Friday, August 2, 2013

Death Proof (2007)

Director: Quentin Tarantino                            Writer: Quentin Tarantino
Music Supervisor: Rachel Levy                      Cinematography: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Kurt Russell, Zoe Bell, Vanessa Ferlito and Sydney Poitier

If you weren’t around in the seventies and didn’t go to double features at the run-down local theater or the drive-in, this is as close as you can get to that experience. Everything about part one of Death Proof reeks of seventies teen exploitation films, right down to the distressed print, the jump cuts, the color saturation and the production design. And yet . . . there are still cell phones and ATMs that let us know it’s not 1973. Quentin Tarantino is the master of genre, that is, the study of style in genre and is able to credibly recreate the look and feel of exploitation films while at the same time making them far more artistically viable than the films that inspired him. It’s a tremendous feat and one that, with the exception of his writing, has gone relatively unacknowledged by mainstream Hollywood.

The film stars Kurt Russell, himself an icon of seventies films, though mostly of the Disney variety. Here he plays a serial killer whose choice of murder weapon is a car. As “Stuntman” Mike, he is able to customize cars so that they are able to withstand tremendous impact. When he finds his quarry, and can get them out on the road, he maneuvers them into head-on collisions with him in order to kill them. He, on the other hand, receives only minor injuries. The first half of the film is done in full pseudo-seventies style with everything recreated down to the camera angles and lighting. It’s an impressive piece of film manipulation and one wishes that he would have been able--or had the desire--to adhere to that vision throughout the film. As it is, the two halves bifurcate the film instead of making the two episodes part of a unified whole.

The second half begins in a crisp, sixties black and white before shifting to a rather pedestrian straight color film with a distinctly modern feel. It’s an interesting choice that really doesn’t work for me. The seventies homage is so beautiful that the rest of the film is almost disappointing by comparison. The one false note in the script is in the fist half of the film when two young guys are talking at the bar and notice Kurt Russell for the first time. They begin making jokes about seventies, red-neck TV shows like B.J. and the Bear and films like Smokey and the Bandit and Stroker Ace. On its own it would have been okay but a couple of scenes later, when Russell is telling a group of girls the same age as the boys about his TV show stunts, he asks if they’ve heard of any of the shows and they all shake their heads, making the guy’s knowledge that much more unbelievable. But those are minor quibbles. Taken as a whole the film is a powerful experience and the nostalgia factor in the first half intensifies that effect even more.

In her review of the film in The B List, Stephanie Zacharek discusses the film in terms of the shared experience of movie going that has been lost with the advent of VCRs and DVD players. That aspect would, of course, be the only thing missing from the complete experience. But without the big old run-down theaters or dusty drive-ins to share those films in, the experience can never be exactly the same as it was. She compares Tarantino to the ageing stuntman that Russell portrays, using as an example the same scene with the girls who don’t know the references--somehow missing the boys who apparently do--and wonders out loud if his references will become increasingly lost on younger generations. I think they already have, but I also don’t think it matters. Great cinema never needs an explanation and, like lost allusions in great literature, one doesn’t necessarily need to understand them to sense the greatness of the work. And that’s one thing Quentin Tarantino will always be: great. Death Proof is just another example.

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