Wired Mesh

Batter My Heart, Five-Pointed Palm

And here's the review whose reception I'm most curious about, especially with all the recent Tarantino hubbub. Yep, it's time for a Kill Bill, Vol. 2 review and -- gasp -- I liked the film. Yes, you nattering nabobs of negativism, Quentin Tarantino made a great movie. Here's why:

Quentin Tarantino kills Bill softly in his masterpiece pastiche

By Aaron Mesh
Published in the April 21 edition of the Pulse

Midway through Kill Bill, Vol. 2, Uma Thurman’s character is given a “Texas funeral,” which is a genteelly Southern way of saying that she’s stuffed in a wooden casket and buried alive. Just as we’re dying (ahem) to know how she’ll break out of the tomb – after all, there’s still killing of Bill to be done – the scene shifts to a flashback where David Carradine’s Bill sits by a campfire and relates to Thurman a story about his martial-arts mentor. Any hopes that this will be a brief discursive are dashed as we realize that Bill is taking his sweet time in telling this tale, pausing after every other sentence to play his hand-carved flute. Thurman watches him with a mix of pleasure and frustration: it’s a good story, but she wants to know how it ends, just like we still want to know how she’s doing back in that pine box six feet under the ground. But Bill gets his jollies from the anxiety. The more infuriating his pauses get, the more he lengthens them.

Like Bill, Quentin Tarantino is one twisted son of a gun: that’s the most obvious conclusion that emerges from Kill Bill, Vol. 2, the second half of the director’s martial-arts revenge epic. By this I don’t just mean that Tarantino relishes creating a world where a murderer eliminates her enemy with a black mamba snake’s bite, then sits down to read him an Internet-downloaded report of exactly how the poison is killing him. Tarantino surely does enjoy this universe, but he delights even more in slowly strangling his audience’s expectations for how an action movie should work.

Kill Bill, Vol. 1 was a bloody bucket of instant gratification, as Uma Thurman’s Bride barely paused for breath between hacking limbs and heads off any Yakuza, nurses or housewives who stood between her and Bill, the man who shot her on her wedding day. It was a rush of blood to the head, leaving viewers both elated and slightly queasy. But Vol. 2 puts a screeching stop to the carnage, denying at every turn the audience’s desire, honed by years of lazily-scripted car-chase climaxes, for the release of simple revenge. The revolting trend in action movies of late has been to make the hero suffer as brutally as possible to justify the eventual vengeance he will wreck upon his tormentors. But Tarantino has deftly reversed the shorthand; the Bride gets her “bloody satisfaction” in Vol. 1, and then suffers in Vol. 2.

Once you get in step with Tarantino’s perverse rhythm, however, the second movie has as many joys as the first. It’s a breathtaking cornucopia of moods and genres, borrowing from Hong Kong martial-arts extravaganzas and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns to create something original and powerful. Many critics, whether they liked the film or not, have proudly flaunted their prowess in solving Tarantino’s crossword of references, but they’re missing the point. No knowledge of Tarantino’s sources is needed to savor the liveliness of his filmmaking. He’s in love with every silly thing he puts in his movie, and the pleasure he takes in his craft is infectious. I can think of no other director who could take a concept as unabashedly cheeseball as the Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique and, by the sheer force of his belief in it, transform it into something grand, even sort of sad and moving.

And here is where Kill Bill poses a wonderful dilemma for the moviegoer (like, say, me) who is convinced that one of the greatest virtues of film is helping us to better see the world and the people around us. Tarantino has no interest in the real world or in real people. Everything in his movie is about the thrill and emotional intensity of other movies.

It’s not that the movie is all style and no substance: the heroes and villains in Vol. 1 were merely gore-spattered cartoon characters, but here they have rich, conflicting emotions. Michael Madsen, as a beer-swilling lowlife, and Carradine deliver especially complex performances; we never know what they’ll do next, or whether we’ll love or hate them for it. And Thurman’s work here is spectacular: she starts as a single-minded revenge machine, but her sufferings expand her. Watch her face as she talks to Michael Parks’ slimy pimp, as she realizes what it means to labor under the thumb of a male handler, and you’ll never be able to stomach the Charlie’s Angels girl-power pabulum again.

But as complex as they are, the characters are always behaving according to the logic of the movies. They bear little resemblance to anything but Hollywood icons. This is pure film, a celebration of form and formulas, and while Tarantino digs as deeply into the meaning of movies as he can, he refuses to engage anything outside the theater doors. He rejects anything even tenuously connected to our everyday lives, and we learn nothing from him.

Why, then, do I find myself adoring this movie? Maybe it’s because Kill Bill, Vol. 2 is one of the least cynical movies ever made. Most films are interested neither in real life nor in other movies, but instead in pandering to the audience’s assumptions all the way to a big opening weekend. Tarantino is too passionate about cinema to consider that. When he uses Ennio Morricone’s score from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at his film’s climax, he does so simply because he thinks that the music is wonderful, and he wants to make it seem wonderful to everyone else, too. He uses every trick he knows to immerse the audience in the bliss he feels watching even the goofiest kung-fu flick. So be warned, ye ironists: Quentin Tarantino not only wants to frustrate your expectations and blow your mind, he wants to explode your heart.

Posted by mesh at April 21, 2004 04:08 PM | TrackBack