Viking Night: Reservoir Dogs
By Bruce Hall
January 25, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com

You might as well face it, they're addicted to love.
Most consumers have no problem loving a huge budget blockbuster. Movies that are meant to appeal to the widest possible audience usually do just that. But some films have a narrower vision, or simply contain more complex meaning than meets the eye. They aren't always art, and they aren't always even very successful. But for a devoted and eccentric few, they're the best entertainment money can buy. Once, beginning with Erik the Viking, a group of dedicated irregulars gathered weekly in a dingy dorm room to watch these films and discuss how what pleases the few might also appeal to the many. Time has separated the others in those discussions so that I alone remain to ponder the wider significance of cult cinema. But while the room is cleaner and I no longer have to skip class to do it, I still think of my far off friends whenever I hold Viking Night.

Some people love Quentin Tarantino, and some people hate him. I try to be one of the few guys on the planet who thinks that he’s not good, not evil, but just necessary. In my view, he’s not quite the godlike creative genius his fans claim him to be, and I really don’t see him as the threat to Western civilization his detractors do. The fact that the man is immensely talented is beyond question – there’s no other way a self-taught director puts together such professional looking material right from the start of his career. Tarantino is an avid student of cinema who is theoretically well versed in a wide variety of techniques for making good looking movies.

But at the heart of cinema is storytelling, and this is primarily where his critics have a point. Learning on your own is a great way to maximize your resources, but it can also insulate you from constructive creative input. Pulp Fiction is probably Tarantino’s best known film and I know a lot of people who are big fans of it despite the fact they hate the guy who created it. But how many people do you know who can recite the basic plot? A pro boxer makes a pact with a gangster to take a fall, goes back on the deal and tries to leave town with the money. Forget the hit men, forget Uma Thurman, and forget all about Zed being dead. All of it is just window dressing – Pulp Fiction spends 130 minutes on what is mostly distracting (but undeniably witty) exposition and maybe 20 on the main idea.

Before QT Nation has my car set on fire let me say that I consider Tarantino’s trademark non-linear storytelling to be both his greatest strength as well as his greatest weakness. But in my opinion, its use in Pulp Fiction serves mainly to obscure the fact that there’s really not that much going on. It was used to far greater effect in his first major release, Reservoir Dogs. If you’re a regular visitor to Box Office Prophets, you’re probably a fan of film in general and therefore already familiar with the movie, whether you actually liked it or not. But if your only exposure to Tarantino has been Pulp Fiction or his material since then, you really owe it to yourself to take a look at Reservoir Dogs. Here, he establishes his technique and stamps the project with a hallmark style that for better or worse, will forever imprint his career.

Now, if you already hate Quentin Tarantino, then don’t take my advice; you’ll just hate him even more. But if you’re as fascinated with him as I am – and if you love movies you should be - you will find that everything people adore and everything people despise about him is here in nascent form. And while Pulp Fiction is the movie that made Tarantino famous, Reservoir Dogs is the one that put him on the map. It provided a big boost to the careers of some tremendously deserving talent, it radically changed the landscape of independent cinema for the better and it simply, in my analysis, is a better film.

Where Pulp Fiction is a simple story dressed up in a glossy veneer, Reservoir Dogs is truly a character study, and a gritty, low-budget one at that. The film starts, as does its flashier descendant, with breakfast. Gruff mobster Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney) has decided to treat six of his henchmen to a delicious meal before hustling them off to carry out a jewel heist. Due to the sensitive nature of their criminal relationship, the men are all given code names. Mr. Brown (Tarantino) is in the midst of a dissertation on the true meaning of the Madonna song “Like a Virgin”. Meanwhile, Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) launches into a Marxist rant about the inequity of the proletariat wage scale. Seven mostly irrelevant minutes later, the film launches into the aftermath of the heist. Things have gone terribly wrong, resulting in Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) having been gravely wounded. Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) speeds toward the rendezvous point, doing his best to reassure and comfort his stricken comrade. The scene is surprisingly powerful, especially in light of the fact that we’ve yet to receive any meaningful background on these two characters. And this of course, is where Quentin Tarantino succeeds as often as he fails. It’s the dialogue that makes the scene work; no previous knowledge of the characters is necessary. Sadly, it’ll be a long time before the movie feels that genuine again.

Like Pulp Fiction, the story here is pretty thin – six thieves carry out a jewel heist, and things go badly due to an informant in their midst. Nobody knows the identity of the mole, but as they wait for each other to arrive at the drop site the pieces fall into place, and each anonymous hood finds out more about his partners than he bargained for. The ending is effective, but less surprising than it is just bloody and savage.

The problem is that Tarantino is less a storyteller than he is a guy with a lot of really cool but largely unrelated ideas and he wants them all on screen at once. Such as: “What if Madonna was really singing about penises?” Or: “Waitress is the number one field for female non college graduates.” or “Did you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in Amsterdam?” These are all interesting bits of trivia, and I don’t mean to suggest that they should be omitted from the script of either film. But instead of developing his characters through the natural ebb and flow of the story, Tarantino tends to rely too much on abstract narrative to provide depth instead.

Mr. Pink is a social elitist with a very ordered mind. Mr. White is an old timer whose sense of personal honor sometimes trumps his professionalism. Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) is a nut job nihilist who couldn’t care less who he takes down with him. We know these things because we are shown intermittent vignettes about each man that give us a little insight into the character, but generally do not propel the main events of the film forward. I’m not suggesting that this is an inappropriate way to tell a story. It is very appropriate, and works a hell of a lot better here than it does in Pulp Fiction. But in the hands of a master storyteller like Martin Scorsese, we’d find that the meal served contains more meat then gristle. And while gristle tastes good, trying to make dinner out of it is just going to leave you tired, but still hungry.

A non-continuous story line full of crafty wordplay can be a very powerful narrative tool, but in Tarantino’s hands it is all too often a shortcut meant to add ballast to a lightweight script. The result here isn’t quite as distracting as it is in his later films; Tarantino’s reputation for witty, informative dialogue is well deserved. But allowing your characters to spend too much of a movie’s run time engaged in the sort of pithy back and forth you’d expect to see at a freshman year house party doesn’t constitute character development. QT has also earned his reputation as a knowledgeable film buff but speaking of Scorsese, there’s a fine line between inspiration and homage. In fact, Tarantino has been known to blunt criticism that he hems too closely to his idols by saying just that. But a room full of mobsters sitting around disparaging blacks and Jews over drinks is not just derivative; it simply doesn’t work here, and that’s what really makes it uncomfortable to listen to. Rather than feeling like an insider’s interpretation of gangster life, Tarantino’s words occasionally sound like an affectation designed to push his own adolescent, hyperkinetic thoughts and opinions on his audience. Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t want to get sued any more than I want my car set on fire. I am not here to claim that Quentin Tarantino is a prejudiced man. I’m basically just saying that “homage” is often a code word for “lazy storytelling”, and that Tarantino is not always as clever and witty as he thinks he is.

But are any of us? The creative process is a highly subjective one, so if it sounds like I’m leaning toward dismissing him as a film maker, I’m not. On the one hand, Reservoir Dogs definitely contains both Tarantino’s best and worst tendencies. But he shows tremendous restraint as a first time filmmaker, focusing on his goals and resisting the urge to be unnecessarily gimmicky. I’ll use this chance to publicly thank him for not busting out a dolly zoom, and for keeping the slow motion to a minimum. And even though it doesn’t always work, the out of sequence plot really does give us a window into most of the relevant characters. Mr. Pink’s regimented view of human behavior may be unrealistic, but in a line of work where a strict code of honor defines everything it has allowed him to excel. Mr. Orange is the likable guy that everyone wants on their team because he comes across as winner, and there’s a compelling reason for it. And Mr. White seems less like a killer than he does a good bartender, so despite his years of experience you get the idea he’s been in the wrong line of work all along. And despite all his protestations of wisdom, Mr. Blonde comes to discover that Matthew 26:52 is the only thing a guy like him really needs to know.

In the vacuum that usually follows chaos, people tend to fall into a natural hierarchy based on the personality and moral base of each individual. Being able to see how each man is put together – outside of the narrative itself – goes a long way toward legitimizing their behavior in the context of events leading up to the film’s climax.

In case you’re wondering, the point of spending so much time mentioning Pulp Fiction in a discussion of Reservoir Dogs is because both movies are similar in structure and therefore tend to benefit and suffer from the same issues. It’s almost as though once he had the budget and the clout to remake his first movie the way he’d really wanted to, he decided to simply take another stab at it, but with a slightly different story. But that’s just my own speculation. What’s true is that in the years since, Quentin Tarantino has grown as a film maker. He’s still using the same old tricks, and he’s still prone to the same mistakes but he’s become a slightly better storyteller, and with each film he’s made they’ve almost all been the better for this. And a quick word of warning – violence is a big part of the Tarantino-verse, and it isn’t any different in this movie.

But if you have a problem with bloodshed, I’d suggest that you avoid movies about mobsters in the first place. Reservoir Dogs should be better than it is, but it is still far better than it could have been. And that’s a tip of the hat to its director. But most of all, it’s an illuminating window into the brain of a very flawed but very intelligent film maker who in the years since has evolved – love him or hate him – into one of the most important and influential voices in cinema today.