RESERVOIR DOGS (1992) ★ ★
Quentin Tarantino's directorial debut was a sensation in 1992, and officially launched his long and illustrious career of making far better films. Its violence and foul language made it popular, which I think is an indictment of our morally bankrupt culture. I wasn't sold on "Reservoir Dogs" when I first saw it in the nineties, and my opinion hasn't shifted much since. To me it's a crude story filled with bad characters played by excellent actors, and that last bit is what saves it from the abyss -- or saves the pieces, anyway.
It's a tale about a band of jewel thieves whose best-laid plans go seriously awry. We're introduced to eight men, five of whom are the main players, in a cramped diner. The camera orbits their table until vertigo sets in. The script subjects us to Tarantino's trademark dialogue for what feels like an hour. It amounts to small-talk about Madonna songs and tipping, but it's punctuated with incessant cursing and the strained sense that every utterance bears the speakers' true convictions.
I find this aspect of Tarantino's style annoying, and even boring, simply because the chit-chat is rarely as clever as he thinks it is. But here it successfully renders a rough sketch of who we're dealing with: selfish men with fragile egos that are destined to be shattered. They use color-coded aliases (Mr White, Mr Orange, Mr Pink, etc.) to ensure that nobody knows anyone's real name, a strategy that has spawned a million internet memes. Not wanting to be left out, Tarantino included himself in the group, and he's actually not too shabby an actor. It's too bad he killed off his character early.
We never see the actual jewel heist, but we know it goes wrong. A pastiche of frenetic shots of men running, shooting, driving, bleeding, shouting, and escaping give us that hint. The atmosphere is charged with panic and paranoia, and when the survivors meet at an abandoned warehouse, the stage is set for Michael Madsen as Mr Blonde to shine. He's the only true psychopath in the group, and he suspects one of his color-coded buddies is working on the Blue team. One thing Tarantino has always done well is put his pictures to music, and Blonde's gruesome way of sorting things out is set to Stealers Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle with You." This all ends with a very fifties film-noir massacre, which is fitting, as Quentin cites Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing" (1956) as his main inspiration.
"Reservoir Dogs" was a difficult and expensive film for a first-time director to pull together, especially with big names like Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, and Lawrence Tierney comprising its ensemble cast, and Tarantino deserves credit where it's due in accomplishing this. But what I've never understood about him is his writing process. With all the resources it took to rally this release, why is its plot so paper thin? One would think he would've wanted a more elaborate and interesting story, especially when writing is cheap. The narrative gets ever more anemic as its characters bleed out.
This movie demonstrates one of the fallacies of screenwriting: more talk is more story. "Reservoir Dogs" is dialogue-driven and loaded with conversations between desperate men. Yet little of it actually drives their predicament, and none of it reveals anything interesting about them. It shows their creator lacked interest himself, which raises the question: Why should anyone care?
--- Bill Fontaine
