The most pointless performance of Uma Thurman’s career: “We had to make decisions”
In 2011, a casting announcement for an upcoming crime thriller had the internet aflutter with excitement. The movie starred a host of talents, both young and old, including a central trio of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Blake Lively, and Taylor Kitsch, along with some scaffolding from A-listers like Salma Hayek and Benicio Del Toro.
However, the most tantalising aspect of the roll-call was Uma Thurman‘s reunion with her Pulp Fiction co-star John Travolta.
Sadly for fans of the coke-fuelled Thurman and Travolta chemistry in Quentin Tarantino’s classic, by the time they sat down to watch this new movie in July 2012, they could have been forgiven for doing a double-take. While Travolta was present and accounted for in Oliver Stone’s Savages as a burned-out DEA agent, Thurman was nowhere to be seen.
What happened between Thurman’s casting announcement and the film’s release? Well, Savages was based on a weighty tome by acclaimed crime novelist Don Winslow, and as is often the case in Hollywood adaptations, shaping the book’s narrative into a two-hour film proved to be a herculean task. In fact, Stone began tearing his hair out as it became more and more obvious that this 120-scene novel wouldn’t condense easily, and a few tough calls had to be made.
“We had to make decisions in script, we made decisions in the editing, we had to consolidate so much,” Stone remonstrated in 2012. “There’s so many things different in the movie than the book; you have to read the book to understand that”.
In the end, Stone was forced to accept that several characters would need huge swathes of their storylines cut down to size or excised, such as quieter scenes that fleshed out Travolta’s relationship with his wife or those that spotlighted Del Toro’s cartel enforcer struggling with his children being raised in California. Even worse, Thurman’s character, the mother of Lively’s free-spirited protagonist O, had to be removed entirely from the film, because as Stone was forced to admit, she didn’t play into the overall narrative in an all-too integral way.
“She was a good character,” Stone told HuffPost about Thurman’s part of an absentee mother with an army of ex-husbands and a tearaway daughter. “Uma Thurman played her beautifully, and the scenes were good, but you don’t have time, you know? We have one goal in the movie, and you go out that gate, and it’s like a horse race.”
Naturally, it’s a fairly unusual occurrence for an actor of Thurman’s status to be cut out of a film wholesale, but Stone revealed that the Kill Bill star saw where he was coming from. “She understood, frankly, because the mother never figured in the outcome, really,” he explained.
Ultimately, it seemed like the person most disappointed by her scenes ending up on the cutting room floor wasn’t Thurman herself. “Her mom is off with her eight different husbands,” Lively revealed, before explaining that the scenes between her and Thurman truly gave an insight into why O became such a rebel. “It’s a shame that you will miss that in the movie. It was really beautiful stuff with Uma Thurman, and I think it really told a lot more of how a girl could end up this way. She’s the modern girl. Divorces are so much more common now than they were.”
In the end, though, it’s hard not to think Thurman’s unseen role in Savages is the most pointless of her career. She and Travolta will always hit the nostalgia button in cinephiles of a certain generation, and the prospect of them reuniting onscreen in yet another crime caper was genuinely exciting. After all, the only other time they’ve re-teamed was in the lamentable Get Shorty sequel Be Cool, and the less said about that, the better.
