True Romance (Film Review)

1993 Warner Bros. Pictures
Directed by: Tony Scott; Written by: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, and Christopher Walken
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 118 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 6/10

Clarence's ideal human interaction is meeting a woman at a bar, giving her a ten minute monologue about how much he loves Elvis, then leaving to go see three movies by himself...or at least, Clarence thinks that's his ideal human interaction. On this particular visit to the theater, and on his birthday of all days, a beautiful, kind of spaced out woman literally falls into his lap, spilling popcorn everywhere. The duo end up hanging out all night, both finding it to be the best one of their life. There's just one problem: this woman, Alabama, despite truly loving Clarence now, was paid to be with him that night. Turns out she's a call girl...and her pimp is crazy. Still, overwhelmed by apparently true romance, the two get married, and things go swimmingly for a day or two, before Clarence follows an impulse, and makes a violent statement against the pimp, sending Clarence and Alabama on the run to the West Coast...with a giant suitcase of cocaine.
When it comes to 1993's True Romance, I often find myself breaking the film into a list of pros and cons, as I struggle to determine how I actually feel about it. Tony Scott's kinetic, dead blue light to warm golden light direction is quite good. He's almost a decade into his film-directing career here, and he knows what he's doing. While Scott's hand is even, Quentin Tarantino's screenwriting is a bit shaky. This script, Tarantino's first for a major motion picture, features sequences of dialogue that are inarguably lovely, but also many that feel unnatural, particularly when any character sports more than four straight sentences, and seems to transform into the screenwriter himself. Characters often don't feel like any sort of real person with any kind of inner life. Then again, the wildness he gives them allows a pretty stunning cast of characters to go nuts with the material. Gary Oldman puts in a career craziest performance, in particular, and character actors, like the wonderful Bronson Pinchot get to dig deep into their favorite bags of tricks. No one can say this movie isn't well cast.
At the same time, I don't think anyone could ever convince me that Dennis Hopper's character's racist, seemingly endless, N-word packed centerpiece monologue here is in anyway necessary. It doesn't fly now, and it shouldn't have flown in 1993. Actually, there aren't many racial epithets that go unsaid in this film. If a new people group appears onscreen, it simply becomes expected someone will call them by a derogatory term. 

But then again, as he often does in his best work, Tarantino fills the last act of True Romance with unexpected grace notes. Who would have thought a scene where Christian Slater waxes rhapsodic with a coked out movie producer could engender so many positive feelings? 

As a whole, though, this script isn't anywhere near Tarantino's best. His greatest and worst impulses are all here, living together. However, and maybe it's just that ending, but I think when it comes to True Romance, the good impulses barely, and I mean BARELY edge out the negative ones. It's an okay flick with some serious issues, but if its eccentricities scratch your cinematic itch, you might be loving this film far more than I do.