Older Movies I Re-Watched Recently: Elmore Leonard 90s Double Feature—Jackie Brown (1997) /Out of Sight (1998)

Spoilers Ahoy

I got left without adult supervision recently, and ended up having a late-90s Elmore Leonard double feature of Jackie Brown and Out of Sight. I’d seen both movies when they came out, hadn’t seen either since. They both hold up!

The two make an interesting comparison.

Jackie Brown isn’t anyone’s pick for Tarantino’s best move—it’s the one where people go “oh right, he did that one too!” Pam Grier and Robert Forster had never been better—and neither one would have a part that good again. For everyone else, this is clearly a minor movie in their respective bodies of work. I remember reading a review of Jackie Brown at the time that said something along the lines of “Tarantino could probably make a movie like this every eighteen months for the rest of his life.” And yeah, everyone in this movie has a quality like this is a break between “real” projects. Not that they’re not taking it seriously, but everyone involved already knows what movies are going in the first line of their obituaries, and this isn’t one of them.

With Out of Sight, on the other hand, you get the sense that everyone knows this is the Big One. This is the start of Soderburg’s comeback, Clooney is still “the ER guy”, Lopez is still a b-player. But there’s a swagger to it; maybe the set was riven by anxiety, but overwhelming sense you get from this movie is: everyone knows this is working. This movie cemented Clooney and Lopez as major movie stars. This was easily Soderburg’s best movie to date, and certainly his most successful, since sex, lies, and videotape. After this, he joins the ranks of major directors. This was it, and you can tell they know it. They’re working their butts off and it is paying off.

Both director’s tics are on full display; there are a lot of closeups of Bridget Fonda’s feet; there are a lot of mid-scene freezeframes of Jennifer Lopez.

One of my favorite things about Jackie Brown is how smart everyone is. All the major players, Jackie Brown herself, Michael Keaton’s ATF agent, Sam Jackson, Robert Forster’s bail bondsman, all know what’s going on; they know that there’s a whole series of double-crosses in play, but they’re all used to being the smartest person in the room, and are all confident they still are. To steal a quote from another movie, at the end they all find out who was right, and who was dead.

There’s a scene at the end where ATF agent Ray Nicolette, played by Michael Keaton, realizes both what’s just happened, and how much he’s been played, and then spends a beat quietly replaying the events of the movie, realizing what’s really been going on this whole time. He’s still got a lot of options, Jackie Brown is still in a lot of potential trouble, but she’s also given him a tremendous gift if he’s smart enough to see it. He is. You watch him consider his options, and he takes a breath and decides he’s good, he’s done here. Jackie Brown is free to go.

Structurally, Jackie Brown is one of Tarantino’s least ambitious movies, and to the movie’s benefit. The most sleight of hand the movie does is around that aforementioned smartness; everyone has a plan, and the audience doesn’t get to find out what they are until they happen. There are long stretches where the suspense is the audience wondering “what is happening right now?” whereas the characters all know.

Unlike Jackie Brown, everyone in Out of Sight is dumb. Even the smart characters Clooney and Lopez are playing spend most of the movie doing very dumb things. (The Soderbergh/Clooney movie with vibes closest to Jackie Brown is Ocean’s 11.) There are parts that play more like a Coen Bros movie, but meaner.

Out of Sight starts in what we later learn is the middle of the story and extends forwards and backwards along the character’s relationships. But this isn’t just the same out-of-order storytelling as something like Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction reorganizes events so that the epiphany that drives all the action takes place is in the last scene of the movie. We’ve already seen the reasons for, and consequences of it, and then with Sam Jackson’s last line of dialoge the movie slots into place the reason for everything we’ve just seen.

Out of Sight is doing something altogether different. It’s structured like a memory, not dream logic in the David Lynch sense, but how you would remember these events after the fact.

A specific example: the scene where Lopez and Clooney seduce each other. From a strictly technical sense, the scene is edited as two sets of interleaved flashbacks, the first in the bar, the second in a hotel room. But it all plays as they way you’d remember it later; no one remembers things in strictly linear order, memory tends to be images linked by emotion, so we get a hand on a glass, and then a hand on a thigh, and then a smile—a collage.

(Soderbergh dials this all the way up in his next movie, The Limey, where the entire movie is effectively Terrance Stamp thinking about what’s happened on his flight home afterwards.)

It’s remarkable how good Clooney is here. He was still “the ER guy” at this point, and the way he quietly underplays lines like “I wasn’t asking permission” makes it clear his stardom wasn’t a fluke. Lopez is on fire, managing to land the very tricky mixture of “highly competent agent who always gets their man” and “but this time I’d like to have an affair first.”

Out of Sight is also an incredibly sexy movie, especially for one where basically everyone keeps their clothes on. From the first moment they look at each other, there is absolutely no question about why Lopez and Clooney are doing extremely dumb things to get together; their chemistry positively sizzles, you could practically cook on the heat they give off.

Which makes an interesting contrast to the central romance in Jackie Brown, between Pam Grier and Robert Forster. Their characters are both older, more disappointed, with a longer debris field of personal wreckage. Their almost-a-romance isn’t about heat so much as kindred spirits, they’ve both been disappointed by the same kinds of things. When Lopez and Clooney get separated, the energy is, well, it was fun while it lasted. When Grier walks out of Forster’s office, it’s just terribly sad; one more disappointment for both of them.

They both end on the same sort of “downer-upbeat” vibe; things aren’t great now, but the trend lines are going in the right direction.

On paper, Jackie Brown is much closer to my sensibilities; smart people outwitting each other, good music. But I found 25 years later, I preferred Out of Sight. I don’t have a deep insight here, but I think maybe the older I get the more sympathetic I get for people doing dumb things hoping they’ll work out. They usually don’t, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. But mostly, I thought the movie was just more fun.