Pulp Fiction (1994) — three crime stories Tarantino arranged out of order on purpose

Pulp Fiction opens with two diner robbers, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, talking themselves into pulling a gun. It closes there too — but in between the film loops back through a separate weekend involving hitmen Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield, boxer Butch Coolidge, and Mia Wallace, the wife of a Los Angeles crime boss. The three stories share characters and a city; what holds them together is the order they’re not told in.

Quentin Tarantino directed it in 1994, his second feature after Reservoir Dogs and his first working with anything close to a studio budget. The story was credited to Tarantino and Roger Avary; the screenplay won Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars that year. Forrest Gump took Best Picture in the same ceremony — a fact every Tarantino retrospective still finds a way to mention.

What the film actually does, more than three decades on, is treat conversation as cinema. Vincent and Jules argue about Royale with Cheese on the drive to a murder. Mia explains a joke about a tomato. Captain Koons hands a child a wristwatch and then talks for five minutes about where the watch has been. The plotting is engineered, sometimes obviously, but the talk is the load-bearing element — every scene is set up so two people can keep speaking past the point a normal crime film would have moved on.

Andrzej Sekula shoots most of it on slightly washed-out 50 ASA stock, which gives the diner, the apartment and the Jack Rabbit Slim’s set the same airless mid-afternoon light. The soundtrack — Dick Dale’s surf guitar, Chuck Berry, Urge Overkill, Dusty Springfield — is doing a lot of the work the camera doesn’t, marking each chapter with a record. Travolta is restarted from career-pause; Samuel L. Jackson is the film’s center of gravity.

Around them, Uma Thurman builds Mia in two scenes; Bruce Willis plays Butch as quiet, irritable and exhausted; Harvey Keitel arrives in a tuxedo to clean a car. Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Christopher Walken and Ving Rhames each take a long monologue and finish before it tips into self-parody.

Thirty years on, the films Tarantino made after this one are louder. This one is the most carefully arranged. The shuffled timeline isn’t a gimmick — once you watch it forward in your head, the looseness disappears, which is the trick.

Tags: comedies, thrillers, Quentin Tarantino