Pulp Fiction (1994)

Official trailer

A Royale with Cheese

Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield drive across Los Angeles in the morning, on their way to kill some college kids who’ve crossed their boss.

What do they talk about? Burgers. Vincent has just come back from Amsterdam, and he explains that in Paris, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is called a Royale with Cheese, because of the metric system. Jules is hooked.

Then they walk into an apartment, eat a kid’s burger, quote scripture and blow people away. Nobody had ever made a crime film like that, where the talk matters as much as the plot and the violence arrives in the middle of a sentence about fast food.

Quentin Tarantino made Pulp Fiction in 1994, two years after Reservoir Dogs, and it took the Palme d’Or at Cannes, made a fortune on a tiny budget and turned him into the most imitated director of the decade.

This is my kind of movie from the burger talk on. I could listen to these people argue about foot massages for another two hours, and the violence hits harder because I’ve been enjoying their company. It’s a 10, and the only thing I’d take out is a word Tarantino couldn’t stop using.

Out of Order

The film tells three main stories, and a couple of smaller ones, out of chronological order.

Vincent takes his boss’s wife out for the evening. A boxer named Butch refuses to throw a fight. Jules and Vincent have a very bad morning after a job. The stories overlap, characters wander between them, and the film opens and closes in the same diner at the same moment.

The scrambled structure justifies itself. It lets Tarantino end the film on a moment of grace instead of death, and it means a character who dies in one story is alive and walking out of the diner in the last scene. The effect is dizzying and oddly moving, and it made nonlinear storytelling fashionable for years.

Jules

Samuel L. Jackson plays Jules, and it’s the role that made him a star. He’s funny, frightening and philosophical, a hitman in a Jheri curl who delivers a fierce, invented passage of scripture before he kills people. His scenes crackle with energy, and every line he speaks became quotable.

Jules also has the film’s real arc. After a man empties a gun at him and Vincent from close range and misses every shot, Jules decides he’s witnessed a miracle and that God is telling him to quit. Vincent thinks it’s a fluke. The argument between them about divine intervention is funny, and Jules’s decision is sincere. In the final scene, Jules has the chance to kill again and chooses not to. It’s the only real redemption in the film, and Jackson plays it beautifully. He earned an Oscar nomination. He should have won.

Vincent and Mia

John Travolta plays Vincent, and the film revived a career that had collapsed into talking-baby movies. He’s relaxed, slightly dopey and oddly charming, a heroin-using hitman who’s very bad at avoiding trouble.

His boss, Marsellus Wallace, asks him to take his wife, Mia, out for the evening while he’s away. Uma Thurman plays Mia, and she’s cool, playful and dangerous. They go to Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a fifties-themed restaurant with waiters dressed as dead movie stars, and they win a dance contest doing the twist to Chuck Berry. Film has few dance scenes as famous.

The twist contest is my favorite scene in the film. Travolta, fresh off a career everybody had written off, dances with Thurman in a restaurant full of fake movie stars, and both of them look like they’re having the night of their lives. Then she mistakes his heroin for cocaine and nearly dies before the night is out, and the jolt works because the film gives no warning.

Then Mia finds Vincent’s heroin in his coat pocket, thinks it’s cocaine and overdoses. The frantic drive to his dealer’s house, and the adrenaline shot straight into her heart, is horrifying and darkly funny in equal measure.

The Gold Watch

The film’s middle story belongs to Bruce Willis as Butch, a boxer who’s been paid by Marsellus to lose a fight and wins instead, killing his opponent, and tries to skip town. It starts with a flashback: Christopher Walken, as an Air Force officer, delivers a gold watch to young Butch and tells him the long, deadpan story of how his father and grandfather protected it through two wars. The punchline is unforgettable.

Walken’s watch speech is the funniest monologue in the picture, and it works because he delivers every absurd detail with a perfectly straight face. I’d sit through a whole movie of him telling stories to children who shouldn’t be hearing them.

Butch’s story takes a sharp, dark turn when he and Marsellus end up captured in the basement of a pawnshop by two sadists. The scene is disturbing, and Tarantino shocks the audience with how suddenly the film’s playful tone can turn. Butch escapes, then goes back to save the man who wanted him dead, choosing a samurai sword from the shop wall to do it.

It’s Butch’s moment of honor, and it’s also the moment Marsellus lets him go.

Marsellus

Ving Rhames plays Marsellus Wallace, the crime boss everybody in the film works for or fears, and for most of the running time we see him only from behind, with a strange bandage on the back of his neck. He’s a presence more than a character, a man whose name makes other men sweat.

When he finally steps into the story, in Butch’s section, he’s knocked down by a car, chased through the streets, captured and assaulted, and saved by the man he wanted dead. Rhames plays the aftermath with stunned, furious dignity. His decision to let Butch go, as long as he leaves town and keeps quiet, is one of the film’s quiet grace notes, the second of its unexpected mercies.

The Wolf

When Vincent accidentally shoots a man in the back seat of Jules’s car, they need help, fast.

Enter Winston Wolf, played by Harvey Keitel, a fixer in a tuxedo who arrives in minutes, drinks coffee, gives orders and solves everything. He’s calm, polite and completely in control, and his comic timing is perfect from an actor who’d played it deadly straight in Reservoir Dogs. Keitel is my favorite surprise in the whole cast. He walks into a car full of blood, asks for coffee, and I relax right along with everybody on screen.

The Wolf sequence is also Tarantino at his funniest: the gruesome clean-up, the argument over whose towels are ruined, Tarantino himself playing the annoyed homeowner who’s more worried about his wife coming home than about the body in his garage.

The Diner

Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, two small-time robbers played by Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer, open and close the film by deciding to hold up a diner. At the end, we discover that Jules and Vincent were eating breakfast in that same diner.

The final standoff, with Jules sitting calmly while a nervous robber points a gun at him, is the best scene Tarantino ever wrote.

Jules recites his scripture again, but this time he explains what it means, and what he’s decided to be. He lets the robbers go, with money from his own wallet. The film ends with Jules and Vincent walking out, alive, into the morning.

Talk

Tarantino’s dialogue is the heart of Pulp Fiction. His characters talk about burgers, foot massages, television pilots, pot bellies and pie, and the conversations are funny, rambling and full of personality. They sound like real people, only sharper, and they make even the minor characters vivid.

There are also problems in its language. Tarantino uses a racial slur repeatedly, including in his own cameo, and critics, notably Spike Lee, called it out. That’s the one black mark on this movie, and it’s worst in the cameo, where the director puts the word in his own mouth for no reason the scene needs. It’s a real blemish on a great script.

The Soundtrack

It has no original score. Instead, Tarantino filled it with surf rock, soul and old pop, from Dick Dale’s Misirlou over the opening credits to Dusty Springfield, Al Green, Urge Overkill and Chuck Berry. The music defines the film’s mood as much as the dialogue does, and the soundtrack album was a huge hit.

Misirlou over the opening credits is still the best needle drop I know. The surf guitar hits and the film’s whole attitude arrives before a single character says a word. The choice started a fashion. For years afterward, every crime film seemed to have a jukebox full of vintage songs, and none of them used them as well as Tarantino.

Its Legacy

Pulp Fiction made independent film mainstream. It was made for around eight million dollars and earned more than two hundred million, it made Miramax a powerhouse, and it launched a decade of fast-talking, violent, nonlinear crime films, most of them much worse.

It won the Oscar for best original screenplay, for Tarantino and Roger Avary, and it’s been endlessly quoted, parodied and studied. Thirty years later, it’s still thrilling to watch, and it still feels completely fresh.

Craft Note

Is Pulp Fiction (1994) worth watching?

I give Pulp Fiction a 10, and I don’t have to think hard about it.

It’s funny, violent and endlessly quotable, it rewired American movies, and it gave Samuel L. Jackson the role he should have won the Oscar for. Travolta’s comeback, Uma Thurman’s Mia and a structure that ends on Jules choosing mercy put it over the top for me. The slur costs it something in my eyes without costing it a point, and thirty years on I’d still put it ahead of every crime film that tried to copy it.

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