned about the real world, he lives, breathes and eats movies, and his scripts reflect that.

His characters tend to sound the same.  Almost without exception, they spout pop-culture trivia and announce who they are and what they stand for.  The audience rarely has to wonder what a character is thinking, because they never shut up about what they’re thinking.  When he directs his own script, this all becomes part of an all-encompassing style.  We enter Tarantino World, we buy that ticket and we get on that ride.  And so far, he has yet to disappoint.

And while Tarantino has entered the pop consciousness as an icon, his movies are still, in essence, art films, cult films, movies about movies.  Even Pulp Fiction I remember seeing and thinking “If Jim Jarmusch made a gangster movie, it would feel like this.”  (Of course,  Jarmusch eventually made a gangster movie, Ghost Dog, which feels nothing like Pulp Fiction.)

Tony Scott does not make Art Films.  He makes Commercial Blockbusters.  And his task here is to take Tarantino’s extremely Tarantino-esque screenplay and somehow turn it into a Commercial Blockbuster.

The fact that True Romance didn’t do well upon initial release is beside the point.  What Scott’s has acheived here is to take the pure, undiluted pop fantasy of Tarantino’s script and, quite apart from “making it commercial,” he’s somehow make it his warmest, most humane film.

Only the feathers seem like a little much for me.

I’ve heard that the original script of True Romance, like most other Tarantino scripts, shuffled time and told the story in a more novelistic way, and that Tony Scott shot the script as written but, in the editing room, made it more linear.  I would give anything (within reason) to see the first cut.