Review
Review Date: 4-January-04
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy
Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)
In "Kill Bill: Volume 1," Uma Thurman plays a woman known only as "The Bride" who wakes up from a coma and begins a quest for revenge four years after she and her unborn child were beaten, shot, and left for dead on her wedding day. In addition to a huge helping of righteous anger, The Bride has on her side the knowledge and skills amassed during her previous life as an elite assassin working for a mysterious man named Bill — the same Bill, of course, who turned on her and blew her world apart. Through the US and Japan, defying muscular atrophy, reluctant Samurai, and criminally insane teenagers, she chases down her prey, pausing only long enough to send Bill a dismembered body as a calling card and to allow for a natural break in a four-hour epic whose second volume arrives this spring.
Welcome to the world of Quentin Tarantino.
I have never understood the web of fascination that Tarantino managed to spin around himself with just a few films (as he boldly reminds you, this is only his fourth), in part because I never watched the classic kung-fu and blaxploitation flicks from which he draws inspiration, and I don't worship at the altar of American pop culture. Also, I have serious reservations about his definition of cool, which seems inseparable from our society's dim-bulb fascination with nonchalant brutality. But in the case of "Kill Bill" it wasn't the violence that gave me pause (after all, that was what I paid for, being mostly of the sword-fighting kind), or the groovy hipster bombast of Tarantino's trademark style; no, what struck me most about the film was its familiar but exuberant brand of feminism, which got me wondering whether this sort of story reflects a jealous admiration or suspicious resentment of women.
Moving beyond the standard David-and-Goliath-with-jiggle appeal of the tough chick, Tarantino imbues "Kill Bill" with all the feminine mystique you could possibly imagine, laying out every demeaning and empowering element attributed to the female experience and expecting the viewer to get off on all of them. The Bride, blonde and beautiful, vulnerable and alone, suffers not only the loss of a child (a daughter) but also rape, objectification, and exploitation at the hands of macho jerks who view her solely as "a tall drink of cock-sucker." And yet, except for a brief moment of tears, she is a model of composed strength and resolution, the rare, lucky human who is utterly certain of her own moral judgment and possessed of both the physical and psychological power to dole out justice in the form of revenge. Hers is not the sulking pique or wounded megalomania of the average vengeful man; it's the ineffable, primal rage of an ocean caught in a storm or a tiger searching for her stolen cubs. She is, in short, a Mother you don't want to mess with, because being a woman makes her more — more exposed, more put-upon, more in touch with everything a person can feel, and therefore more potent when she decides to strike back. But if she weren't so ripe for torture first, would Tarantino still love her? I really can't say for sure.
I can say what I love, though: Uma Thurman. To my mind, she has never been much of an actress, but in this film she kicks ass, and I don't just mean physically. (Actually, the ass is about the only part of the anatomy that The Bride doesn't whack off somebody with a spatter of glorious crimson.) Perfectly cognizant of the intricacies and limitations of Tarantino's Hear Me Roar vibe, she takes all The Bride's fury and turns it into the life force of a truly mesmerizing character, pretty much stealing the show from the man at the helm. (Which isn't to say that he doesn't deliver some of the goods, like the extended fight scene at the end.) Passing effortlessly from panicked to serene, kittenish to deadly, Thurman simply goes to town in "Kill Bill," painting it red in more ways than one.
Not surprisingly, The Bride's chief enemies are women (who fall into the standard-issue Power Bitch category), and all the men she encounters are basically oafs ... except Bill, who alone appears to have both balls and the ability to pull strings (though we have yet to see his face). It's a clear testimony to the success of Tarantino and, especially, Thurman when I say that I can't wait to see the son of a bitch make his appearance so that The Bride can give him what he deserves — not only to achieve her own revelation and revenge, but also to resolve, in this particular case, the lingering ambivalence about just how mighty the heroine is, or ought to be.
Copyright © 2004 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.
