Inglourious Basterds (2009)

2 years ago

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

THAT’S A BINGO!

by Chad Perman

For all the press it’s received in the past few weeks, Inglorious Basterds is probably not at all the movie you think it is. The parts receiving the most attention – the brutal killing and scalping of Nazis by the Pitt-led ‘Basterds’ – take up all of a few minutes, in an early scene of a film that’s epic in both scope and intent. Which is not to say that a baseball bat head-beating - doled out to a high ranking SS officer who refuses to give up the location of his fellow SS men – doesn’t make an impression; it surely does. But rather, to focus on that aspect of the film – again, a small aspect when all the parts are assembled – is to mischaracterize the film in serious ways. The immature splatter-fest revenge flick that early critics have led you to expect is simply not the film that shows up at all. If anything, Inglourious Basterds is the most mature, emotional, classical film Tarantino has put up on screen to date, a hyper-verbose and slowly drawn-out film with a good deal of its dialogue in French and German, a film where Tarantino crafts his most memorable villain to date (Col. Hans Landa), as well as one of his most realistic female characters (Shoshanna). If you choose not to see it, to write it off as a mere revenge fantasy or a lesser version of Pulp Fiction set in Europe during WWII, well, you do so at your own peril.

At his best, Quentin Tarantino is a storyteller. Despite the splash he’s made as a director over the past 15 years - and the Video Store Clerk turned Auteur mythos built up all around him – it’s his writing, consistently, that distinguishes him from the rest of the bunch. There’s a poetry to it, always; a rhythm. Not only does he know how to tell you a story in an entertaining way, but he’s also able to seduce you verbally - with dialogue, rhythms, cadences - as he’s spinning his tale. His words reward you for being smart, for being literate (film and otherwise), for following along. It’s catnip to us film geeks. And it’s probably the reason a whole lot of people can’t stand him.

Another reason Tarantino’s films are often decried – and if you pay attention, you’ll hear the same complaint this time around as well – is for their length. “He needs a better editor!” they cry. “He needs to be reined in!” they whine. “He’s too in love with the sound of his own words!” they declare. As if it’s somehow a bad thing to let a man with Tarantino’s mind wander around for however damn long he wants to; as if it’s somehow a chore to spend two and a half hours in this world, with these characters. It’s a silly critique, at best, and one that’s never made a good deal of sense to me. I want Matthew McConahgey/Kate Hudson rom-coms or movies where action heroes play nannies to be short and quickly over with - not Quentin Tarantino films. I’m glad that Tarantino, the writer/director, is apparently unable to ever ‘rein himself in’ (though even I admit that Tarantino, the person/persona, could stand some calming down).

It seems of vital importance to Tarantino that Inglourious Basterds be seen as an important film in his ouevre, and he wastes little time showing his This is Serious Business card: the opening scene is among the finest things he has ever done. The suspense, the pacing, the acting, the dialogue, the milk!, the languages, the eerie silences and calm - it’s a ten minute masterpiece. It works because it’s slow and deliberate, because we sense right from the start where it’s going – curiosity and dread mingling, tingling in our stomachs - and it still takes its own sweet time getting there. Could the scene have been ‘trimmed’? Sure. It just wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good, which Tarantino instinctively understands; the build-up is more than half the fun. It’s a slow burn in a film that winds up being full of them and, as such, sets the stage perfectly for Basterds eventual architecture.

It also gives us our first introduction to the ever-intriguing Col. Landa (Christoph Waltz), a frightening mix of wit, madness, calculation, and want.

The film is, as Kill Bill was before it, broken down into “Chapters” - Tarantino’s novelistic intent once again rearing its head - with no two chapters much alike, stylistically or otherwise: the first few chapters introduce us to the various characters and elements of Tarantino’s vast and elaborate tale, while the final chapters serve to bring all of these seemingly disparate elements together.

With that in mind, Chapter II whisks us away to a much different place - if not literally (the location remains Nazi-occupied France), than certainly tonally. Chapter II is a much looser, comical, violent scene; the scene from which much of the trailer (and thus, early reaction) is drawn; the scene most deserving of comparison to both 70s exploitation flicks and WWII band-of-brothers type cinematic tropes; the scene one can quickly guess gushed forth from Tarantino’s pen; the scene in which we meet the Basterds; the scene where Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), more than twenty minutes into the movie, finally shows up.

And again, I don’t want to downplay the visceral appeal of the scene - I get why it’s received the lion’s share of attention. It’s memorable, it’s showy, it’s clever, it’s fun - and it’s certainly hard to forget the image of a man’s head being brutally beaten by a bat-wielding character nicknamed “The Bear Jew”. However, interesting and informative introduction to “the Basterds” though this scene may be, it’s hardly the only thing the film can do, or is interested in doing. One gets the feeling that a younger Quentin Tarantino, circa 1992 or so, would have crafted an entire film around this scene, echoing and/or extending it in more obvious, predictable ways - but that the older, more mature Tarantino simply isn’t interested in making this kind of a film any more. He does the scene, perhaps, to remind you he can still do it (not to mention that it was, in his own words, a good deal of “cinematic fun!” to do), but quickly reverts back to the more austere (i.e. “grown up”), realistic, and emotional storylines first introduced in the film’s opening chapter. (It’s probably worth noting, also, that Tarantino wrote this second chapter over ten years ago and then, not knowing really where to go after that, put it away for nearly a decade before returning to it and penning the remainder of the film.)

Chapter III places us in the middle of Occupied Paris in 1944, reuniting us with Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent, who gives the film’s second best performance), a girl we last saw at the end of the film’s first chapter, bloodied and running away from a home where her entire family has just been massacred by SS forces. Now, two years later, she has assimilated into Parisian culture, passing as the (gentile) owner of a local cinema. She remains under the radar until a young Nazi war hero, Frederic Zoller (Daniel Bruehl), begins to fall in love with her - setting off a chain of events that culminates in the decision by top Nazi brass to host a gala premeire screening of Joseph Goebbels latest film, Native Son, at Shoshanna’s humble Parisian cinema. And, that, she decides - after learning that Goebbels, Goering, and even Hitler himself will be in attendance - is where she will single-handedly defeat the Nazis and end the war in a nitrate-induced blaze of glory.

The Basterds, of course, have their own role to play in the melee. Blissfully unaware of Shoshanna or her vengeful plans, they are drawn into an entirely separate - but equally destructive - plot to end the war on that same fateful night. Operation Kino, a British plan to gain access to the premiere with the help of a German actress double-agent (Diane Kruger), calls in the Basterds for muscle and assistance. Once inside, the plan dictates, they will attempt to blow up the cinema.

The film’s final two chapters work to pull these various threads together, eventually wrangling its sprawling cast of characters (the ones that remain alive, at least) together inside the theater for a rip-roaring finale that, if not historically accurate or particularly believable in any way, is still a good deal of “cinematic fun”, offering up surprises, stand-offs, suspense and, of course, explosions. It is, once again, a recognizable Quentin Tarantino film, with all the old familiar QT stand-bys: the Mexican stand-off in the La Louisiane bar scene (though this time, the stand-off involves guns pointed at “Nazi balls”), the female preparing for battle in an empowering musical-fueled montage, the fetishizing of women’s feet (in this case, Diane Kruger’s), well-made plans going awry, and a ridiculous amount of violence. Though he infuses new life into many of these motifs, they are still, obviously and always, hallmarks of Tarantino’s work; critics pounce on this as repetitive, while admirers marvel at an auteur’s re-working of these old obsessions. In other words, as with most anything Tarantino has ever done - or, let’s face it, will ever do - it’s a love or hate kind of thing. Say what you will about the man and his movies, but he rarely leaves any kind of middle ground for his audiences to stand on.

With that in mind, I should probably point out that I am nowhere near biased: I love Quentin Tarantino’s films, and look forward to each new one like a kid on Christmas morning. That being said, as objective as I’m able to be, there is a whole lot to love about Inglourious Basterds: the controlled derangement of Christoph Waltz’s award-winning performance (Best Actor at Cannes, and all but assured of an Oscar nomination if there’s any justice in the world), Melanie Laurent’s tenderly tough Shoshanna, Brad Pitt’s bluntly raw and humorously southern-fried part-Apache Basterd-leading Lieutenant, Robert Richardson’s gorgeous cinematography, Tarantino’s many cinematic homages and allusions. It’s a visually marvelous, skillfully plotted, verbal delight of a film that dances between drama, suspense, humor, and pathos with a dexterity that will surprise more than a few people - if they are willing to give it a chance.

Chad P. is a writer living in Seattle. He totally didn’t end up planning on this piece being so long, and apologizes for his inability to be succinct. He promises to try harder next time.