Last week, the Almost There series featured the likely sixth-placer in the 1997 Best Supporting Actress Oscar race. However, as much as Sigourney Weaver seemed poised for Academy recognition, hers wasn't the year's biggest snub. That sad honor belongs to Pam Grier, whose star turn in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown earned nearly-unanimous critical praise and sturdy precursor support. Like John Travolta before her, she was a movie icon from two decades prior now fallen from the spotlight, an erstwhile star reintroduced within the context of a verbose acting showcase with modern verve. So if Travolta scored a nod for Pulp Fiction, why didn't Grier do the same with Jackie Brown?
The answers to that question are many and most dispiriting, especially if, like me, you find Jackie Brown to be one of its director's best films. That love extends to Grier, whose lack of an Oscar nomination stands out as one of the Academy's greatest injustices in the 90s…
Like an apparition from the grainy rainbow of 70s blaxploitation cinema, Pam Grier enters Jackie Brown gliding across a wall of multicolored mosaics in the Los Angeles Airport. The cinematography, costume design, and music all point towards understanding this woman as a piece of iconography – film history and character juxtaposed. And yet, as the credits go on, it's as if Tarantino and Grier move Jackie away from abstracted symbolism to messy humanity. She begins in poised stillness, a magazine editorial in the flesh. Then, the woman starts hurrying, composure ever so slightly broken by the fear of being late. She doesn't break a sweat, but nervousness is evident as she flashes a perfect smile.
In these opening minutes, we, as an audience, learn how to read Jackie Brown, both the movie and the figure. There's the first layer of rarefied glamour, a lie sold through movie star charisma and supported by the celluloid apparatus. Beneath it, there's personhood, human specificity that lives in the shadow out of necessity, out of a survival strategy the text will elaborate on as the plot unfolds. This is a movie about deception. While watching, one is encouraged to consider how many truths coexist and how a signifier can lead the viewers and characters to wrong conclusions or misdirection. Just take a look at our protagonist.
Jackie is a vision of confidence in her marine blue air stewardess uniform, calm and professional, impossibly magnetic. Who would suspect this ideal of lady-like respectability of smuggling money from Mexico into the States for a Los Angeles gun runner cum drug dealer?
Though she'll later prove herself a master of double-crossing, Jackie hasn't achieved such expertise this early, as it becomes apparent when police intercept the smuggler. It happens in the airport's parking lot, a mini spectacle of collapsing coolness as the cops find 50 000 dollars and a bag of cocaine in her luggage. Lighting a cigarette, holding on to it like a lifeline, and striking a pose, Grier maneuvers through a panoply of micro-reactions that ensure we know just how helpless the character currently is. My favorite detail is maybe the wavering smile that trembles between lines as if she's recalibrating her expression when, deep inside, her mind's trying to find a solution to this setup.
Frustrations accumulate as the woman's taken to the station and forbidden from smoking during interrogation. Grier is an expert at delineating the cracks in a tough façade, saying much with the spasm of a frowned lip, an arched eyebrow dripping with disdain. When the men further trap her, their spiel growing perilously personal, a dead calm settles over Miss Brown. She's a wild thing backed into the corner of a cage, powerless but mutinously mute in the face of their pressure. From then on, everything turns more complicated. Ordell Robbie, her criminal boss, bails her out and, a few hours later, is ready to kill the bailee to secure her eternal silence.
Trapped once more, she comes up with a scheme – pretending to aid the authorities while smuggling Robbie over half a million in cash. It's a risky plot, but it's the only way she'll get out of it alive and, eventually, rich. The night Jackie gets out of jail, thus provides Grier with numerous actorly challenges. First, she has to telegraph the toll of prison, the fear of lengthy incarceration, and Jackie's exhaustion. Grier does this through insularity, closing herself even more while showing new openness with Robert Forster's Max Cherry, the stewardess' bail bondsman. The seeds of middle-aged romance are planted in a prelude to Robbie's attempted hit, which demands shrewd thriller acting from the leading lady.
The tension is palpable, almost suffocating, heightened by Guillermo Navarro's color noir cinematography and Sally Menke's sharp cutting. As Jackie pulls a gun on the gun runner and talks her way out of being strangled, the ghosts of Grier's past tough broads come to the forefront. That being said, their characteristics are combined with deeper pockets of psychological realism, dramaturgical complications that enrich her work. Such enrichment continues in the morning after, when Cherry returns for the gun Jackie purloined under his nose, and the two talk about aging. Like Sean Burns wrote in a 2015 piece about Jackie Brown, it's "the oldest movie ever made by a 34-year-old" – something hard to refute when considering the scenes shared between Grier and Forster.
All these years later, it remains Tarantino's most mature work. Sure, more movies came after, some deeply informed by their director's age. For example, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood may be an old man's movie through and through. Still, its potential maturity is tempered by nostalgia, and the memory of youth materialized by the recovered past. In Grier's portrayal of the title character, Jackie Brown also dwells in memories of times gone by. However, neither characterization nor the movie breathes fake life into what is gone. Instead, they drown in yearning, almost get drunk on it, combating the intoxication with sobriety born out of pragmatism, a realistic perspective of life.
A tricky balance act, it's only possible or legible because of Grier, who embodies the scripted complexities and adds some of her own to the mix. She underplays moments one would expect to be emphasized, going through Jackie's webs of manipulation with unwavering even-headed cool, perhaps a hint of aloofness and a provocative appeal to temptation. Casual interactions are understated, though more illuminating with glimmers of contradictions, vulnerability with a potential ally, or compassion for a fragile girl. In a weird paradox, lies feel flatly genuine while actual truths tremble with whispered clutter.
In a scene of unexpected serenity, Jackie contemplates her reflection during the movie's mall-set climax. She's just been called a badass by the store clerk and looks like the picture in a smart black pantsuit. Nevertheless, her eyes denounce a chance of doubt, a spark of anxiety that will be exaggerated to high heavens to fool those cops. Maybe she's a natural badass. Maybe she's someone who's had to be one for so long, pretending along the way that she's taught herself to believe the illusion. Maybe she's tired of it all and wants peace, or perhaps the thrill of a sting is its own kind of high. Maybe that's all true, and nothing is.
Grier presents these many possibilities, forcing them to coalesce and make sense under a mask of steely conviction. Interrogated by the agents after the operation's gone wrong, news of two murders shake that impervious front. Once again, the multitudes of Jackie Brown force the actress to make antithesis into synonymous interlockings. This time, it's fearlessness and utter fright, a combination repeated when Robbie comes calling with vengeful intent. Here, though, Tarantino allows us to see the foundations of Jackie's outward strength, her rehearsals. Even then, some things are hidden from the spectator to get cleared up later.
Only in her last scene, heading towards a new life, does Grier allow Jackie Brown to be absolutely genuine, tender, and hopeful. But, in the end, there's also a disappointment, a bittersweet note to mark the film's finale. It's an aching coda to an absolute tour de force, a final show of movie star magnetism in service of devastating character work. No wonder Tarantino chose to conclude this exquisite piece of cinema on Grier's face, vibrant in a close-up that suggests everything by doing close to nothing. Pam Grier's mere existence in front of the lens is enough after all she's done with the role of a lifetime. If that's not Oscar-worthy, what is?
One factor that makes Grier's unnominated status so painful – beyond the performance's quality – is how likely a nominee she seemed. During the season, the star earned nominations for the SAG, the Golden Globe, Saturn Award, Golden Satellite, the Image Award, and a slew of critics' honors. That's more than some of the year's Oscar champions. Alas, AMPAS' Best Actress nominees were Helena Bonham Carter in The Wings of the Dove, Julie Christie in Afterglow, Judi Dench in Mrs. Brown, Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets, and Kate Winslet in Titanic. Hunt won the Academy Award in the end, while Christie was the surprise inclusion that cost Grier her place in the lineup. To this day, Pam Grier has never been nominated for an Oscar. So maybe it's time to consider her a candidate for the Honorary.
Jackie Brown is streaming on HBO Max, HBO, Max Go, DirecTV, and Spectrum On Demand. You can also find it in several other services available to rent or purchase.