Get Shorty

    365 Films

Entry #73

Get Shorty (1995)

Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

It’s strange how in the span of eighteen years, Get Shorty has gone from being an enthusiastic staple of what accessible, mainstream, and big studio entertainment is capable of to its current status a mere ghost of a fossil of a bygone era.  Think about it, when was the last time you saw John Travolta, Gene Hackmen, and Rene Russo in anything let alone the same movie.  When was the last time you went to the movies to see a proper translation of Elmore Leonard?  When was the last time director Barry Sonnenfeld made anything worth seeing?  At the time, he was a champion ex-cinematographer and newly christened director who was on the early side of a directorial hot streak.  Unfortunately for him, it all came crashing down in a little less than four years.  I don’t mean to accentuate the negative here but it’s difficult to watch a film as breezily entertaining as Get Shorty and not be a little saddened by the fact this particular combination of talent will never conspire to make anything like it again.  Adapted from the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name, Get Shorty concerns small time Miami gangster Chili Palmer’s activities in Hollywood as he convinces a Z-grade producer named Harry Zimm to finance a feature film based on recent events in Chili’s life.  That’s the skeletal outline of a plot that could also be boiled down to that which the work of Elmore Leonard does best: colorful exchanges between colorful characters.  Each scene is essentially a power struggle between two ideologically similar yet practically opposed industries, Hollywood and organized crime.  The film really begs no further insight simply because it is content to zip by at a brisk pace, offer up beautifully timed gags, and bathe us in the joy of listening to its astutely performed snappy dialogue.  As much as that hard work had already been committed to paper by Elmore Leonard, credit where credit’s due to writer Scott Frank who proved he was certainly capable with Leonard’s words in his even more impressive follow-up, Out of Sight (more on that later).  Thinking back on Get Shorty, it’s all too evident that the film’s sole reason for existing was because of the pop culture tidal wave created by Pulp Fiction the previous year.  Travolta had proven he was worthy of playing in the majors, now he just had to get on base.  In other words, this movie would not exist without Pulp Fiction paving the way for it.  At the same time, Get Shorty succeeds where so many other (way too many to count) piss poor imitators failed.  It didn’t try to out-Tarantino Tarantino and instead relied on Leonard, who was magically writing this kind of shit into gold back long before Tarantino was even born.  It keeps things light, it keeps things funny, and it never tries to convince you that it is something it’s not.  In the end, it may not be a film that astounds the eye and boggles the mind with its cinematic transcendence, but it deserves quite a bit of recognition for being so good at looking effortless.  And for those of you unfortunate enough to have seen its DOA follow up, Be Cool, you know how difficult effortlessness can be.