Guy Ritchie's Snatch, Or, Why We Need Quentin Tarantino Again

There's a complicated scene between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper in True Romance, the Quentin Tarantino-scripted movie that came between Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, in which Hopper makes a speech that is at once so objectionable and at the same time such a beau geste that the audience doesn't know how to feel and what to think. It's the sort of scene that you get nowhere trying to describe or explain. You could, if you liked (and if you had a room full of people with a lot of patience), keep pausing the film every few frames and analyze the moral dynamics of the situation (See, here he says this, this, and this, which makes us think X, while at the same time he's doing this and this, which makes us feel Y), but you'd look like a fool.

I kept thinking of that scene during Snatch, the latest policier bouffe from Madonna's ambitious new spouse, Guy Ritchie. I went to see it because of Benicio Del Toro, even though I'd nearly fallen asleep at the ironing board the week before trying to watch Ritchie's first feature, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels on television. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels seemed to consist largely of the same joke made over and over: oiks using sarcasm or fancy language. The fourth or fifth time this happened you either went with the rhythm of the gags, like an audience at a Neil Simon play, or else you found yourself thinking about why this particular joke creeped you out. (Answer: it assumes that Cockneys are stupid and that, therefore, to hear them wield long words or irony is incongruous.)

I guess I thought Del Toro's acting would outweigh Ritchie's sophomoric writing and direction. Actually, Del Toro doesn't have a lot to do in Snatch. What you see of him in the trailer is pretty much what you get. He gets bumped off fairly early in the picture, and after that becomes a running gag about a corpse with a bag over his head. With what screen-time left to him, Del Toro is forced to spend speaking in a thick "Jewish" accent, or Ritchie's idea of a "Jewish" accent, saying the kinds of things that Ritchie thinks Jews would say, and trying to look like a nebbishy guy with fantasies of being cool. For Del Toro, who is very, very cool, this is a stretch.

Jews are by no means the only objects of Ritchie's derision in Snatch: he also makes generous fun of black people and women, not to mention oiks (about whom there are the same jokes as in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels) and the Irish. Watching Snatch, I found myself prey to the same dawning discomfort I'd felt a few weeks earlier watching Steven Berkoff perform his one-man show at the Public Theater. Shakespeare's Villains: A Masterclass in Evil, as the show was called, was actually less about either Shakespeare or villainy than it was about being a hack actor. It consisted mostly of Berkoff strutting about the stage telling actor jokes (about critics, bad reviews, stage mishaps) and reciting Great Moments from the Bard.

It wasn't just an excuse for Berkoff to indulge himself, though. It was also an opportunity to see up close Britain's own special brand of crypto-racism and xenophobia at work. Berkoff's main party-trick turned out to be stereotyping: he did famous scenes and speeches in funny voices and with funny business. He did Othello in the voice of a "Negro" and Shylock in the voice of a "Jew" and the Macbeths in the voice of "Glaswegians." He minced about as Gertrude, Ophelia and Lady Macbeth making lewd gestures with his hands. There were lots of hooter jokes. It was the more shocking if you knew who Berkoff was, that all this jocund racism and misogyny was coming from one of the great left-wing proponents of the post-post-war British stage.

In Snatch I had similar trouble with a subplot involving a character known as "the Piker" (Brad Pitt). "Pikers" are what Ritchie's oik protagonists call the Irish gypsies who live in the trailer park where they go to buy a second-hand caravan (a trailer); Pitt is their leader. The Piker lives with his mother in the trailer park and is an animal in the ring. He excels at bare-knuckle boxing. He can take another fellow out with one punch, which becomes a problem when the meanest, cruelest, most brutal and blood-thirsty gangster in town wants him to go down in the fourth round of a fight the oiks have entered him in (they're illegal boxing promoters).

The Irishness of this character is central to the comedy?and not just because he's unintelligible. (Ritchie's one creative stroke is to capitalize on the fact that Brad Pitt is incapable of doing a passable Irish accent.) The Piker is devoted to his mother ("me ma-aa-ah," as Pitt pronounces it). He is also uncontrollable in the ring and, except for a few sparks of low, primitive cunning, fairly dim; consequently it becomes a source of dramatic tension more than once whether or not he understands what it means to throw a fight. (The fact that he does turns out to be beside the point.) Late in the movie, the bad mean gangster wants to show the Piker that he means business, so he sets fire to the mother's trailer while she's asleep in it. It's the sort of thing that would be a major plot point in another movie, having someone's mother burned alive. But not here. The Piker's dead "maa-aa-ah" is a joke, a bleat, an afterthought.

It's interesting to note how the word "piker" is used in Snatch and set it against the scene in True Romance in which Dennis Hopper informs Christopher Walken that Sicilians are descended from "niggers." It's a long speech, and through most of it you can't believe what you're hearing. You like the Hopper character, you understand that he's standing up to Walken, which you want him to do. Walken wants to betray someone's whereabouts and Hopper says he doesn't know. Walken says he knows Hopper is lying?that he can tell because he, Walken, is Sicilian, and Sicilians are the greatest liars in the world. It's almost as if Walken is saying that the Sicilians invented lying, so Hopper counters by telling Walken, in essence, that "niggers" invented Sicilians. It's a very bizarre scene, and for a while (probably just for a second or two) it has you paralyzed, morally. It isn't until the very end of the speech that you understand what Hopper is doing: trying to get himself killed, saying the thing he knows Walken will find most offensive.

Conversely, it isn't until the very end of Snatch that you realize how unimportant Guy Ritchie deems the death of a "piker." A "piker" in British slang is a tramp or vagrant. It's not quite as incendiary a term as "nigger," but it comes to the same thing. In calling the gypsies "pikers," Ritchie's oiks are dubbing them the lowest of the low. That Ritchie himself sees the trailer-park gypsies in his movie as no-count trash is evident in his dramaturgy. The bumbling low-lifers in Tarantino's pictures, like the characters in the other indie-film genres that Ritchie is aping (Irish, American and English), tend to be highly idiosyncratic. Ritchie's are undifferentiated. They have no human or tragic dimension. They're just funny.

Ritchie's interest in groups of people derives from a desire to denigrate them so that he can feel superior. Tarantino's interest in groups of people has to do with moving them around, confronting them with each other, making us question what we think and feel. Which is why we keep getting all those scenes where everyone is holding a gun on everyone else. It's a tableau Tarantino got from Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo. But Tarantino made it his own by adding a moral element: when he sets up one of those four- or five-way standoffs, every gun in the frame has a different moral heft because of what the person aiming it has said or done. Who's worse: the vampires or the bikers or the criminals? Is there anything to choose between the Hollywood guys, the FBI and the Mafia?

Ritchie isn't interested in what people do or even what they say. He's interested in what they are.

But my point isn't really Ritchie and his work; it's Tarantino and his. Tarantino seems to have disappeared. Reservoir Dogs stirred something?in the film community, and out of it?and Pulp Fiction was greeted as the most significant thing to happen to English-speaking culture since the great vowel shift. He became the god of independent filmmaking; what's more, he used his sudden power and influence to do good things, to help other young filmmakers. He tried to interest young audiences in some of the films that his own derived from ("If you like my stuff, this is where it came from," he says in an ad for his Rolling Thunder Pictures).

Tarantino spawned countless imitators, most of whom (like Guy Ritchie) didn't get it?they thought it was all about gratuitous violence and gore, when in fact it was about language and morality. Tarantino made things cool that later became important?reinventing the idea of the soundtrack album, writing roles that allowed actors like John Travolta and Samuel Jackson to redefine themselves, getting a movie star to like Bruce Willis to work for no money in a good cause. (Pulp Fiction busted up the longtime show-business equivalent between money and prestige: after that it was okay for anybody to do interesting work, no matter how low-paying it was).

Tarantino also made some mistakes. He accepted too many cameo roles in other people's movies, allowed himself to be cast in the wrong part in a camp Broadway revival, became too visible. He allowed us to get sick of him.

Well, we're not sick of him anymore. Come back, QT, we miss you.