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here’s a fleeting moment during Jackie Brown’s climactic money-transfer sequence where the eponymous character (Pam Grier), sitting in a department-store dressing room, catches her reflection in the mirror and holds her own gaze for a few seconds. In this voiceover-less movie, we’re cursed to not know the particularities of what she’s thinking and feeling, but the intensity and weariness glinting in Grier’s eyes have a way of convincing you that you broadly do. A confluence of anxiety, exhilaration, exhaustion, confidence, and uncertainty all becomes briefly detectable in one of the few moments in the movie where she’s not putting up false fronts for people she must first make feel safe before plunging a knife into their backs.

Jackie Brown was first a literary heroine, white and with the surname Burke. She’s the emotional center of Rum Punch (1992), a characteristically hard-boiled Elmore Leonard novel about, if to drastically pare the storyline down, a 44-year-old stewardess working for a bottom-of-the-barrel Mexican airline. She makes money on the side by smuggling in cash for a minor arms dealer named Ordell; she spends much of the book not merely engineering a hoodwink against him but also a pair of cops who have recently arrested her and are trying to manipulate her into helping them arrest Ordell, too. 

Just before wrapping up work on his mainstream breakthrough, Pulp Fiction (1994), Quentin Tarantino read Rum Punch, could immediately see the movie that could be made out of it, and then ran into some challenges getting an adaptation off the ground. When those circumstances changed, Grier, an actress he’d always admired, flashed in his mind as the character, perfect because “she had to be 44 but look like she was 34; she had to look great, and she had to look like she could handle anything.” Her being Black, not white, in the movie provided, Tarantino thought, more pathos to her dilemma — more urgency. Long used to playing supporting roles after a short, sterling period in the 1970s where she led movies made on the cheap as indomitable action heroines, Grier guessed, when she first got Tarantino’s script, that she’d be playing a minor character.

Grier’s acclimation to underestimation gives the casting, in certain respects, a meta flourish. A decades-long lack of regard, paired with the financial desperation that comes from making $16,000 a year with shoddy benefits, are just some of the things portending Jackie’s move to the path of the small-time criminal mastermind, outwardly calm under pressure but human enough to practice ahead of time how she’ll look pulling a gun on someone. Jackie is capable but exhausted; during production, Grier herself doubted whether she was the former but always was aware how much she was the latter, worn down by Tarantino’s go-go-go energy and the detailed verboseness of his writing. 

Bridget Fonda, Robert De Niro, and Samuel L. Jackson in Jackie Brown.

But like the woman she’s playing, Grier emerges on top, by turns vulnerable and commanding, sympathetic and intimidating, in a role that would be seen as a kind of comeback following her decades-gone status as a leading lady. Jackie Brown still arguably remains Grier’s meatiest part. It’s conversant with the ones she’d play in the pulpy thrillers with which she remains most associated; Coffy (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), Sheba, Baby (1975), and Friday Foster (1975), the vehicles she made with American International Pictures, are often grouped together to make its own kind of B-movie imperial period. But Jackie Brown bests them in its precision, quality, and refusal to so egregiously exploit her popularity as a sex symbol. Jackie is like one of those women — Coffy or Friday especially, to my eye — but a little older. Tarantino, a notorious movie obsessive, can’t help but still nostalgically wink at Grier’s heyday with a ‘70s soul-heavy soundtrack most inundated with cuts off Roy Ayers’ singular Coffy soundtrack. The clear reverence makes you hear them anew.

Released on Christmas Day, 1997, Jackie Brown is Tarantino’s sole literary adaptation. It also avoids the heightened visual style for which he’s recognized, best exemplified, maybe, by the comparably flashy and bright Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill movies. The terse, hardened atmosphere is more consonant with Leonard’s prose, and also the to-the-point look and feel of Grier’s ‘70s projects. 

Jackie Brown wasn’t as rapturously received as Pulp Fiction — to some it was a muted slump — but it was wise in hindsight as a follow-up, not a hard pivot from its predecessor but evidently not trying to self-consciously recreate what had been beloved about it, either. It still feels like an outlier in Tarantino’s filmography: more reserved, contemplative — mature. It’s not the sort of movie you expect to come so early in a filmmaking career — Tarantino was 34 when Jackie Brown was released — because it would be more obvious for it to be released closer to the end, when he was comparable in age to his figuratively grizzled protagonists and could more closely identify with the midlife malaise they’re trying to remediate.

Jackie Brown is not an especially beautiful movie, but it often comes close. Early on are the colorful opening credits; coming later, and more regularly, is cinematographer Guillermo Navarro’s partiality for close-ups. His lenses particularly love the weathered faces of Grier and co-star Robert Forster, whose lines and marks are studied like the stories behind them are being searched for. (Forster’s plateauing career would, like Grier’s, get a boost from the movie, though only he, maddeningly, would get the Oscar nomination.) Navarro and Tarantino elevate and admire people who have been through shit, and, to a degree, look it.

Grier and Robert Forster in Jackie Brown.

Forster plays a jaded, equanimous bail bondsman named Max Cherry who falls hard for Jackie. Outside of the movie’s bittersweet, concluding kiss, the closest he comes to showing it is his decision to help her betray Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson). That isn’t to say that he’s only in it for love: he, too, 56 and without much to live for besides the hair plugs recently thickening his scalp, might as well risk it all. He’s maybe Jackie Brown’s most touching character, suddenly a little softened by matters of the heart after ostensibly decades of keeping walls up to ensure success in a business where any weakness is a liability. (“Is white guilt supposed to make me forget I’m running a business?” he says coolly to a Black client trying halfheartedly to tug on some heartstrings.) He can’t stop listening to “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” by the Delfonics, a song introduced to him by Jackie; he’s surprised to find himself really caring about the well-being of a client — Jackie — when he’s learned to keep his distance from that kind of thing. He’s a taciturn character, the type who generally speaks only when he needs to. Forster gives you a window into his lone-wolf inner life, the internal shifts a woman like Jackie is capable of engendering. 

Jackie Brown has a uniformly great ensemble. Jackson, often with his hair tied into a down-the-back ponytail topped with varyingly-colored Kangol hats, is a force as a wannabe crime bigwig whose aspirations are discordant with his capabilities. Bridget Fonda is breathtakingly funny as his moll, mostly just sitting around her apartment (which Jackson’s character is almost always visiting) getting high and watching movies in bikini tops and denim short shorts. The character, Melanie, doesn’t have ambitions to do much else — and she happily says so — and is also not impressed by the criminals who move in and out of her life, able to see clearly how little their braggadocio actually means when compared to the substance of their work and the aptitude they have for it. 

Melanie initially takes to Louis, Ordell’s not-so-bright friend who’s just been released from prison (Robert De Niro); she impulsively fucks him in her kitchen after she rambles to him, in what’s probably the film’s funniest exchange, about her dull time idling in Japan in her early 20s. But she unwisely can’t stop herself from teasing him mercilessly for his nerves and forgetfulness during their part in the movie’s climactic money exchange. I love the way she starts saying his name — she stretches out the S’s at the end of it like she were a rattlesnake teasing its soon-to-be victim who doesn’t know what else to do besides slowly back away — when he starts really blowing it. One admires, though might be worried, how not fearful she is of an impetuous man who could thoughtlessly retaliate at any moment.

The pair will not fare well during that money exchange, which ingeniously rewinds over and over again to show each person’s perspective á la Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). Then again, no one, unless we’re talking about Jackie Brown and Max Cherry, will. Seeing each perspective only reinforces the cleverness of — and our appreciation for — the people who end up coming out on top. It isn’t easy to dupe this many people. Ordell might be scary, but not as scary as potentially having to start one’s life over — he lights a fire under Jackie’s ass when his tactics of intimidation should prompt the opposite. When he at last realizes that he’s been swindled after a few moments of silence devoted to pondering how he could have ended up with such little money in the exchange, it’s a struggle to keep it cool as a viewer when he finally realizes it: “it’s Jackie Brown.”