THERE'S NOTHING MORE DEPRESSING than finding a guy as tough as nails and as mean as dirt," Norman Mailer once remarked. We have, Mailer thought, a deep, profoundly sentimental need to believe that a hard exterior invariably hides a sweet, yearning, essentially decent nature. The alternate idea--that toughness disguises nothing but more toughness--may be the more accurate take on reality. But it's also an intolerable one, especially in the movies, the basic business of which is to redeem us, for a couple of hours now and then, from our darker suspicions about human nature.
It has been John Travolta's peculiar fate to personify our desperate hope that a certain modern delinquent type--the grammatically challenged guy wearing tight pants and sporting a duck's-ass haircut--may not be quite as dangerous as he appears to be at first appalled-bourgeois glance. It is what made him a star almost two decades ago in Saturday Night Fever and Grease. And now that he's 41 and finally able to play grownup versions of the punk that was, it is what's making him--after a long season of neglect--a star again.
Last year his turn as Vincent Vega, the menacing, ingratiating hit man in Pulp Fiction--linguistic philosopher, dancing man, heroin addict--earned him an Academy Award nomination. And the picture earned the gratitude of that minority among us who think most contemporary movies, far from being too violent, are suffering a terminal case of the blahs. Now he's about to return as another unlikely hoodlum, at once incisive and dreamy, in Get Shorty, also a smart, shrewdly crafted movie, but one that's less dangerous, easier for everyone to like, than Pulp Fiction. There's every chance it will renew Travolta's Oscar eligibility.
Deservedly so. His Chili Palmer is a Miami loan shark, the kind of good fellow who can shatter his competitor's nose and with a casually aimed shot nip a sliver off his scalp, in the process neither raising his voice nor losing his shy little smile. He's a much neater operative than Pulp's Vinnie. And his drug of choice is much less threatening; it's old movies. For he's also the kind of film geek who can identify Rio Bravo from a few snippets overheard on the TV set in another room, or mouth all the dialogue from the last scene of Touch of Evil as he sits entranced before the screen in a revival house.
Imagine tough-tender Chili's delight when the demands of business and the dictates of pleasure combine in the form of a trip to Tinseltown to collect some overdue debts. His pursuit of one deadbeat provides him with a pitchable story idea, while the pursuit of another one brings him into the presence of a producer and a star who, in his naivete, he thinks may be able to help him. Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman) may be a schlockmeister down on his luck, and Karen Flores (Rene Russo) may be famous mainly for the authentic terror with which she invests her screams, but Chili is still impressed; he knows their work.