By MICHELE BOTTON, BERNARDO SANTIAGO ACOSTA (Frances Lincoln; 2024)
A graphic novel biography of Quentin Tarantino that is, as the front cover makes clear, “Unofficial and Unauthorized.” This means you shouldn’t expect an especially accurate or authoritative treatment, and scripter Michele Botton doesn’t attempt to provide anything of the sort.
What Botton (who previously penned graphic biographies of Audrey Hepburn and Charles Bukowski) does provide is a quirky rumination on Tarantino’s rags-to-riches Hollywood ascension and his thematic concerns (violence in particular), related in the form of a series of dialogues. Specifically, we get graphic representations of Tarantino chatting with Uma Thurman on the set of PULP FICTION; with Leonardo Di Caprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie on the set of ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD; with John Travolta and Pam Grier during casting sessions for, respectively, PULP FICTION and JACKIE BROWN; and, finally, with Robert Rodriguez (identified as “A director and friend…Likes playing guitar and making cool movies”) during the filming of GRINDHOUSE. The dialogues in all cases are dominated by Tarantino himself, who fills in his companions, and us, on the details of his life and career.
The chronology, in a nod to Tarantino’s patented “answers first, questions later” mode of storytelling, is skewed, yet all the pertinent details are included: the young Taratino’s employment at Southern California’s late Video Archives, his failed attempt at making a no-budget comedy called MY BEST FRIEND’S BIRTHDAY in the late 1980s, his unrewarding stint as a writer for hire on TRUE ROMANCE and NATURAL BORN KILLERS, and his lifelong love of women’s feet (what’s missing is Tarantino’s late 1990s acting-only career and his more recent ownership of the New Beverly Cinema and Vista movie theaters). We also get a good sense of Tarantino’s outgoing and fiercely idiosyncratic personality, even if the “reality” of what we see and hear is, as mentioned above, questionable.
Also open to question are the artistic depictions of Tarantino and his colleagues, which diverge mightily from their actual features. This, I would guess, was intentional on the part of artist Bernardo Santiago Acosta, who would likely have risked a lawsuit had he been too accurate in his portrayals.
Overall this is a praise-worthy work, telling us most everything we need to know about the subject at hand, and doing so in a highly enjoyable manner. One thing, however, bothers me a fair amount: the dialogue, in direct contrast to that of Tarantino’s scripts, is flimsy and undistinguished. The fault may be with the fact that said dialogue was translated from French to English (by Edward Fortes) and evidently lost much of its bite in the process, but a Tarantino themed book without solid dialogue simply can’t be dubbed a full success, regardless of how strong everything else may be.