Black History Month: Pulp Fiction (1994)
Tuesday, February 24, 2015 at 4:38PM Our Black History Month through the lens of Oscar continues with Jason on Samuel L. Jackson...
If you'd like a master class in screen-acting (not to mention a Minor in Pronouncing Vulgarity in New & Unique Ways) then you couldn't do much better than by studying the two times Sam Jackson's called upon to recite his character's favorite Bible scripture, Ezekiel 25:17, in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. The scenes essentially bookend the film with Jules holding an audience captive through just the conviction of his delivery. Hardly the last time Sam would manage that feat.
Oh and okay yes in Pulp Fiction he's also got a gun, always a gun. But mostly it's the delivery! He makes that gun practically melt away until all you can see are his intense "Gremlin eyes" (actual quote from Entertainment Weekly) staring at you from under that dark cloud of Jheri-curl, and as he speaks you sink deeper and deeper under the spell of those words - at the film's beginning we find ourselves sinking into horror and despair as we realize he's delivering our eulogy, bang bang. And then, appropriately given the film's upended chronology, at the film's end he gives Pumpkin & Honey-Bunny a new full-walleted lease on life and he embraces his own future, a newfound walker of the Earth to be. The beginning is the end, and vice versa. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides..."
Samuel L. Jackson was already 22 years into his acting career by the time Tarantino wrote him the part that would come to define him, not to mention give him his only-to-date Oscar nomination. (Shameful fact, that latter bit.) He'd auditioned for a part in Reservoir Dogs and been passed over, but then QT saw the nimble magic Sam was working for Spike Lee in Mo Better Blues and Jungle Fever (the 1991 Cannes jury actually created a Supporting Actor award just to give Jackson's performance as the drug addict Gator in the latter film a statue) and knew he had to have him. And it was a match made in profanity heaven.
And it's all in those two scenes, start and end, end and start, with the wide-ranging journey we take dodging magic bullets and acts of god hanging in between. In Sam Jackson's Gremlin eyes (thanks again, Entertainment Weekly) the path of righteousness is forged - on the one side bloody mayhem, on the other a spiritual quest, with nobody balancing the two halves of Quentin's beautiful mumbo-jumbo much better before or since. "Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness." Be our shepherd, Sam Jackson. We shall never want.
Reader Comments (8)
Probably my favorite performance of all time right here. He's just so great AND funny. The dialogue soars.
LOVE that performance. He deserved a Best Actor nomination for that one, not supporting- which he got. He was not supporting Travolta.
I have been meaning to rewatch this movie for a long time but whenever i do i get hung up on just watching specific scenes and they are usually the pumpkin/honeybunny and mia wallace scenes so I don't end up obsessed with this performance.
still i remember it being very strong and in any year other than ED WOOD i bet he would have won.
Speaking of I am running a poll over at MNPP asking people which performance they'd have voted for - Landau in Ed Wood or Sam in Pulp - and it's actually pretty close!
I would have voted for Martin Landau (also in 89).
Landau was not my initial choice having not seen his film at the time of the Academy Awards. But subsequently after falling in love with Ed Wood. I cannot in good conscious go for Jackson over Landau. Sam's lack of subsequent award season love is partially his fault. The rest is a conversation that could use a rest around this parts for the time being.
If there were any justice, he would've been nominated and won for Jungle Fever. Still towers above everything he's done, including Pulp.
Thank you, Peggy Sue and NewMoonSun.