Viewing True Romance is like watching the contents of screenwriter Quentin Tarantino’s pop culture-rich cauldron being poured into the mold of director Tony Scott’s ultra-stylish sensibility. There’s a complex synergy at work between the two auteurs. Among the changes that Scott imposed on the material were unkinking the nonlinear storyline, imbuing the proceedings with an almost whimsical fairy-tale vibe, and giving the film a far more upbeat ending.
The very title of True Romance sets the viewer firmly in the realm of the ostensibly lowbrow type of novels that Tarantino would mine more extensively the next year for the even more generically titled Pulp Fiction. The opening of True Romance possesses the wistfulness of “I never believed it could happen to me,” a typical starting line in this sort of confessional literature. After failing to pick up a woman, Lucy (Anna Thomson), at a dive bar, our hero, Clarence Worley (Christian Slater), consoles himself by attending a screening of the Street Fighter trilogy, where he has a quite literal run-in with Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette), a dream girl who might just be too good to be true.
After their questionable meet-cute, Clarence proceeds to introduce Alabama to the contents of his pop culture-laden mindscape—all Marvel comics, rockabilly music, and chop-socky movies. (His motivational inner conscience, played by Val Kilmer, turns out to be none other than Elvis Presley.) Like Tarantino himself, Clarence is a media-made man, so much so that it’s easy to believe that he rents movies from Video Archive, where Tarantino famously worked in his 20s.
But every character Clarence meets along the way also extracts some element of their identity from mass media, from white pimp Drexl Spivey (Gary Oldman) taking his cues from The Mack, to aspiring actor Dick Ritchie (Michael Rappaport) auditioning for the new TJ Hooker TV show so he can finally meet Captain Kirk. Movies are a screen on which we project ourselves, and that’s a notion that the film takes very literally in its climax: As the insane Mexican standoff between cops and gangsters devolves into all-out free fire, the action plays out with dailies from the fictional Coming Home in a Body Bag 2 playing in the background.
True Romance evinces a reliance on a screenwriting technique that Tarantino would bring to fruition in his later work. When the action slows way down, the dialogue ratchets up the tension, until there’s an explosion of violent action. This happens three times over the course of the film: the aforementioned climax; the notorious sequence in which Vincent Coccotti (Christopher Walken) and Clarence’s father, Clifford (Dennis Hopper), discuss the genetic history of Sicily; and the torturously queasy scene where Alabama and a henchman, Virgil (James Gandolfini), look for a briefcase full of coke. Rather than simply revel in these violent outcomes, though, the film is keen to show that these encounters could have ended very differently if only an obvious and key piece of information had come to the foreground sooner.
Another of the key pleasures of watching True Romance today has to do with the insanely stacked cast of characters, combining veterans like Hopper and Walker with then up-and-coming stars like Brad Pitt and Patricia Arquette. Particularly poignant is the sight of a young and relatively trim Gandolfini, six years before The Sopranos, exhibiting here the same blend of nice-guy charisma and wise-guy menace that marked his Tony Soprano. And then there’s the myriad of other character actors who fill out the background, each of whom gets a least one bit of business or cracking line of dialogue to really sink their teeth into. All of these factors combine to make True Romance a truly seminal film of the 1990s.
Image/Sound
Arrow’s 2160p transfer of True Romance looks spectacular, leaps and bounds above Warner’s earlier Blu-ray edition. Color saturation gets a real boost, such as the red lights at Drexl’s crib, those peachy L.A. skies, and the vintage purple of Clarence’s Cadillac convertible. Fine details in costume and set design stand out strikingly, while grain levels look well resolved. Audio comes in both Master Audio 5.1 surround and 2.0 stereo mixes. Both tracks sound clean and clear, though the surround is far more immersive, delivering ambient effects like roaring engines and rampant gunfire with equal aplomb. Whichever way you go, the numerous evocative needle drops and Hans Zimmer’s marimba-heavy score sound fantastic.
Extras
Tucked inside this gorgeous two-disc set’s Blu-ray case are six double-sided, postcard-sized reproductions of the original lobby cards. And inside the VHS-replica slipcase you’ll find a double-sided foldout poster with original promotional art and new artwork by Sara Deck, as well as a 60-page booklet with illuminating essays by Kim Morgan and Nicholas Clement.
This edition contains both the theatrical and longer director’s cut of True Romance on the same UHD disc. Arrow expands on the already robust roster of extras found on the 2009 Warner release. They carry over commentaries featuring director Tony Scott, screenwriter Quentin Tarantino, and actors Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette, then add a new one featuring Tim Lucas. The film writer predictably contributes a scrupulously researched and engagingly delivered appreciation of the film, going into every facet of its production, analyzing its larger themes, and providing some interesting takes on the various drafts of the screenplay and original ending, as well as the thematic resonance of certain music cues.
Arrow also carries over a number of select-scene commentaries featuring actors Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Brad Pitt, and Michael Rapport, expanding these with recently recorded contributions from actors Bronson Pinchot and Saul Rubinek. There are also a handful of new interviews with several crew members, as well as composers Mark Mancina and John Van Tongeren talking about Hans Zimmer’s score, and a discussion of Tony Scott’s life and films with Scott biographer Larry Taylor. Elsewhere, you can watch the alternate ending with commentary from Scott or Tarantino, as well as nearly 30 minutes’ worth of expanded and deleted scenes from the film with commentary from Scott.
Overall
The varying sensibilities of Quentin Tarantino and Tony Scott come together to fashion one of the cornerstone films of the early 1990s.
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