Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” stars Uma Thurman as an assassin left for dead on her wedding day who seeks revenge against her would-be murderers, a motley gang that includes her mentor-lover Bill (David Carradine) and his four deadliest assassins (Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, Michael Madsen, and Daryl Hannah). His original cut ran four hours. Rather than force the writer-director to shrink the running time, the film’s releasing studio, Miramax, released “Kill Bill” as a theatrical two-parter: 2003’s “Volume One” and 2004’s “Volume Two.”
Reviews were mixed, and the industry was indifferent to it; it became the first and so far only Tarantino film(s) to receive zero Oscar nominations. But it was a worldwide financial success that opened up the second half of his career, which has been dominated by operatic and melodramatic historical fantasies like “Inglourious Basterds,” “Django Unchained,” and “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.”
“Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” is not just the longest Tarantino movie but arguably the most Tarantino movie. It’s undoubtedly his most pop-culture-obsessed movie, which is saying a lot about a director whose breakthrough feature, 1994’s “Pulp Fiction,” staged a key scene in a restaurant that was like Planet Hollywood for Turner Classic Movies subscribers. Seen in two parts or as a whole enchilada, it’s a lot to process, even for a viewer who likes a lot of the same stuff that Tarantino is into. It’s variously modeled on kung fu and Yakuza films, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, cruel and outrageous 1970s grindhouse cheapies, and anime/manga. Tarantino has said many times over the last two decades that he considers “Kill Bill” a single, long movie. The release of “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” proves him right.
An early version of “The Whole Bloody Affair” premiered at Cannes 2006 and has been shown in Tarantino’s Los Angeles repertory theaters, but this is the first time it has received an official commercial release. It should be considered the definitive version in the future, unless Tarantino decides to re-edit it yet again. Here, he slightly tweaks both “volumes,” stitches them together around a 15-minute INTERMISSION card, and restores previously deleted material that general audiences have never seen. The most striking is a ten-minute-longer flashback to the childhood and adolescence of Liu’s character, assassin turned Tokyo gang boss O-Ren Ishii, who was traumatized and exploited by the pedophilic gang boss who slew her parents, but survived to exact revenge 11 years later. The animated segment is so long that it sometimes plays as if a chunk of a different film (a spinoff prequel, maybe) that’s been inserted into the present-tense journey of the Bride, who wants to kill the people who snuffed out her wedding party and, she believes, ended her pregnancy.
I remember mostly disliking “Kill Bill, Vol. 1,” save for the performances (Thurman’s especially) and specific technical and musical elements. One of my big problems was the pacing. I’m small-c catholic in my formal appetites and have been known to give four stars to movies so slow they’d put a snail to sleep. However, the two-part “Kill Bill” still felt interminable to me, like being trapped at a party by a cokehead record collector who won’t stop monologuing about the records on his Desert Island list. I might’ve called parts one and two the slowest and most disjointed revenge movies ever made. Turns out it was a context problem. It’s now been made clear that this was a problem imposed from without, by marketplace considerations and the vulgarian sentiments of a movie mogul whose initials are H.W.
With the whole tale laid end-to-end, the Bride’s odyssey now plays at a deliberate but steadily forward-moving pace. By restoring the movie to its original, uncompromised state, which is as aggressively arty as commercial filmmaking is allowed to get, “The Whole Bloody Affair” is, ironically, the most inviting and fully satisfying version of the material. The bizarre Western gangster-martial arts film-noir Road Runner universe that Tarantino has whipped up feels more palpable. And, more so than any of his other movies (yes, really), this one earns the comparisons that Tarantino makes between his own work and true pulp writing that once was published in magazines and cheap paperbacks.
But the one-shot movie also evokes ancient texts and symbolic languages: the Old and New Testaments, Greek and Roman myths, folk songs, the Tarot deck, and gothic poems about characters haunted by loss. The numbered and titled chapters echo both Jean-Luc Godard’s nonfiction filmmaking collages, which were super-aggressive in their use of onscreen text, and the individual issues of a 10-part graphic novel. (Each half has five chapters, and structurally, there a lot of mirroring effects, from the split-screen that’s sometimes employed in fight scenes to the way that specific motifs or story elements are placed opposite each other (O-Ren Ishii’s origin story is about a child losing her parents, while the Bride’s is about a mother who thought she lost her baby before it could be born, that she’s alive, in the custody of Bill, and has a name (Elle, which means “she” or “her” in French).
But the biggest revelation here is Thurman. Her rendition of the Bride in all of her contradictions is her finest work, and possibly one of the greatest lead actress performances in movie history–a merger of Bruce Lee-Clint Eastwood-style badass athleticism and the statue-like deployment of actresses in Ingmar Bergman’s films. Thurman is believable as a tall, tough Amazon who tears through enemies like a thresher in a wheat field. But she’s equally credible as a woman who has endured unfathomable suffering and has the physical and psychic scars to prove it. The shot of her breaking down in Bill’s bathroom as her daughter sleeps in the next room is so powerful that you can almost feel the movie buckle beneath its weight. The extended one-shot presentation strengthens what was already the best work of Thurman’s career.
Whatever your feelings about Tarantino and his work, this is a tremendous visceral experience, with radiant colors, slate-somber black-and-white, and geysers of crimson blood. To quote the end of another Tarantino film, it just might be his masterpiece.
