Though not strictly a hagiography, this thorough explication of the films that Quentin Tarantino made under the auspices of Harvey Weinstein presents America’s most celebrated auteur of the last three decades as a complete success on his own terms and anyone else’s. It also gathers enough famous talking heads to sing his praises that the director, Tara Wood, can talk about Tarantino’s relationship with the now-confirmed sexual abuser (“He was my best friend…”) in fairly frank terms without necessarily contradicting on-screen testimony to the notion that QT, as Jennifer Jason Leigh puts it, “wrote parts for women better than anyone.” To her credit, Wood doesn’t dance around the problem; but it does make the hero worship sound more forced than it’s probably meant to sound. 

What’s missing, of course, is QT’s own voice. The filmmaker seemingly contributes nothing personal to the documentary, even if his film geek persona permeates every frame. Consequently, the anecdotes and insights provided by his regular actors, collaborators, and hangers-on have a delicious insider quality to them that even non-QT enthusiasts should enjoy. There’s a running sub-theme about how all of Tarantino’s films comprise an alternate universe complete with its own unique commerce and human community, which, when understood properly, make the ultra-violence and the rarefied humor not only understandable, but acceptable. The actors who appear are self-aware enough that they’ve come to accept QT’s main working credo, which is that “you’re never cooler than the movies” themselves. Jamie Foxx is the only leading man movie star who talks to Ward, and he admits that Tarantino had to “bring me down” from his high perch to make him credibly convey a slave-like mentality in Django Unchained. And whereas he wasn’t always able to get the actors he wanted (Travolta, who definitely had his career revived by QT, wasn’t his first choice for Pulp Fiction), Tarantino knew more about the acting community in Hollywood than anyone in the history of the business, and once he blessed you with a role, you were kind of his. Tim Roth, Christoph Waltz, Michael Madsen, and Kurt Russell essentially say as much, pledging their allegiance not because of what he did for them financially, but how he guaranteed their street cred.

In amongst the delightful bits of trivia and heartfelt encomiums to loyal compadres (in particular, QT’s longtime editor, Sally Menke), Ward sometimes comes across as tone deaf in her presentations of those aspects of QT’s ouevre that rub people the wrong way. She actually handles the Weinstein connection fairly well, but despite Foxx’s and Samuel Jackson’s defense of QT’s love of the n-word (at the expense of Spike Lee and the more delicate sensibilities of Leonardo Dicaprio, who had to utter it multiple times in Django), the use of the word even in the documentary has a jarring effect that comes across as gratuitous. Uma Thurman’s permanent injury as a result of reckless practices during the making of Kill Bill is mentioned but not really explained. And while Ward’s description of the films as being both ground-breaking and highly influential is unimpeachable, her implication that they all were of the highest quality feels like a dodge. How anyone can sit through The Hateful Eight—70mm or no 70mm—with any sense of enjoyment is beyond me. The fact is, QT’s iconoclasm has helped him get movies made the way he believes they should be made, but much of the stuff he did after Jackie Brown was self-indulgent. That said, I still really like Death Proof. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

QT8-The First Eight home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2019 Wood Entertainment