I’LL SAY THIS for Quentin Tarantino, some of his movies have excellent female heroines. Subscribers to The Dialectic may have seen the previous article in this series, where we looked at the character of The Bride in Kill Bill1. She was an action hero, a character possessed of preternatural skills, a warrior who took no nonsense (or prisoners). The eponymous hero of Tarantino’s 1997 crime thriller Jackie Brown has singular attributes, but they are much more credibly human. She is no less impressive than The Bride as a character, and being a woman in her mid-forties, is arguably an even more valuable entry in the rolodex of good fictional female role models. The Hollywood spotlight still has a tendency to flicker increasingly as female actors lose currency - or, to use a less euphemistic term, “age” - but Pam Grier2 as the indomitable Jackie Brown blows away such discriminatory hogwash with the efficiency of a tidal wave. The British film critic Mark Kermode had this to say of her performance when reviewing the film on its 25th anniversary in the podcast Kermode and Mayo’s Take.
…Pam Grier is just…the whole screen glows!…she’s every bit as much of a force of nature as she always was.
Kermode is known for the eloquence of his film reviews, so I assume from this rather disappointing comment - it could have been penned by a teenage fan - that in this instance his powers of rhetoric were quashed by his enthusiasm. I can understand it. Grier as Jackie Brown runs rings around both the police and a hair-raisingly menacing dealer in illegal firearms called Ordell Robbie, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Robbie bumps off his associates with the spontaneity of someone who moves in circles where life is cheap and very, very dangerous. He is intelligent, charming and deadly, but ultimately no match for this shrewd, streetwise survivor.
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