October 10, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Bling Bling He Shot Me Down
KILL BILL VOL. 1
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
[Editor's note: Seriously, don't gloss over this alert, those of you who haven't seen the movie. You don't want the last line in Vol. 1 spoiled before you get to see it for yourself. See the movie and then read all of this review.
You don't want to know what I think of KILL BILL VOL 1.
If you have any geek cred at all, you already know what you think. You've seen the trailer a thousand times. Perhaps you have downloaded the screenplay and read it carefully. Or maybe you have sneaked or weaseled your way into one of the several advance screenings that have taken place over the last few weeks. Whatever it is, you don't need me to confirm your assumptions or outrage your pre-judgments or add to your own appraisal.
Instead, I would like to take this opportunity to explore the complex relationship between Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone, especially as it betrays itself in KILL BILL VOL. 1.
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As you know, Oliver Stone adapted one of Tarantino's early screenplays, which came to the screen as NATURAL BORN KILLERS. There is a long and complicated genesis behind that adaptation, recounted one-sidedly in KILLER INSTINCTS, co-producer and former QT friend Jane Hamsher's account of the film's making. It is known that Tarantino wasn't particularly happy with the way the film came out, and supposedly doesn't really like to talk about it. On page 77 of QUENTIN TARANTINO: INTERVIEWS, from the University of Mississippi Press, reprinting a chat with Joshua Mooney for MOVIELINE, Tarantino has said the most he has ever said publicly about the situation, and possibly all he ever will say. Though he seems more angry at the producers than at Stone, he does reserve some ire for the man who reportedly "totally" rewrote the script, as some journalists put it (I'd like to hunker down with a comparison some day).
This controversy belies the influence that Stone has had on Tarantino.
Let's look at the evidence, which may amount only to a series of coincidences. Both men are screenwriters and directors. Both court controversy, whether consciously or not, whether through language (the use of the word "nigger"), violence, or politics. Both have won Oscars for screenwriting. Both have made movies in which DJs figure importantly (TALK RADIO versus RESERVOIR DOGS).
But the analogies go a little deeper than that.
Both are obsessed cinematically with violence, cars, and the American landscape be it rural areas, roads, the desert, or the Valley. Both have a complex relationship with Asian culture, which is more oblique in Stone and born of his Vietnam experience, if nothing else. The interest in cars and violence is shared by most American filmmakers and their movies but there is little doubt that both Tarantino and Stone have brought something peculiarly their own to the subjects.
Now, in KILL BILL, Tarantino uses Stone's best cinematographer, Robert Richardson (if you get a chance, pick up the October AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER, which has a cover story on KILL BILL VOL. 1, which includes tantalizing excerpts from the diary Robertson kept during filming). He also casts another Stone vet in an important part, Daryl Hannah, who was the temptress in WALL STREET. He includes a cartoon anime sequence, which is akin to the sitcom sequence in NBK (or did QT write that, too?).
KILL BILL is all about vengeance, and vengeance is a hidden theme in Stone's films: NIXON, JFK, PLATOON, and WALL STREET all hinge on acts of complexly motivated vengeance. In KILL BILL, the inspiration for the vengeance is pretty clear-cut, but is still the engine that drives the movie.
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It's easy to see how the strange symbiotic relationship between Stone and Tarantino could go unnoticed. First there is the public animosity. Then there is the fact that Stone's films don't seem to mirror anything in Tarantino's films (unless the black population of ANY GIVEN SUNDAY is a shout out). Part of the problem is that Stone is not exactly as quotable as some of the B directors Tarantino worships. In fact, Stone is something of a square. He's the guy who managed to make a rock and roll movie (THE DOORS) squarer than even ALMOST FAMOUS. Stone just doesn't seem as movie mad as Tarantino. Stone doesn't really talk that much about movies per se in his interviews. He talks about ideas. Controversies. Intentions. For Tarantino to acknowledge Stone in his films with subtle citations is tantamount to Nicholas Ray or Samuel Fuller in the '50s paying quaint visual homage to Stanley Kramer.
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So what are we to make of this connection between Tarantino and Stone? Like many of us, Tarantino probably has a love-hate relationship with Stone, but unlike the rest of us, he has actually tangible reasons for the hate part. In his view, Stone messed with his work. It's true that Tarantino is much more influenced by a couple of thousand B-movie directors, and among A-list helmers, Tony Scott looms larger. Plus, Stone's particular obsessions — deserts and Indians — hold no allure for Tarantino. Yet he cannot help but be influenced by Stone, because Oliver Stone is a vivid director, and because Stone's own career can serve as a model to a young man attempting to make his own mark on the industry.
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In case you are curious, I think that KILL BILL VOL. 1 is a great film. I've seen it twice now, and will see it again and again in the future, both on-screen and on DVD when it is released singly and then later when the two parts are combined in some yet-to-be determined yet no doubt profitable fashion. KILL BILL is the perfect autumn movie. It is lush and streamlined, complex and simple at the same time. Tarantino plays with chronology a little bit, but only to interesting effect. Yes, the film is grossly violent, but as a weak and cowardly person I appreciate those parts of the film that indulge in the retribution I never get to perform myself in real life. Over the years I've gone back and forth about Tarantino, KILL BILL is a perfectly bejeweled little film, and this time he slayed me.
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FILM COMMENT editor Richard T. Jameson used to do an annual list of great little moments from a year's worth of films, and KILL BILL is the kind of movie that could take up all of one of those columns. I also like the miniature work, such as the plane arriving in Tokyo, which hasn't been much commented on. Tarantino has always been adept at casting and the actors here are perfect, from Daryl Hannah, whom I have loved since THE FURY and here gets to play a one-eyed villain, to the wiry Vivica (who is) A. Fox. I love the way all the girls handle their blades, which a knife fight expert told me was accurate. I also admire the fact that Tarantino managed to cleverly contrive a whole sequence just to sate his foot fetish while making the scene fully integrated into the action. I especially love the fact that every sequence in the film looks like a different movie while the whole things still holds together. I liked the use of Michael Parks in one of Tarantino's patented resurrections, and I liked the spaghetti western inflections in music, dialogue, and behavioral codes. And I loved the use of a piece of Bernard Herrmann music from the obscure British horror film THE TWISTED NERVE (which I've never been able to see, even though I've had the soundtrack record for years). Also, I've never been all that much of a fan of Uma Thurman, and I blamed her a little bit for the fiasco that was THE AVENGERS. But, man, is she good in this film! QT knocks her around a lot but she takes it like a trooper and gets up for more. Her line readings, shaky in the past, are here confident, thought sometimes stylized to fit into the western-chop socky mode. There's something of an ALIAS quality to the film's action women (Tarantino was a guest star in the first season), and like Jennifer Garner, Thurman is capable of wide registers of emotion. Unfortunately, these are the kinds of roles that go underappreciated.
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I hope someone posts a "KILL BILL Annotated References" website so I can revel in what all the geeks are enjoying. But in the meantime, I would like to take issue with a paragraph in Todd McCarthy's VARIETY review of KILL BILL. "Unfortunately," he writes, "Tarantino's attempt to get things off to a kick-ass start, with Uma Thurman's Bride busting into the Pasadena home of one of her attackers (Vivica A. Fox) to initiate a prolonged and bloody fight-to-the-death, does just the opposite; scene's over-the-top violence and tough-babe attitudes come on too strong right out of the box, before viewers can get their bearings. Somewhat awkward sequence creates an off-puttingly unsettling feeling in that the gruesome results are witnessed by the dead woman's little daughter, to whom the Bride speaks in callously adult terms. It's doubtful that anyone who had ever had kids could write a scene quite like this."
It's always hazardous for a reviewer to make judgments on a movie that is only half there. I think that commentators on LORD OF THE RINGS faced a similar conundrum, which was how to review something of which you were only seeing a part. But though one shouldn't finally go upon just the screenplay I can say, as someone who has read it, that the opening sequence with the child looking on is matched perfectly by a similar scene that takes place in the film's climax, two scenes that bookend the Bride's narrative trajectory. Far from being "hard" to the daughter, the Bride is speaking to her like an adult, and what she is saying is right out of the code of the west. Also, I thought the last line of Mr. McCarthy's paragraph was a weird jab at the single, childless Tarantino. At least on the page, the final scene of KILL BILL, like the first one, shows nothing akin to a callous attitude to children. Finally, starting with a kick-ass scene like that is perfectly in keeping with the style of king fu movies that are Tarantino's inspiration, so at the very least he is remaining true to the form while also finding a way to bend the genre to his artistic inclinations.
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As is well known, KILL BILL follows the path of vengeance that a woman takes after she wakes up from a four-year-coma (the agent of her re-awakening being a pesky mosquito that sucks her blood, blood always beginning or ending the scenes in this film). She is called the Bride (Uma Thurman), and that's what she was one day in a small El Paso chapel before her former assassination squad team-mates O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Vernita Green (Fox), Budd (Michael Madsen), and Elle Driver (Hannah) took her down and killed all of her friends, at the behest of the Bride's former boss, Bill (David Carradine). Once she's up and moving, the Bride heads to Japan, where she first has a deadly samurai sword made for her by Bill's old master, Hattori Hanzo (Sonny Chiba), then takes on O-Ren Ishii, now the head of Tokyo's yakuza, and her army of guardians, including Gogo Yubari (Chiaki Kuriyama from BATTLE ROYALE), and Sofie Fatale (the beautiful Julie Dreyfus, whom everyone is going to have a crush on after seeing this film). Then it's off to SoCal to eliminate Green. Of course, the film isn't told in this order.
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And so part one ends. In part two, The Bride goes further down her list of murder targets, to the Daryl Hannah character, to Michael Madsen's character, and to Bill himself. We will learn where the Bride's daughter is located, and what the Bride's name is (hint: you actually hear it casually vocalized in the first five minutes of the film, though it is bleeped out later when said explicitly). But we average viewers won't learn this until next February, because Miramax broke the movie in two (rhyming with Tarantino's thinking on the matter), and magazine and publicity lead times are so long that February is probably the earliest that the film could be released and still get a VANITY FAIR cover story.
NEXT TIME: INTOLERABLE CRUELTY
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