True Romance

Try to imagine a romantic movie from the mind of Quentin Tarantino.

Whatever you come up with probably resembles True Romance. It’s essentially the same movie as the three he’s directed himself, except the two main characters are in love, and there isn't quite as much witty dialogue.

Clarence (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette) meet in a movie theatre, spend a wonderful night together, and fall in love. Clarence, being the swell guy he is, goes to Alabama’s boss, Drexl (Gary Oldman) to free her from her call-girl job by any means necessary.

Oh, and did we mention that it’s a vision of Elvis (Val Kilmer) who tells Clarence to kill Drexl?

Once the deed is done, Clarence grabs what he thinks are Alabama’s clothes, but which turns out to be a suitcase full of cocaine. It just so happens that the cocaine belongs to a rival of Drexl’s (Christopher Walken) who, understandably, would like it back.

It would take several more paragraphs to explain every detail of the plot, but if you’ve seen Tarantino’s other movies, you can pretty much figure it out. Once you see how things are progressing, you can even figure out the climax.

True Romance is not a bad movie, but its main problem lies in how many questions arise in your mind after seeing it. For example, why is Clarence having hallucinations of Elvis? Or what happens to Christopher Walken’s character once he finds out where Clarence and Alabama are? Or why does Val Kilmer’s name appear fourth in this list of so many big stars, when he has a total of three minutes of screen time and we never even see his face?

The film’s asset, however, is of course its cast. Aside from those already mentioned, it also costars Dennis Hopper, Brad Pitt, Tom Sizemore, Michael Rapaport, Samuel L. Jackson (in a three-line role), Bronson Pinchot, Saul Rubinek, James Gandolfini and Chris Penn. All are excellent, particularly Pinchot, Rubinek, and (as always) Gary Oldman.

It’s a hard movie to recommend, unless you’re a huge Tarantino fan. It has all his trademarks and, despite being directed by Tony Scott, is a Tarantino film through and through.

Warner Bros. has decided to bless us with a series of two-disc special edition DVDs (with plenty more to come, provided the first group sells enough copies). True Romance may not quite fit in with the classics (Singin’ in the Rain, Unforgiven, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus), but has definitely gathered a nice enough cult following to deserve a special edition. This two-disc set has plenty of extras, even if the audio and video aren’t quite what they could be.

We get a nice 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, and although it looks pretty good, it seems a little soft throughout. There’s not a lot of grain or other objects, and the color is good, but it just doesn’t quite look as sharp as it could (or should). Alongside a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track, Warner has – in an odd but welcome change of character – also added a DTS track to the disc. Both sound pretty much the same, except the DTS version sounds a little quieter. On both counts, surround use is not as strong as we would like, even though there are plenty of opportunities. During the climax, the surrounds roar to life and shake the room, but are otherwise pretty tame.

On disc one, we get three audio commentaries, one by Tony Scott, one by Quentin Tarantino, and the other by Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette. The Slater/Arquette track is fun; it’s clearly been years since they’ve seen the film and it’s nice to hear them reminisce. Scott doesn’t have the kind of voice you’d want to listen to for an extended period of time, but he has a lot of interesting things to say about every aspect of making the movie. He has some nice anecdotes, and is very informative. For Tarantino’s commentary, I was expecting two hours of extreme self-indulgence, but it actually held my attention better than the other two. He talks about how True Romance was the first script he ever finished, after having tried to write many before that but stopping at page 30. In all fairness, that kind of topic held my interest because I can relate to it, whereas the casual viewer might find it horribly boring. But overall, these are three entertaining commentaries.

Pop in disc two, and we get a whole whack of extras, including 29 minutes of deleted/extended scenes with optional director commentary. Most were cut for the sake of pacing, and none are really a great loss. There is an “interactive” behind-the-scenes featurette in which an icon appears at various points. If you click “enter” while the icon is present, it takes you to more behind-the-scenes footage. Totaling about 20 minutes (if you watch all the “iconic” behind-the-scenes stuff), it doesn’t really tell you anything and merely shows you somewhat interesting behind-the-scenes footage. There are also four selective audio commentaries by Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Brad Pitt and Michael Rapaport; each wisely only commenting on the scenes in which they are present. This is a nice feature that should be included on more DVDs. Finally, there is an animated photo gallery, a 5-minute 1993 featurette, and the trailers.

We hope Warner continues to make discs that are this great!

True Romance, from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
121 minutes, anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1) 16X9 enhanced, 5.1 Dolby Digital, DTS
Starring Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, and nearly any other actor you can think of
Produced by Samuel Hadida, Steve Perry, Bill Unger
Written by Quentin Tarantino
Directed by Tony Scott

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