Film: Quentin loves Jackie. And so do we

DO YOU SAY "Tarantinoesque" or "Tarantinian"? Most of us have a good idea of what makes a film quintessentially Quentin's. If the Zeitgeist was a stick of rock, his initials would probably run through it. And Jackie Brown (15) has all the trademark elements: talkative lowlifes; a script that snuffles through the swill-bucket of pop culture; big-name stars sharing the screen with gloriously rehabilitated has-beens. But it also boasts more traditional cinematic qualities that make it a weightier project than either Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction. It's looser, messier, and shot in a palette of rich, retro-ish browns and beiges. It is less hare-eyed, less eager to please, less concertedly kooky. And in place of colour-coded cartoon figures or one-note zanies, Jackie Brown offers characters who might have inner lives, hidden motivations. They might even (get this!) be real human beings.

Tarantino's respect for his star, Pam Grier, is principally responsible for this shift in tone. Once the queen of the Seventies blaxploitation flick, Grier is this film's reason to exist. The script is as much a homage to her career as an adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch. The crime-thriller plot - at once devilishly complex and magnificently irrelevant - relates how Jackie, an air stewardess and smuggler, double- crosses her gun-running boss (Samuel L Jackson), his dopehead surf-chick moll (Bridget Fonda), their shifty partner (Robert De Niro), and a skittish detective (Michael Keaton). Despite the starry cast, Grier is the centre of attention. Tarantino gazes upon her with a mixture of awed deference and adolescent horniness, as if she's some friend of his mother's on whom he's got a terrific crush: he's besotted with her fag-toking, frazzled, filled-out glamour, but he' s also terrified by her grown-upness, her big-haired, bosomy, Mrs Robinsonian savoir-faire. His camera gloats over details like the impressive vinyl collection in Jackie's living room, and lingers on Grier's lopsided, lipsticked mouth; but Tarantino is careful not to get too close. Jackie has a coffee mug in her kitchen that bears the Albanian national emblem, but nobody asks her if she ever went to Tirana: Tarantino lets her keep her secrets. Her name is the title, her face is on the poster, and the script allows her to outwit mean mutha Jackson as if he's some snit homeboy. You don't mess with her.

It's not just Grier's star status that Tarantino takes delight in resurrecting. With a generosity that must put him in the bedtime prayers of every faded player, he's cast Denise Crosby from Star Trek: The Next Generation as Jackie's lawyer, and Robert Forster - a C-list leading man whose most recent box-office success was Alligator (1980) - as her disillusioned bail bondsman and sole confidante. The strategy pays off - Forster is quite brilliant, bringing to bear on his performance the weariness of his years in TV hell.

And Tarantino is also willing to take liberties with bankable stars like Robert De Niro and Bridget Fonda. He makes Fonda drink body-builders' protein milk-shake straight from the blender jug, and lets us see every freckle and fold of adipose tissue on her body. And who else would dare to stick Robert De Niro in the background of a scene, fiddling with a jar of instant coffee? Nobody, I'd guess, but the director of Jackie Brown. It's this attitude that makes his film so satisfyingly cool, so full of sweet regard for its careworn heroine, and so distinctively the work of a substantial talent. That's why there's something called the Tarantinoesque. Or the Tarantinian. Or whatever. MS