"Kill Bill Vol. 2" confirms what we already knew: Quentin Tarantino is the reel deal, a cinematic original. Love them or hate them, his films don't look or sound or move like anyone else's in the world. Because "Pulp Fiction" helped build the house of Miramax, he enjoys the patronage of Harvey Weinstein, allowing him the unique luxury of close-to-complete control of his work. No assembly-line art here.Marking his own sweet time and talent, Tarantino sees his life and films as wholecloth, consciously patterning them after the careers of the auteurs - Howard Hawks, William Witney, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, to name some - who made him.
An enfant as terrible in his way as was Orson Welles, Q.T. combines the arrogance, innocence and isolation of genius. Full-hearted, he invites you into his meticulously designed funhouses - Escher-like mazes of genre, style, "sampling" from his favorite movies - and cannot begin to imagine your not having a really cool time there.
"Kill Bill Vol. 2" concludes the chopsocky, spaghetti Western, blaxploitation, stylized-to-the-max saga of Beatrix Kiddo, a.k.a. The Bride, a.k.a. Black Mamba (Uma Thurman) that, for viewers, began last October. Falling pregnant, this world-class assassin decides to raise her daughter in the world of ordinary folk, far from her ruthless lover Bill (David Carradine) and his coven of women warriors. Bill won't have it, and he and his crew massacre The Bride and her wedding party. But Beatrix rises, not once but many times, to take her revenge on Bill's "family" - and finally Bill himself. That's the story, folks, the archetypal stuff of myth, B-movies and comic books.
Indeed, during "Vol. 2"'s much-anticipated showdown between Bill and Beatrix, Bill deconstructs the relation between comic-book superheroes and their alter egos to point out the fundamental fallacy in The Bride's retirement plan. While Spiderman and others were ordinary men who took on super powers and costumes, only Superman was born to the mantle. His choice of Clark Kent as disguise constitutes a nasty critique of the human race: "weak, unsure, cowardly" - everything Beatrix is not.
Naturally, a few other choice metaphysical bon mots turn up in that climactic conversational corrida - because, yes, that's Tarantino's idiosyncratic notion of a lethal exchange of fire between superheroes in love/hate. Repartee like this leaves blood on the floor. And the contrast between the scene's warm hacienda décor and the white-hot current - of rage and pain and betrayal - that crackles between Bill and Beatrix makes us choke on horrified laughter.
You can sense that even as he is inventing such scenes, Q.T. is as enraptured as we are by the power of personality and performance. Thurman's Beatrix embarks on and completes what Joseph Campbell defined as the hero's journey, a feat usually reserved for boys becoming men. No guiding light to some Dante, she soldiers through her own Inferno and Purgatory.
Elegantly long-limbed and graceful in extreme action; cheekbones gaunted by coma, fury, terrible loss; often unrecognizable under layers of dirt and blood, Beatrix suffers the uneuphemized trials of Campbell's primal pilgrimage - and flashes an occasional sly wink of metacinematic glee. Her killing beauty is the distaff version of Charles Bronson's in Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West."
And then there's the mesmerizing Carradine. His performance is another testament to Q.T.'s eerie directorial ability to up the acting ante with performers who show limited chops in other movies or have dropped off the A-list. Drawing on his "Kung Fu" and Woody Guthrie credentials, Carradine projects an aging gunslinger who can weave a laconic campfire tale or drive a philosophical tete-a-tete over brandy. It's taken a long, bloody lifetime to assemble his killer costume: the lanky grace and control, the theatrically graveled voice and that wonderfully weathered face masking a snake's coldblooded gaze and a perversely passionate obsession with his "daughters." Carradine's so perfect, we can only be thankful that Warren Beatty, once tapped to play Bill, ankled.
Q.T.'s storytelling is all about style, the flesh and blood and sinew of the movies. Reductive readings of style convey the notion of something flashy layered over the practical heart of the matter (i.e., plot, the "meaning" of it all). Q.T. follows in the footsteps of radical directors such as Josef von Sternberg and Howard Hawks, for whom style was identity, survival, morality. Think of "The Big Sleep," Hawks' private-eye jeu d'esprit about who's cool and who's not and what that means in the director's peculiar lexicon of good and evil. Similarly, "Kill Bill Vol. 2" meanders its serpentine way from place to place, person to person, present to past, genre to genre, musical score to score - defining/refining character and destiny through style.
It's style that separates the heroes from pretenders and second-raters in "Kill Bill Vol. 2." Often that style comes in the form of signature getups or gestures. Another leggy blonde in Bill's stable of women warriors, Elle Driver (Darryl Hannah), represents a cracked mirror image of Beatrix: her eyepatch is flawed character made visible, her eye having been ritually plucked out for bad behavior. Bill's brother Budd may sport a white cowboy hat, the signal in innumerable Westerns of sterling character, but he's a sleazy reflection of his sibling's purely evil soul. Legend has it that martial artist Pai Mei (Gordon Liu), who has trained Bill, Elle and Beatrix, once massacred a whole monastery for a small lapse in manners. Under his tutelage, The Bride learns that strength of character lies not only in being able to fire her fist through solid wood but in being able, afterwards, to manipulate chopsticks "like a human being." In Q.T.'s cinematic lexicon, style is honor, courtesy, a bent sense of humor, knowing the ropes, keeping up appearances. It is cool.
"How do I look?" drawls Bill as he rises to meet his end - no flippant inquiry in these existential environs. How one looks - one's signature style - is everything, in the world according to Q.T.
What you see on screen in "Kill Bill Vol. 2" is hard play of the highest order: joyous, exhilarating, sometimes brutal, often jaw-droppingly imaginative, absurd, ultimately a little heartbreaking. The movie is spun out of sensuous texture, movement, light and color, music - the magic stuff that movies are made of. Q.T. puts us in touch with the palpable glories of kinetic energy within a frame and shot-to-shot, energy we see, hear, feel in our flesh.
He shows us how cinema can transform any action, any character, any landscape into something iconic, beautiful, strange, silly or sublime, like a glimpse of an alternative universe where everything is always becoming ... more. His plentiful allusions explode hard or soft, vibrating with added significance that enriches but never defines the moment. With its choreographed, ritual talk and hand-to-hand, sword-to-sword combat - as well as interwoven musical / cinematic variations on primary themes - "Kill Bill" comes close to ballet or opera.
Take the entire wedding sequence at the start of "Vol. 2." Channeling Orson Welles, John Ford and Sergio Leone, Q.T. electrifies space, making the shady interior of the chapel a safe house of cliche and squareness and limitations and rules; while outside, in an overexposed black-and-white Western landscape, larger-than-life lovers, as exiled from civilization as was Ethan Edwards at the end of John Ford's "The Searchers," duel and burn in mythic radiance.
The very pregnant Bride has resigned from Bill's tribe to "work on a family." In a way, all of "Kill Bill" is a riff on family, from "Vol. 1"'s tour-de-force bungalow battle that climaxes with a little girl witnessing her mom's death, to the mother-and-child reunion at the end of "Vol. 2." Nearly every stop along Beatrix's vengeance trail features tragic or twisted familial relations. Recall O'Ren Ishii's slaughtered parents and lethal spawn in "Vol. 1"; picture Esteban, the deliciously salacious whoremaster (Michael Parks) who is Bill's "father figure" in "Vol. 2." And it's the brand of moral and aesthetic style she's inherited from her sensei fathers (swordmaster Hattori Hanzo and martial artist Pai Mei) that allows Beatrix Kiddo to wipe out covens and crews, brothers and sisters, and finally, godfather-lover.
"Kill Bill Vol. 2" is far more elegiac in tone than the madly inventive, action-fueled first volume. As in Sam Peckinpah's death-dance Western "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," most of the key characters know that they "deserve death." It's really just a matter of where and when they will lie down. "Can't we just forget the past?" wonders Budd, onetime samurai demoted to bouncer and toilet-cleaner. Not in the movies.
"Kill Bill"'s narrative folds back and forth on itself, calling attention to the pleasures of digression, the power of memory, the persistence of images and experiences that shape who we are. "Some things you do can never be undone," Bill opines in his last hours, as Q.T.'s story of love and hate and death and resurrection comes full circle, answering our primal desire for the logical, beautiful, satisfying shape of fiction.
Q.T.'s film celebrates movie-memory bigtime. He's lovingly distilled a whole raft of movie warrior-women into one splendid heroine and made her literally shine, in luminous black and white and in saturated color. Honoring movies and those who make them, Q.T. dreams up characters who take their lives from the flickers; his screen action is fueled by the whole grand, trashy tradition of the cinema. And part of the power of his movie-memory shows in the way he's resurrected careers (John Travolta, Robert Forster, Pam Grier, Carradine) not in one-shots but for a second lifetime.
Too bad that, in a time when amnesia and contempt for our film heritage are nearly de rigueur, there's a camp of film reviewers who positively revel in not getting Q.T.'s movie references - and in using his allusive style as an excuse to stop short of actually reviewing his films in depth. Instead of engaging "Kill Bill" on its own terms, they resort to piling up resentful assertions unsupported by what's actually on screen. Describing the most spectacularly composed, choreographed and cut sequences, they are forced to cop to a certain technical brilliance on Q.T.'s part - and then comes the obligatory whine, "But what does it all mean?"
Q.T.'s mad love affair with the movies deserves reviewers who either take fire or throw cold water on it fairly and intelligently. Unfortunately, film reviews have mostly devolved into shorthand for ADD-afflicted readers who require only thumbs up or down. Part of the responsibility for Seattle's woeful lack of real film culture (read memory) must fall on reviewers who don't educate and are capable only of plodding consumer reports, sophomoric posturing or juiceless refusals to be engaged by passionate filmmaking - the only kind of which Quentin Tarantino is capable.[[In-content Ad]]
