Formative Performances: Pam Grier in “Jackie Brown”

It’s Day 5 of Women’s History Month, and I need y’all to sit your a**es down and shut the f**k up and listen to me talk about Jackie Brown.

I’ve talked about Jackie Brown before. She’s the title character of Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. She’s a woman caught in a near-impossible situation, starting off as a mere pawn in Samuel L. Jackson’s drugs and money scheme, who eventually makes a choice to start her own scheme. She makes the drug dealers and cops the pawns in her game and puts together a plan to steal half of a million dollars. Does she succeed? Well, if you’ve seen a Tarantino film before and noticed how he tends to treat his female lead characters, you can answer your own question there.

Try to forget about the film ending for a second. This is a woman who knows that Samuel L. Jackson’s character is on his way to kill her. She waits until he has his hand around her throat to strangle her before she cocks the gun at his…well, you know. I can’t even begin to contemplate the amount of…let’s say “courage”…it takes to patiently wait for a man to try to kill you before you turn the threat right back on him.

Robert Forster received a well-deserved Supporting Actor nomination for his performance in Jackie Brown, but I think Pam Grier should have received a Lead Actress nomination as well. Her fierce, determined, calculating, intelligent portrayal of Jackie Brown carried the movie.

This was also one of the first performances that made me start thinking about social justice and the lack of diversity in Hollywood – an issue that I’d always been vaguely aware of, but never really followed closely. A role like Jackie shouldn’t be so rare for black women and/or women over forty.