30 years ago, 'True Romance' gave us the unfiltered Quentin Tarantino
The star-studded film, directed by Tony Scott from Tarantino's script, featured all the touchstones of the young QT.
Quentin Tarantino's most recent film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, came out back in 2019, and since then Tarantino's creative output has consisted of two books — the very unorthodox novelization of OUATIH, and the criticism anthology Cinema Speculation — as well as numerous podcast episodes.
These have given us an indication of what Tarantino, as a 60-year-old new father, has been thinking about, including (but not limited to) the reach of cinema history, how the medium is appreciated by different generations, and the necessity of preserving the in-theater experience and film itself.
Tarantino's script for 1993's True Romance, on the other hand, is more indicative of the things Tarantino was thinking about in his 20s: Namely, the fantasy of being a nerdy guy who gets the girl, goes toe-to-toe with dangerous criminals and wins. It's certainly the best movie ever made in which the hero is a comic book store employee.
Roger Ebert, in his 1993 review, got to the essence of True Romance:
"The universe in question could best be located inside the inflamed fantasies of an adolescent male mind - and not any adolescent, but the kind of teenage boy who goes to martial arts movies and fantasizes about guns and girls with great big garbanzos."
The film came out in September of 1993, 30 years ago this week, right between Tarantino's first two films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. The concept is extremely simple and full of the sorts of cliches that were established at that time and would get even more tiresome as the '90s wore on.
It’s some rough, rough stuff, including some very graphic violence and plentiful racial slurs. But True Romance is guided by the undercurrent of its love story.
Christian Slater is the hero, Clarence, a nerdish guy who works in a comic book store and seems to have not much of a social life, despite looking like world-renowned handsome actor Christian Slater. In the first scene, at a kung fu triple feature, he meets a girl whose name is Alabama (Patricia Arquette), even though she's from Florida.
They have sex, but then she admits she's a sex worker, hired by Clarence's boss so he'd get laid on his birthday- the type of benevolence that bosses tend not to grant to their minimum-wage employees. They smooth out any misunderstandings, declare their love for one another, and then get married, all in the movie's first ten minutes.
The rest of the movie is spent on novices Clarance and Alabama taking on the entire criminal underworlds of both Detroit and Los Angeles, with just about every character played by a who's-who of the decade's greatest actors. It's something of a proto-Breaking Bad, in which down-on-their-luck heroes manage to both outsmart and outfight criminals even though there's no indication at the outset that they possess any of the skills seemingly required to do so.
They first confront a dreadlocked pimp named Drexl (Gary Oldman), and following a violent confrontation, they end up with a huge cache of his drugs, which had been stolen from rival mobsters. It's from the period of Oldman's career when he did a different, wild accent in every movie:
(With his role as Harry Truman in Oppenheimer, Oldman joins the ranks of actors who have played both the president of the United States and a pimp in different movies. Others: Morgan Freeman in Street Smart and Deep Impact, Dan Aykroyd in Doctor Detroit, and My Fellow Americans. Harvey Keitel for some reason has never been cast as president, unless you count when he was president of the Actor’s Studio. And Colman Domingo, after his turn as the pimp in Zola, just needs to play the president to complete the parlay.)
Questions about the whereabouts of the drugs lead to the film's most famous scene, in which a Sicilian mobster (Christopher Walken) confronts Clarence's father (Dennis Hopper), and gets an impromptu, racial-slur-filled history lesson:
Sure, that's all pretty jarring to hear, especially all the n-words. But just follow how the power in the scene shifts back and forth.
The film also has Brad Pitt, in an early part as a stoned roommate, Val Kilmer as Clarence's conscience, in the guise of Elvis, Samuel L. Jackson in a brief scene that goes from witty dialogue to violence, and James Gandolfini, in the sort of violent brute part he often played in the years before The Sopranos.
In its third act, the action shifts to Los Angeles, and it becomes something of a riff on Hollywood cop films and showbiz itself, as Clarence and Alabama try to arrange to sell the drugs to a big-time Hollywood producer (Saul Rubinek), as the cops (among them Chris Penn and Tom Sizemore) listen in and Cousin Balki himself (Bronson Pinchot) acts as a middle man/snitch. Clarence, having suddenly been granted the ability to outwit drug dealers, is soon expertly and confidently dealing with a Hollywood mogul.
It all ends the way so many '90s films did, especially those with Tarantino's involvement: With a Mexican standoff, everyone shooting, and the heroes getting away.
What is True Romance's legacy? It's remembered for synthesizing the sensibilities of both its director and screenwriter while collecting all of those great actors and putting them in outstanding scenes. Intriguingly, Arquette would win an Oscar for 2014's Boyhood, when at that point none of the film's top actors besides Walken had won one (although Pitt and Oldman would go on to win them later.)
And, it’s got a pretty great recurring theme song, titled “You’re So Cool” and written by Hans Zimmer:
True Romance is streaming on Pluto TV.
Literally my favorite movie, and not only did I do a re-watch within the last few weeks, I purchased the Director's Cut so that I could watch that as well. Love me some True Romance.