Reel Life

There’s a curious silence in London film circles about the mysterious disappearance of Quentin Tarantino’s film Death Proof, which only five weeks after its release has all but disappeared from Britain’s screens.

Can Quentin Tarantino revive his career?

Films flop at the box-office all the time, of course, and many well-known film-makers and stars suffer setbacks. But Death Proof’s fall from grace has been catastrophic; this past week it has only been playing at seven British cinemas – compared with 333 for Run, Fat Boy, Run, released a week earlier.

Worse, figures for Death Proof after last weekend showed receipts of less than £800,000. For a routine American movie, that’s a poor showing.

When such a film’s made by someone with Tarantino’s high profile, it’s box-office anthrax. And no one is talking about this: it’s as if Death Proof has been ‘disappeared,’ like some political dissident in a former South American dictatorship.

Tarantino’s film opened to some stinging reviews (mine included). But you can’t just blame reviews; if they could sink a film, Adam Sandler’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (which opened the same week and fared even worse at the hands of critics) would have vanished without trace, too.  Yet it enjoyed four weeks in the UK Top Ten, and has grossed a reasonable £3.8 million.

In contrast, Death Proof opened on September 21, and was a disappointing number 6 after its first weekend. 

From that point, things got worse and worse; it sunk to number 15 in the following weekend’s charts, and to number 32 the week after.

All this time its UK distributors were busy yanking it out of cinemas as if their lives depended on it.

How can this be? Tarantino remains one of the world’s best known film-makers. He still attracts a following who think he can do no wrong – though clearly, not one that’s big enough to save his latest film.

It’s true that Death Proof (as part of the Grindhouse double-bill) flopped in the States this summer. But Britain’s Tarantino fans don’t much care what happens in the States.

Proportionally, his following in the UK is bigger and more intense than in America. Reservoir Dogs, for example, was more popular here than across the Atlantic.

So you get the feeling that if he’s sunk here, he’s sunk everywhere. 

I say this in sorrow rather than in gloating. I loved Tarantino’s early efforts. Reservoir Dogs was a bristling, exuberant, cheeky breath of fresh air.

Pulp Fiction was a formal masterpiece, and one of the most influential films of the last 20 years. Not everyone liked his third outing, Jackie Brown, but for me it showed welcome signs of maturity and grace.

Yet I’m not surprised by the Death Proof debacle.  My hunch is that the seeds for its commercial failure were sown by Tarantino’s Kill Bill, mercifully divided into two films by Harvey Weinstein.

It was a marathon of self-indulgence. Oh, there were some striking set-piece scenes. But it was tiresome too. I found myself feeling guilty because I didn’t recognise every obscure martial arts film from Hong Kong or Taiwan that Tarantino was referencing in scene after scene.

And then I found myself feeling irritated because I felt guilty. I know several others who felt the same way.

With Death Proof, it’s more of the same: constant allusions to trashy 1970s American B-movies that his younger fans won’t have seen and his older fans will be glad to have forgotten.

It’s the equivalent of being slapped around the head until you’ve done your homework thoroughly. And then there was the interminable, aimless dialogue between groups of scantily-clad but second-rate actresses.

Tarantino obviously delighted in it; but audience word-of-mouth over the past five weeks tells its own story.

Can Tarantino revive his career? I genuinely hope so. But he badly needs to get his head out of a camera lens and realise there’s more to life than cinema.

He needs to stop making films about films; at present, he’s like a dog chasing his own tail.

In order to do this, he may need to reinvent himself, rather like those veteran actors whose careers he has surprisingly repositioned over the years: John Travolta, Robert Forster, Michael Parks.

But for the time being it must be said: Tarantino seems so last century.