Reservoir Dogs (1992, Quentin Tarantino) (Patreon)

92/100

Generally speaking, I'm not someone who obsessively watches a new favorite movie again and again during its theatrical release. Rare indeed are cases in which I've made a return trip to the multiplex more than once...and when I have, it's usually been as part of a group (my high school clique, consumed by a combination of awe and senioritis, made a weekly pilgrimage to Brazil throughout early '86) or because I kept dragging different friends to see something singular (hence five viewings of Memento between September 2000 and March 2001, two of which were on consecutive days).

Reservoir Dogs was different. Because I didn't start logging repeats until '96, there's no way to confirm how many times I caught Tarantino's debut at what was then the Loews Village VII (in NYC, Third Ave. at 11th) over the fall of '92, but I'm pretty sure that six is the minimum number. Might've been more like eight or nine. Whenever I had a few hours to kill, I'd head back..and always by myself, as I'd moved to New York from California just two months previously and had yet to make any real friends there. It was as if I literally couldn't believe that I'd seen the emergence, in real time, of a pantheon filmmaker, and felt driven to re-confirm the movie's greatness over and over, like a scientist running multiple trials. While Reservoir Dogs was a decent-sized arthouse hit in the U.S., Tarantino didn't fully "happen" here (as opposed to the U.K.) until Pulp Fiction, an exponentially bigger phenomenon. He had happened for me, though. Would've bet all future lunches on him becoming exactly who he is. 

(I'm not always that perspicacious, please note. Saw Hard Eight during its original run, pre-Boogie Nights, and had no such intimations. Following intrigued me enough that I saw Memento at TIFF 2000, but the latter actually wasn't on my original fest schedule. Didn't see Wes! coming in '96. Etc.)

So what was it? Gotta say, more than 30 years later, this movie still looks more impressive to my eyes than almost every low-budget indie film that I've seen since. The opening scene's then-novel focus on pop-culture minutiae has since become so pervasive that it can seem a bit tiresome now (and I was always more amused by the debate about tipping—complete with Mr. White unexpectedly spouting progressive stats about non-college-educated working-class women—than by the "Like a Virgin" exegesis, though that's probably Tarantino's most tolerable performance)...but look at how it's visually orchestrated, the deftness with which Andrzej Sekula's constantly circling camera (in numerous separate short arcs, not one continuous orbit) obstructs and reveals faces throughout the entire lengthy conversation. Tarantino being Tarantino, he probably lifted that idea from some obscure '70s film (or maybe Hannah and Her Sisters), but the execution is flawless. Nor does the level of formal invention dip once we're (mostly) confined to a single location. Apart from the merciful/horrible pan away from Mr. Blonde's ear surgery (which was really just covering for an attempted gory prosthetic effect that looked way too fake), and maybe the stutter-step opening-credits strut, there's nothing flashy or ostentatious here. Just a lot of perfectly judged moments—the match cut from long shot to medium shot that occurs midway through Mr. White struggling to light his Zippo; the slow pullback from that iconic shot of Mr. Pink lying on his back, gun pointed at Mr. White, that finally reveals Mr. Blonde quietly observing their fracas—crafted by someone with an encyclopedically intuitive (I say it's not oxymoronic) understanding of the medium. 

Pretty decent screenwriter, too. I'm not inclined to re-litigate the whole City on Fire accusation, a source of immense tedium on Usenet newsgroups in the mid-'90s. Watched Lam's film in [checks log] 1995 and concluded that every element Tarantino borrowed, he made fully his own—not too surprising, really, since he more or less expanded City on Fire's climactic sequence into an entire feature, utilizing largely original flashbacks for backstory. In particular, I've always found the Orange-White relationship orders of magnitude deeper than that of Ko and Fu, despite Mr. Orange's unconscious state for almost the entire first hour. (Orange shoots Blonde 59 minutes and 43 seconds into the movie. Among the great cold-water shocks of my moviegoing life, but I analyzed that whole sequence in a Scenic Routes column years ago.) Somehow, Tarantino, Keitel and Roth manage to construct the film's emotional nucleus in just a few minutes at the beginning and the end; it may sound odd to say of something so notoriously profane and violent, but it's Orange's intense panic and fear at the outset (love the way his barely coherent screams are slowly mixed into the opening credits, competing briefly with "Little Green Bag"), along with White's surprising tenderness in response, that make Reservoir Dogs more than the superficial exercise in loquacious gangster chic that it's frequently relatively dismissed as. I can't think offhand of another criminal-world movie that depicts a gunshot victim—someone we're generally meant to perceive as at least somewhat badass (magnificent bit #367, Freddy to his mirror reflection before going fully undercover: "They don't know shit. You're not gonna get hurt. You're fuckin' Baretta, they believe every fuckin' word, 'cause you're supercool")—as genuinely distraught, rather than bearing up "manfully."* And if there's a single Eureka! instant cementing my conviction that this is a masterpiece, it's Mr. White taking the time to gently comb Mr. Orange's hair while whispering reassurances. Thanks to that gesture and others, when Orange makes his confession, and White utters the patented Harvey Keitel Moan Of Pure Existential Anguish, I truly feel their pain in my own gut. 

It also helps to counterbalance the aspect of Reservoir Dogs that I don't love, which is the evident glee Tarantino takes in his characters' racism, misogyny, homophobia, so forth. All of which is defensible as realism, or would be were the dialogue not otherwise so stylized; if you're having someone toss the 'n' word around because that's how that guy would talk in real life, maybe he shouldn't also be casually rattling off sentence construction like "I used to work minimum wage, and when I did, I wasn't lucky enough to have a job that society deemed tipworthy." In any case, parts of this, e.g. the whole Mr. Blonde flashback, do grate on me just a bit, especially knowing that Tarantino would subsequently keep that shit up for decades. Same way that the Pulp Fiction tracking shot that introduces Mia by following her bare feet plays differently now than it did in 1994, when we didn't yet know that it's fetish-motivated. It's not a dealbreaker for me, but it's the main reason my rating is "only" a 92.

Jesus, I haven't even touched upon how fantastic the entire ensemble excepting Tarantino himself is. (Buscemi has never been better.) Or mentioned the dizzying evolution of the commode story, from introduction to memorization to rehearsal to delivery to imagined visualization, with the last two actually combined at one point. (Surprised in retrospect that I didn't choose that for Scenic Routes, if only to praise the actor who played the sheriff telling his fake-amusing-anecdote-within-the-fake-amusing-anecdote: "Buddy. I am gonna shoot you in the face.") Or noted that Tarantino was not only dusting off semi-forgotten '70s hits from the very beginning—I already knew "Stuck in the Middle" and "Hooked on a Feeling" and the delightfully-counterintuitive-as-a-closer "Coconut," was at that time unfamiliar with "Little Green Bag"and "I Gotcha")—but thought to actually sort of structure the film around them, using Steven Wright as an ideally phlegmatic DJ. I'm willing to entertain the argument that Pulp Fiction is an objectively superior achievement**, by virtue of being just as accomplished and considerably more ambitious, and you'd best believe that the five months between its winning the Palme d'Or and arriving in theaters were some of the longest I've ever endured. Still, Reservoir Dogs blew me away first, and a relationship as intense as the one I had with this film in that long-ago fall of 1992 sticks with you.

* Actually, the closest analogue that leaps to mind, albeit with almost the opposite effect, is Stuntman Mike's late freakout in Death Proof, which perhaps not coincidentally is another of my top-tier Tarantinos. 

** But I will fight the Actually It's Jackie Brown (or Kill Bill, or Basterds, or OUATIH; surely there's nobody who considers either Django or Hateful Eight his single best work) contingent unto my dying breath.