Flashback to the fall movie season of 1993 and no one was anticipating True Romance to be a huge movie. And that’s why it was a box-office failure, because no one was expecting it to be a huge movie. Yet, its success and legacy lives on over the years. Its casting is one for the books. Despite Christian Slater, who was riding high at the time, getting the top billing as the protagonist Clarence Worley, the movie was a breakthrough for up-and-coming Patricia Arquette. The rest of the cast is something like out of a superhero movie, which is fitting considering Clarence is a comic-book fan and works in a comic store.
It includes four Oscar winners (Arquette, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt and Christopher Walken). It was written by none other than Quentin Tarantino back when he was only known on the film festival circuit. It’s features Samuel L. Jackson in one of his earlier roles before he became a star following the success of Pulp Fiction. There’s also an aspiring character actor James Gandolifini, playing a truly sadistic violent person along with a hilariously underrated performance by character actor Saul Rubinek, which may be his best ever, as a Hollywood producer. And there’s also Michael Rapaport, who can be put in anything and still stand out.
The movie was also directed by Tony Scott, the man who brought us MTV-style action movies like Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop 2 and Days of Thunder. You could say it was the Bonnie & Clyde for the MTV Generation. It’s hard to put True Romance into one genre of filmmaking. On one hand it’s a crime movie. But on another, it’s as it title indicates is a romance movie. The following contains spoilers.
The plot revolves around two 20-somethings living in Detroit who meet at a movie theater showing Sonny Chiba’s Street Fighter movies. But they don’t just meet by chance. Clarence Worley (Slater) is a young slacker who loves comics, kung-fu movies and Elvis Presley. It’s his birthday and he’s trying to hit on a woman (Anna Thomson), possbily a prostitute, in a bar who rejects him when he mentions he wants to take her to the movies.
Later at the theater as he sits alone, Alabama Whitman (Arquette) walks in and accidentally dumps her bucket of popcorn on him. He brushes it off and she flirts with him as they enjoy the movies together. They go for pie and coffee afterwards as Alabama says it’s her tradition after she sees a movie. But as they talk, it becomes apparent there is a spark between the both of them. Clarence takes her by his workplace and she is excited about it. They go back to his place and have sex.
But Alabama has to come clean. She’s a call girl and Clarence is her third customer after four days. Alabama has fallen in love with Clarence and Clarence, himself, is also the one woman he’s been looking for his whole life, even if she doesn’t like The Patridge Family, after putting on an act that she did. They rush off to the courthouse to get married and seem to be happy, getting matching tattoos.
However, something is rotten in Denmark. Clarence is still concerned that her pimp, Drexl Spivy (Oldman), might become a problem. So, after thinking about it and discussing it with a vision of Elvis (Val Kilmer), who says that even if he kills Drexl, cops won’t care. Despite her objections, Clarence says he’s going to go get Alabama’s personal items from Drexl, who lives in a building in one of the worst neighborhoods in Detroit.
What Clarence doesn’t know is Drexl is a cold-blood killer. He works for mobster Vincenzo Coccotti (Walken), a Sicilian consigliere for crime boss “Blue” Lou Boyle. He murdered two other gangsters, “Bg Don” (Jackson) and Floyd “D” (Laurence Mason) while doing a drug deal of about half a million in cocaine. Drexl and his right-hand man, Marty (Paul Bates), give Clarence a cold reception when he shows up and thinks turn violent. Even though he’s white, Drexl “acts black” and has dreadlocks and talks in a stereotypical voice, using the N-word and mocking Clarence by saying, “He must’ve thought it was White Boy Day.”
Oldman’s performance, while he only appears in two scenes, and his character is killed off by Clarence who shoots both him and Marty, is one of his most memorable. It’s easy for an actor to turn in a performance that’s offensive such as Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The twist like Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder is playing a person who is so overboard in his delivery he disappears in the performance. And considering Oldman has shown a lot of range as an actor, you can sense a little of his Sid Vicious performance at work in Drexl.
In the chaos, Clarence accidentally takes a suitcase that contains the cocaine mistaking it for Alabama’s clothes. With Drexl dead, they have one problem solved, but the cocaine is another. What do they do with it? Clarence realizes he can sell it in Los Angeles where his childhood friend, Dick Ritchie (Rapaport), is a struggling actor.
But first, he wants to make sure everything is ok. He visits his estranged father, Clifford (Dennis Hopper in a rare role as a nice guy), a retired cop living in a trailer on one of the poorer neighborhoods. Clifford is a recovering alcoholic and it’s hinted the alcohol led to a divorce and his strained relationships. It’s quite possible, the alcohol led to Clifford’s removal from the police department, which is why he is having to work at a night security guard in what looks like part of Detroit’s rust belt.
What is amazing is about True Romance is how all the characters seem to stand out even if they appear in only one or two scenes. Clifford is shocked to see Clarence and a little more surprised to hear that he and Alabama are married. But he becomes enraged when hearing about the Drexl incident. However, he decides to call his former colleagues to inquire only to hear they think Drexl’s killing is drug-related and had to do with Boyle (who is referenced but never seen.) He assures Clarence and Alabama there is nothing to worry about as he seems to make peace with his son.
However, there is a lot to worry about. Drexl took Clarence’s driver’s license before he was shot. And the mobsters discovered it which they inform Clifford when they show up demanding to know where Clarence, Alabama and especially where the cocaine is. The movie is notable for its interaction between Walken and Hopper as in true Tarantino fashion, they discuss the traits of how to detect liars and how the Moors raped Italian and especially Sicilian women changing the gene pool. Gandolfini plays one of Vincenzo’s goons who tortures Clifford.
Because Clifford left a piece of paper with Dick’s address on his fridge, the mobsters head to L.A. as well. While he’s happy to see Clarence, Dick tells Clarence he hasn’t had too much luck finding someone except Hollywood producer Lee Donowitz (Rubinek), through his actor friend, Elliott Blitzer (Bronson Pinchot), a snobby sycophantic assistant to Donowitz. Dick also has a roommate, Floyd (Pitt), who spends most of his time getting stoned on the couch in their apartment watching TV.
As they arrange a meeting to sell the cocaine to Donowitz at a reduced price, trouble is brewing as Elliott gets busted with a sample bag and coerced by two eager detectives, Nicky Dimes (Sean Penn) and Cody Nicholson (Tom Sizemore), into double-crossing Donowitz. At the same time, Virgil is willing to do whatever it takes to get the cocaine when he surprises Alabama in their hotel room.
Like a lot of Tarantino’s movies, it’s violent. And the scenes between Virgil and Alabama are extremely violent so much they were heavily edited to obtain an R-rating. Reportedly, Sizemore was offered the part of Virgil, but refused to it because of this scene. He then told Gandolfini about it. The role helped the actor land his star-making role as Tony Soprano on the hit show The Sopranos.
Yet, just like the scene with Drexl, Alabama isn’t a violent person. After being roughed up, she kills Virgil because it’s a kill or be killed situation. It would be hard to sympathize with her or Clarence if Arquette and Slater didn’t make the characters seem like two people who just find themselves in a bad situation. Clarence took his gun to the meeting with Drexl just in case. He didn’t intentionally go there to kill him nor Marty, but only did so when Drexl and Marty got violent with him first. It’s implied in the meeting with “Big Don” and Floyd “D” that Drexl and Marty have known them for a while, so if they’d brutally kill two people they knew, it means Clarence isn’t anything to them.
And because Virgil, himself, is such a sadistict person, saying that he now kills people to see their expressions change, there’s no sympathy for him when he gets his due. And Alabama doesn’t relent on payback and Scott and Tarantino are asking us how we’d react in the same situation. This might explain why an ending was altered where when the drug deal goes wrong, Dimes is shot by one of Vincenzo’s goons, Luca (Paul Ben-Victor), but it is now shown that Alabama shoots Dimes when he shoots injuring Clarence.
As for the drug deal, it’s infamous for being a Mexican stand-off between police, mobsters and Donowitz’s bodyguards that looks comical but is inspired by the end of the Hong Kong action thriller City on Fire (which Tarantino swore he hadn’t seen while writing this script and what would become Reservoir Dogs, even though there are many similiarities between Fire and Dogs). But by the movie’s climax, the whole movie has been so outrageous and over the top, anything less extreme wouldn’t be a cop out.
In many ways, True Romance is a time capsule of an era of what it was like to be living in the early 1990s. The Cold War was finally over. The Reagan Revolution had backfired. America was in a bad recession. Many young people in their teens and 20s (branded as Generation X) weren’t going to grow up the way their parents did as it became obvious they wouldn’t have the prosperity their elders did. When Clarence, Alabama and Dick meet with Elliott to set up the drug deal, they do it at an amusement park (presumably Six Flags Magic Mountains) where they ride a twisty roller-coaster. It’s all about living in the moment because tomorrow may never come. Even Dimes and Nicholson are no different. They have a gung-ho charge head-first attitude that when Elliott agrees to wear a wire, they can’t tell their captain (Ed Lauter in a uncredited scene) quick enough because they’re so excited like kids on Christmas morning.
On the flip side, Floyd represents the Don’t-Give-A-Fuck attitude that would be synonomous with some Gen Xers. He just lives to smoke pot and watch TV. His couch looks more like a bed as it’s covered in a sheet with pillows. My guess is Floyd doesn’t have his own room. I’ve often wondered how Floyd and Dick got together. My guess is Floyd was just someone who had the money but couldn’t get his own place so he found a place to crash at Dick’s place who needed someone to help with the bills. Even when mobsters walk in with guns aimed at him while Floyd is smoking pot, he nonchalantly tells them where Clarence and Alabama are while offering them some pot to smoke.
Released on this date, Sept. 10, True Romance would open in third place behind the megahit The Fugitve and Undercover Blues, the latter making about the same money and being easily forgotten. In many ways, I think its production company Morgan Creek and distributor Warner Bros. didn’t know how to market it correctly. Slater was still riding high in the early 1990s but the rest of the cast were still mostly unknown. I’d say this was the first time since his performance in Heathers that Slater decided to act differently than doing a Jack Nicholson impersonation. He really makes Clarence a person we can all emptathize with despite his faults. Produced for about $12.5 million, it would only gross about $12.3 million in North America.
It was released on the home video market in the winter of 1994 and then found its audience, as most movies do, through video rentals and cable TV viewings. Later in the 1990s, actors like Jackson, Pitt, Oldman, Arquette and Kilmer would become more popular. But Tarantino’s success following Pulp Fiction would have people heading to the video stores to rent it. Walken, himself, would find himself becoming a popular actor (mostly for his distinctive way of speaking) among younger audiences. And the scene between him and Hopper is probably up there with the interaction between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Heat. Both actors have been known for their virtuoso over-the-top performances and seeing them together is a perfect pairing.
Arquette, herself, establishes herself as a perfect lead actress. With a hint of a north Florida twang in her voice and a bubbly personality, you can see why she could never make it as a call girl. It’s a crucial role that other actresses and even directors would just dismiss her as second banana to the male lead. I’d argue that True Romance is more about Alabama than it is Clarence.
On top of that is the hilarious performance by Rubinek as Donowitz, who is loosely a parody of Joel Silver. Scott had a horrible experience making The Last Boy Scout which he would later say was the worst experience of his career. He had to deal with the egos of Silver, who produced it, as well as Bruce Willis, who butted heads with him and Silver. It’s also been reported that Willis and Damon Wayans didn’t get along so much that body doubles had to be used and scenes were shot so they didn’t have to be on the set at the same time. The movie was notoriously re-edited against what Scott wanted. Rubinek plays up the stereotype of the portly producer who screams and swears so much that you can see traces of it in reports that have come out against Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin. You almost feel this is Rubinek’s way of getting back at the producers he’s had work with.
It’s a rarity to see a movie like this that seems to have every scene work and every role so perfectly cast. Along with Ben-Victor, Frank Adonis, Victor Argo and Kevin Corrgian (who are favorites of Martin Scorese) appear as mobsters and are able to add some life to their traditional one-dimensional roles. It’s one of those movies I can watch multiple times (and have) and never grow tired of it.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 