True Romance 30th Anniversary Retro Review
TRUE ROMANCE REVIEW SCORE
Too often forgotten in discussion of either the filmmaking career of Quentin Tarantino or the screen acting history of Christian Slater is 1993’s True Romance. The romantic crime drama hit theaters thirty years ago this week, and while it didn’t break any box office records, in the years since it’s earned critical acclaim and a well-deserved cult following. If you’ve never had the pleasure, it’s currently streaming for free on PlutoTV.
True Romance opens with the life of lonely comic book shop clerk Clarence Whorley (Christian Slater) getting rocked after meeting the sexy and sweet Alabama (Patricia Arquette). She shoves her way into his life on his birthday, at a mostly empty movie theater during a marathon for the martial arts leading man (who would later appear in Tarantino’s Kill Bill saga) Sonny Chiba.
After only a single date and a passionate night, Alabama confesses two things to Clarence: she’s fallen for him in a big way, and she’s a sex worker hired by his boss to give him a good time. Clarence admits to his own love for Alabama, and after the next day’s visit to City Hall, they’re married.
Just like Pulp Fiction‘s doomed Vincent Vega always seems to trigger bad things when he uses the bathroom, it’s always in the toilet that the Elvis manifestation appears before Clarence.
But there’s the tiny problem of Alabama’s belongings and the pimp who has them. Clarence promises Alabama he only means to have a friendly conversation with her former pimp, but things get bloody quickly, Clarence leaves with the wrong bag, and pretty soon True Romance‘s cast gets crowded with Detroit mobsters and LA cops hunting down the newlyweds.
The words “ensemble cast” get thrown around a lot; to the point that the term has just about lost its meaning. But True Romance delivers a true ensemble cast, including two actors whose names would become much more well known in the years following the film.
Gary Oldman plays the ruthless pimp Drexl, Dennis Hopper plays Clarence’s estranged father, Christopher Walken is at his most merciless in his cameo as a high ranking gangster, and Brad Pitt gets high from a pipe made from a honey bear and hangs out on a couch for the entire film.
Samuel L. Jackson appears in a single scene a year before his career-making role in Pulp Fiction, and James Gandolfini — who wouldn’t become known as HBO’s Tony Soprano for another six years — is the button man Virgil whose one-on-one confrontation with Alabama is about as brutal as anything you’ll see on film.
True Romance is blessed with a wealth of single scene appearances featuring A-list actors who turn their few minutes into pure cinematic history.
The rest of the cast includes Bronson Pinchot of Perfect Strangers fame, Michael Rapaport who these days is much better known as being angry online, the late Tom Sizemore, and Reservoir Dogs‘ Chris Penn.
While you’ll never make out his face, Val Kilmer appears as a character officially credited as simply “Mentor” but who is — depending on your interpretation — how Clarence imagines Elvis Presley, the hero’s hallucination of Elvis Presley, or the actual ghost of the rock icon. Just like Pulp Fiction‘s doomed Vincent Vega always seems to trigger bad things when he uses the bathroom, it’s always in the toilet that the Elvis manifestation appears before Clarence.
True Romance is blessed with a wealth of single scene appearances featuring A-list actors who turn their few minutes into pure cinematic history. Oldman is utterly magnetic as the pimp Drexl Spivey (who technically has two scenes), and the Oscar-winning actor once actually named Spivey as one of his two favorite roles (along with JFK‘s Lee Harvey Oswald).
For whatever reason, the early-to-mid nineties were relatively crowded with road trip movies including killer couples obsessed with one another.
Then there is the infamous “Sicilian Scene,” in which Christopher Walken’s Vincenzo Coccotti tortures Clarence’s father, Cliff (Dennis Hopper). If you divorce it from the use of a word that has — for better or worse — become a huge part of Tarantino’s filmmaking legacy, it is a wonderfully acted and incredibly written scene. Cliff makes a difficult choice to protect his son, and its delivery is as triumphant and heroic as it is devastating.
For whatever reason, the early-to-mid nineties were relatively crowded with road trip movies including killer couples obsessed with one another. There was David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, Dominic Sena’s Kalifornia, and — another Tarantino-written film directed by someone else — the much more well known Natural Born Killers, directed by Oliver Stone.
True Romance stands out as not only a cool, exciting film filled with the violence Tarantino did so much to popularize, but with a much more relatable couple whose romance feels more, well, true. Clarence and Alabama are the most sympathetic and likable couples of the ones in all the above mentioned films by miles, and you’re rooting for them from start to finish.
In fact, according to Maxim‘s 15 year retrospective on True Romance, Tarantino initially objected to director Tony Scott changing the original ending which the heroes don’t survive. Scott confessed he had fallen for the pair too hard and couldn’t bear to give them an unhappy ending. Tarantino would eventually come around to the director’s way of thinking.
True Romance is one of the best crime romance films you could ever hope to enjoy, if not the best. If you don’t catch it while it’s free to stream on PlutoTV, make sure you catch it somewhere else soon.
