True Romance

The first time I saw True Romance was on TV, and I'm not sure I even saw the whole thing. I remembered pieces of it, so I rented it over the weekend. It was interesting to look back on Quentin Tarantino's first script to see the nascency of the man who would kick-start American film during the 1990s. Most of the building blocks are there--in the first five minutes his alter-ego, Clarence Worley (played by Christian Slater) professes a love for Elvis Presley and Sonny Chiba (in fact, he says he would fuck Elvis, if a gun was put to his head and he had to fuck a man).

True Romance is full of the kind of stylized dialogue and violence that would mark Tarantino's work ever since. It has also has an almost endearing amateurishness. Here we have Tarantino's stand-in, a lonely comic-book store clerk (Tarantino was clerk in a video store) living out the basic and most ludicrous of male fairy tales--he has made a prostitute fall in love with him. If prostitution is the oldest profession, than certainly this is the oldest male fantasy. This is the kind of writing that the socially awkward have been banging out for years, probably on the hopeful belief that if something is written down, it will come true. So we have Clarence, meeting a prostitute at a Sonny Chiba film festival, and after one night of connubial bliss they are in love forever. Only in the movies, folks.

The fantasy doesn't stop there, as Clarence and Alabama (of course she would have a colorful name like Alabama, simply Susan or Carol wouldn't suffice) get involved with a stolen suitcase of cocaine that leads them to interact with the mob, the police, and a Hollywood producer. This is like Tarantino's bedtime story come to life. Through it all we hear the kind of dialogue that sounds like film noir squeezed through the filter of the the miasma of American pop culture, as well as Tarantino's philosophy of what good movie-making is. When Clarence/Tarantino tells the movie producer (who was probably modeled on Don Simpson) that the movies that win Oscars are bullshit, he probably couldn't have dreamed he would one day win an Oscar.

This film is also fun to watch because it is cast with a menagerie of actors who pop up in these kind of movies all the time, like Gary Oldman, Tom Sizemore, the late Chris Penn, Michael Rapaport, and of course Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken, who act out the memorable scene in which the ancestry of the Sicilian people is examined. Add to that faces that would end up becoming famous, like James Gandolfini as a hit-man and Brad Pitt as a stoner, and this is the kind of film where you can have fun going, "Hey, that's Brad Pitt!"

Even if this in an absurd fantasy, Tarantino knows that, he's tipped us off with the title, as True Romance was a pulp magazine series that had about as much truth to it as it did literary value. There are sorts of "wait a minute" moments, such as why Gary Oldman and his crew aren't armed, to the end, when a man with a head wound and a suitcase full of cash isn't stopped at the Mexican border. But they, this is a fantasy, and Tarantino would develop as a writer.