Quentin Tarantino’s most personal script was filmed by another director. True Romance is the less-than-literal story of his early years, but punched up with the violence and sex that any good pulp writer knows is essential. I’m gonna jump off a cliff here and guess that weird-faced, video store clerk, movie freak, Tennessee-transplant-in-California, pre-fame Quentin Tarantino was probably not a huge hit with the ladies. Maybe I’m wrong, but Patricia Arquette’s Alabama certainly comes off like a sexless geek’s fantasy girl. She’ll watch Asian chopsocky movies with you, listen to you blather on about your idols, thinks that every weird thing about you is amazing, marries you instantly and is a smokin’ little sexpot on top of all of that.
Shapely and devoted Alabama is the powerless male geek’s version of the chiseled, rich stud on the covers of Harlequin romance novels for lonely women. It’s the exact same stupid entertaining thing. Deal with it.
Meanwhile, Christian Slater’s Clarence Worley (a name that sounds like it belongs on a serial killer or a farm boy or both) is a broke young guy with a pot of gold to sell. It’s a fat stash of cocaine that he accidentally made off with when he confronted and killed Alabama’s pimp. He has no idea what to do with it in his shabby corner of Detroit so he calls up his equally broke, wannabe actor friend (Michael Rappaport) in Hollywood for connections. All of those big stars and producers over there suck up this stuff like Hoovers and will pay big money for it, right? He has no idea how much blood needs to spill first before he can make his cash and go live on an island with his wife.
And all of this is a metaphor for Tarantino’s own early forays into in the movie business. While Clarence Worley had a suitcase full of coke, Tarantino had his surefire crime story screenplays, valuable items pushed on the same Hollywood scumbags. He’s your regular fish-out-of-water, but crazily confident at the same time. Worley’s no wallflower. He loves to talk. When he falls in love, he becomes downright brazen. A dangerous man, madly, almost self-destructively, protective of his woman.
Because Alabama is not just a woman. If Clarence Worley is Tarantino’s alter ego, Alabama symbolizes his soul. She’s that fierce and perfect, to him, thing that he’ll fight to preserve.
Tarantino could have written a straightforward story about a struggling young writer/director in the movie business minefield, I guess, but this approach is better and has a capsule description that won’t bore you instantly. It’s a clever one.
Blessed by the gods early on, Tarantino REALLY lucked out here. Big time Hollywood director Tony Scott respects the material enough that Tarantino’s voice still comes through. These characters love to mouth off at length and Scott seems to have taken minimal liberties with their busy dialogue. And while, at first, Scott’s quick-cutting blockbuster style seems antithetical to Tarantino’s own preference for long takes, it somehow works. Commercial Hollywood filmmaking is pulp fiction, too, after all. Splashy. Unsubtle. Dropping the big moments like anvils. Low on vitamins, plenty of sugar. Scott was a master at making slickly crafted junk and he did it with a straight face. You can’t tell if Scott even CARES about Tarantino’s subtext to enjoy this action-packed, smartly cast good time. You don’t have to care, either. When it comes to pulp, that’s how it oughta be.