A Blast to the Heart

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Vincent (Travolta) and Jules (Jackson), henchmen of Los Angeles crime lord Marsellus Wallace (Rhames), retrieve a briefcase from some cheating kids. Three people die there, and a fourth in a getaway car. A specialist (Keitel) drops by to supervise the cleanup. At a diner, the henchmen's breakfast is interrupted by a thrill-crazy young couple (Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer) staging a holdup. He and Vincent go to see Marsellus, who is telling an aging boxer named Butch (Willis) to throw his next fight. Later, Vincent buys some potent heroin, then escorts the boss' sexy wife Mia (Thurman) for a toxic night on the town. Vincent gets out the needle. Butch double-crosses his boss, wins the fight and plans to skip town, but soon must decide whether to save Marsellus' life at the sure risk of his own.

That is the story. (Tarantino wrote everything except the Butch episode, which was created by the director's occasional collaborator, Roger Avary.) But it is presented out of chronology, so as to alternate fierce melodrama with behavioral comedy, and vengeance with revelation. Tarantino pulls the string around one story while setting up the next in the bustling background. He played neat tricks of a similar sort in Reservoir Dogs. "It's not like I'm on this major crusade against linear narrative," he says. "What I am against is saying it's the only game in town."

And while keeping things tightly wound, he gives his actors plenty of room to breathe the heady air of his dialogue, with all its wit and thoughtfulness punctuated by obscenity. Says producer Lawrence Bender, who for a miserly $8.2 million mounted this glossy production (including a '50s-style restaurant set so cool that some backers want to franchise it): "It's the kind of dialogue that's so organic, you can chew, eat and digest it."

Tarantino's and Bender's company is called A Band Apart, after Bande a Part (Band of Outsiders), the 1964 film about two hoods and a femme fatale that Jean-Luc Godard based on an American paperback novel. But where Godard used pulp fiction as an excuse to discuss the philosophy of the boulevards and the boudoir, Tarantino is true to the genre's moral muscularity; he's interested in the philosophy of the abattoir. His tough guys chat about life's iniquities and inequities, about hamburgers, the Bible, the ethics of foot massage, the perfidy of women.

Sometimes they sound like catty old fishwives. But this is a very male form of gossip -- verbal machismo. With their edgy patter, the guys test themselves, their friends, their victims; every conversation is a pop quiz with life on the line. And when they do shut up, it's often to blow someone away, or do drugs, or sink into edgy pensiveness. In Tarantino's film there are no comfortable silences.