Note: In anticipation of the Oscars, the following is a review of a best picture nominee missed during its original theatrical run.
Can there really be any catharsis from depicting an event that did not, cannot and will not happen, as if the fictional rewriting of history can salve one of the 20th century’s deepest wounds? For all his considerable skill as a writer and director, Quentin Tarantino delivers in Inglourious Basterds what is, in essence, an infantilized revenge fantasy with even less usefulness than burning a hated figure in effigy. Packaged as a spaghetti western in World War II garb, the film tacks together a group of Jewish guerillas in France, the survivor of a Nazi slaughter whose ownership of a cinema presents an opportunity for revenge, and a Nazi colonel tasked with hunting down enemies of the Reich and, of course, Jews. Much like the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, this is a film in which characters don’t so much influence the plot as get carried away by it, like pieces of cork in turbulent rapids. Plans are made, go awry, and with this being a Tarantino film, the only certainty is that the body count will be ridiculously high. Unlike Burn After Reading, however, the plot feels less like a deliberate surgical satire and more like a film that’s gone out of control.
The opening scene is easily one of the best and most promising in the movie, quietly introducing a deliciously memorable character – Colonel Hans Landa (nicknamed the “Jew Hunter”) – through the film’s best, most creative performance, courtesy of Austrian actor and genuine revelation Christoph Waltz. We watch with an uneasy mixture of dread and bemusement as the Colonel arrives at a milk farm in search of missing Jews and toys with the farmer he suspects of hiding them, all the while smiling with a captivating, polite, perky malevolence. Later scenes, however, are marred by the way in which Tarantino reuses the same structural means of building and collapsing tension: long periods of trawling dialogue typically capped by brutal violence. One can hear him noisily ratcheting up the tension; each moment that passes is one big “wait for it…” until the tension finally bangs. Fault an excessive deference to Sergio Leone, who managed to infuse poetry into scenes known for their patience – the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West remains the gold standard along with the three-way stare-down at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Tarantino merely ends up with a collection of strangely tedious, drawn-out and predictable scenarios. Again, a difference with Leone: characters, faces. Leone loved faces with personality etched into the skin and eyes, not strictly for their own sake but for what they could tell us, in complement to often sparse dialogue, about the characters. Inglourious Basterds is similarly interested in the hows and whos of the characters, and brimming with beautiful scene compositions, but reduces the why to simple good and evil and cares nothing for the feelings underlying it all. This is why Leone is poetry and Tarantino is, in this case at least, a technical manual; Inglourious Basterds displays marvelous craft and composition yet lacks spirit. Tonal confusion – the film is stuck in the limbo between black comedy and drama rooted in the horrors of World War II – further gives the film a herky-jerky feel. From painfully quirky, inconsistent affectations like bold letters announcing some characters, but not all, and random narration thrown in to repeat information already provided by characters’ conversation, the film doesn’t achieve a coherent mood let alone make the case that there is something to laugh at, however inappropriately, in the Nazis’ holocaust or the horrors of warfare.
One could ask to what extent the lovingly stylized violence plays into the stereotype of the vengeful Jew-Shylock with bowie knives, a match, and a penchant for scalping and explosions. Inglourious Basterds plays into it wholeheartedly, right down to the inferno proclaiming that this is “Jewish vengeance” as people burn to death and are shredded by machine gun fire. Prior to that, the Basterds – led by Brad Pitt doing Midwest impressions as Lt. Aldo Raine – actively use cruelty and violence to sow fear in the Germans. From a briefing Raine gives his men: “We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are. And they will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the Germans won't be able to help themselves but to imagine the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heels and the edge of our knives.” Ah, the stuff to swoon over while sighing, “My heroes!”
There is an element of manipulation in all of this; who, except for the lunatic fringe, isn’t outraged by Nazis? But despite his apparent intent to offer his take on the “sociological battlefield at that time with the racism and barbarism on all sides,” as he is quoted in the movie’s Wikipedia entry, Tarantino doesn’t bother with the basic question of how good differentiates itself from evil when it uses similar methods. Forget toying with audience willingness to overlook and rationalize brutality and sadism inflicted on the correct enemy; Inglourious Basterds indulges rather than questions. Even the moment when a little candle flame of tragic sympathy is lit for Daniel Bruhl’s character, a young German war hero whose exploits lead to fame as a movie star belied by the inklings of conscience, Tarantino is quick to extinguish it lest we are forced to set bloodlust aside. Repeating the theme of bloody revenge that seems to be Tarantino’s single-minded focus, with no room for the nobler aspects of our psychology, Inglourious Basterds delivers not humanity but a stunted facsimile. It’s a film ultimately as cartoonish as Martin Wuttke’s portrayal of Hitler, despite the promise of isolated moments here and there, well suited as propaganda for allied forces — if 70 years too late.
Entertainment: * (out of two, and mostly for Christoph Waltz’ performance)
Craft: * (out of two)
Inglourious Basterds. Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Starring Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Daniel Bruhl, and Sylvester Groth. 152 minutes. Rated R for strong graphic violence, language and brief sexuality.
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