Tony Scott’s True Romance, which he directed from an early script by Quentin Tarantino, is a movie made by trash-movie aficionados for trash-movie aficionados. And I use the term “trash-movie” not as a pejorative, but rather as a term of affection that those who appreciate such works will immediately recognize and appreciate. As Pauline Kael wrote in her seminal essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” “Trash doesn’t belong to the academic tradition, and that’s part of the fun of trash—that you know (or should know) that you don’t have to take it seriously, that it was never meant to be anymore than frivolous and trifling and entertaining.” And I can think of no better description of True Romance and its pleasures.

Tarantino, despite his shelf-full of Oscars, has always been a lover of cinematic detritus who has built his now multi-decade career on reimagining American B-movies, genre films, cult favorites, and obscure foreign oddities as a new kind of meta-art. Scott, never a filmmaker of particularly great depth, is his stylistic compadre, amping up an already crazed script with sensual light and shadow and the kind of bam-slam editing that would eventually spin out of control in his later films. But here you can still sense his command of the material, although at times it seems to be just on the verge of getting away from him, making the whole film feel like a speeding car careening perilously along a cliff’s edge. Part of the fun is wondering if and when it will go over.

And it never quite does, though it comes awfully, awfully close. Guided by the intensity of its cinematic forebearers, most of which are name-checked at some point or other—the Sonny Chiba Street Fighter trilogy (1974), Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1977)—True Romance aims to be the very antithesis of what its protagonist not-so-subtly calls “safe, geriatric, coffee table dog shit.” That protagonist is one Clarence Worley (Christian Slater), who many have rightly noted is an obvious on-screen surrogate for Tarantino himself (who has admitted as much, although he concedes that the character was made way cooler than he intended). A perennial outsider who works in a Detroit comic-book store and sees kung-fu triple features alone on his birthday, Clarence is a hipster nerd who turns out to have nerves of steel. Where did these nerves come from? From the necessity of the script, of course, which requires him to turn his fervent, pop-culture-infused dialogue into unflinching, resolute action. In another movie this would be a cheap, unearned cop-out, an unmotivated character turn that makes no sense; but, because True Romance is such an obvious, unapologetic amalgam of cinematic conventions, cliches, and plot devices, you won’t bat an eye (if you’re on its wavelength, of course). It also helps that the character is played by Christian Slater, who had already parlayed his young Jack Nicholson-esque vibe into a host of rebel-outsider-maybe psychopath characters (see Heathers, Pump Up the Volume).

Clarence’s lonely life is forever altered with the arrival of Alabama (Patricia Arquette), who at first appears to be just a sweet, but clumsy blonde in tight clothes who spills her popcorn on him at the movie theater, but turns out to be a new-to-the-game call girl hired by Clarence’s boss to show him a good time. But, as the title suggests, there is not just love in the air, but genuine romance, which explodes over a single night (with Scott aping his own blue-back-lit eroticism from Top Gun) and finds them married with matching tattoos the next morning. And that’s not the only thing that explodes. The plot takes a turn when Clarence decides to pack a gun and visit Alabama’s pimp, a brutal, dreadlocked drug dealer named Drexl (Gary Oldman). When all is said and done, lots of blood has been spilt and Clarence is in possession of a suitcase full of half-a-million-dollars worth of uncut cocaine (“Uh, these are not my clothes,” Alabama says when he opens the suitcase).

So, what is a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde to do but head west to California, where Clarence reconnects with an old buddy, an aspiring and utterly untalented actor named Dick Ritchie (Michael Rapaport), who he hopes will help him unload the whole shebang for a couple hundred thousand dollars, which he and Alabama will then use to ride off into the sunset. Dick hooks them up with Elliot Blitzer (Bronson Pinchot), the uptight assistant to a comically smarmy Hollywood producer named Lee Donowitz (Saul Rubinek), who might just be in the market for two years’ worth of nose candy. Since one of Tarantino’s narrative specialties involves good plans going off the rails (see his 1992 writing-directing debut Reservoir Dogs), it is no surprise that things don’t work out exactly as Clarence plans, especially once members of the Italian Mafia show up (it was their cocaine he stole) and the police get involved. Never ones to shy away from excess, Tarantino and Scott give us a three-way standoff in a posh hotel room with more firepower than a small army, which erupts into a gloriously deranged John Woo homage. For appreciators of the balletic and the bloody, it is enough to make you stand up and cheer.

Along the way True Romance supplies us with a rogue’s gallery of oddball side characters, including Brad Pitt as Dick’s perpetually stoned, TV-glued roommate, Christopher Walken as a brutal Sicilian enforcer, and Val Kilmer as the ghost of Elvis Presley in a gold jacket, who shows up in a few scenes to offer Clarence (who worships the King) advice and support. To give you some sense of how gleefully deranged the film is, Dennis Hopper plays the role of Clarence’s sober and sober-minded father, a former police officer-turned-security guard who helps Clarence and then tries to cover for him when Walken’s enforcer shows up. The back-and-forth interrogation between Walken and Hopper is one of the film’s high points, partially because it works so well as simple dialogue-driven drama in a film otherwise bursting with visual excess. It is also a great scene of subtle performance, as Hopper’s character signs his own death warrant by providing an unexpected history lesson in race mixing that he knows will enflame Walken’s already “vendetta kind of mood.” He knows his own demise is the only way he can protect Clarence’s whereabouts, so we recognize in hindsight that it was a great act of sacrifice—a failed father’s belated redemption.

Otherwise, True Romance is not a film of much dramatic or character depth, and nor should it be. It is at heart a bloody cartoon of absurd characters living in an exaggerated movie world of gangsters and Hollywood honchos. Scott, always ready and willing to push the envelope, gives us some scenes of extraordinary violence, particularly the protracted beating that Alabama takes at the hands of James Gandolfini’s Mafia soldier in a gaudy motel room. The violence is both visceral and unsettling, which Scott uses to keep us on edge. Just when we think the comedy is taking over, he throws us for a loop with something potentially disturbing, then ramps right back into candyland. But, that is the kind of movie True Romance is—wildly improbable and delightfully unpredictable, even when charging through some very familiar territory.

Copyright © 2022 James Kendrick

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