He Said, She Said: Inglourious Basterds
By Caroline Thibodeaux
September 8, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
When a new Quentin Tarantino film opens, it's always an event. It doesn't matter whether the movie's any good or even if it's entertaining at all. The writer-director takes his time delivering his projects, often crafting his offerings over years at a time. Between his leisurely pacing and a partnership with the Weinstein Company that has lent itself from time to time to seeing his films open later than originally planned - Tarantino has the ability to whip up the curiosity of his waiting audience, fans and critics alike. They will and they do wait for it and usually, they come away satisfied. Tarantino is more than an auteur. He's one of the few living directors whose actual name has lent itself to the designation of a film-making and screenwriting style. In this day and age of information/entertainment anywhere, everywhere and all the time, his status as a cinematic icon precedes him, deservedly or not. His filmography is studied and analyzed in numerous History of Cinema, screenwriting and filmmaking courses all over the world. And by all accounts he intends to keep adding to the program of study.
The latest addition to the syllabus is Inglourious Basterds – an alternative history WWII revenge drama that pays simultaneous homage to Spaghetti Westerns, Blaxploitation and French New Wave. In a cheeky shout out to Aldo Ray, star of numerous WWII Macaroni-Combat films - a sub-genre heavily influenced by the Spaghetti Western - IB stars the one and only William Bradley Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine, the leader of a crack team of Jewish soldiers out successfully spreading fear and hunting Nazi scalps throughout war-torn Europe. This group's plan to kill Hitler and end the war is paralleled by the efforts of Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish farm girl who ends up the proprietor of a small cinema in Paris after escaping her family's massacre. She has the same objective in mind. Tarantino injects himself so thoroughly into this film and in such a loving and humorous way, I almost expected him to make a cameo appearance and deliver a speech involving dead Nazi storage. All the way from the line "I'm French. We respect directors in this country." (This line must have killed during the film's premiere at Cannes) to his main conceit – that WWII could be ended by showing a movie – not for a moment was I allowed to forget that I was watching a QT production. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
IB is an engaging, infectious romp stuffed with QT's requisite wordy, expansive dialogue, hammy yet eventually appropriate work by Pitt and a revelatory performance by veteran actor Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa. I didn't buy Pitt's opening monologue/address for a minute, but his sing-song hillbilly patter sets the stage for much of what comes later and serves to get the ear and brain readjusted to Tarantino's writing style – a style that features scenes that go on much longer than most films. (Each scene actually feels like its own one-act play.) I ultimately understood what Pitt was trying to do by the second and third acts and his work gets stronger and funnier as the movie unwinds.
Waltz's portrayal of a cunning, multilingual SS officer known as The Jew Hunter continues the Tarantino legacy of mortifyingly hysterical and yet somehow appealing bad-asses that tend to elevate the tension and hilarity of every one of their scenes. In a testament to how well written this character is, Michael Fassbender (the German-speaking but still too-British officer Lt. Archie Hicox) campaigned hard for this role but had to settle for Hicox. Waltz is more than up to the challenge and relishes the opportunity to breathe life into this perfectly vicious officer of the Waffen-SS who may or may not have his own hidden motives. Script aside, his performance is the showcase of the film and it's no wonder Waltz' work in IB is being bandied about as a possible Oscar contender. In shades of Travolta in Pulp Fiction and Robert Forster in Jackie Brown, Tarantino has pulled another actor off the scrap heap and supplied that actor with an opportunity to reawaken and reinvigorate his career.
The list of admirable performances goes on. Diane Kruger, thoroughly unremarkable in Troy and those two dumb National Treasure movies, is winning as the German movie actress Bridget von Hammersmark, a vivacious yet determined double agent. Swoony Fassbender cuts a dashing figure while trying to launch Operation Kino, and Til Schweiger doesn't have nearly enough screen time as my favorite Basterd Hugo Stiglitz.
One problem I had with the movie is that Tarantino throws in so many shout-outs, anachronisms and film culture references it becomes a bit difficult to simply let the movie unfold before your eyes in just one viewing. In this respect, Tarantino may be perceived as either being a clever businessman, tricksy or just annoying. Whatever he is, I do feel the need to see this movie again and I think I'll get more and more from it each time I watch it. Just as I do with Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and especially Kill Bill Volumes I and II. I don't know if he is a big fan of the 1960 film version of The Time Machine or not, but for some reason Rod Taylor plays Winston Churchill with an alarming makeup job featuring an enormous gin blossom. When Shoshanna reinvents herself after her escape she renames herself Emmanuelle Mimieux – not to be confused with Yvette Mimieux (Weena in The Time Machine) – just reminded. There's a moment in the third act where Shoshanna contemplates her revenge. She has set the stage and is on a well-deserved cigarette break. All of a sudden David Bowie's "Putting Out Fire" from the 1982 version of Cat People begins playing. I understood the imagery well enough; Shoshanna's smoke leading to a blazing fire she wants to set, her heart and mind burning with the idea and hope of revenge blah, blah...but that particular song was just too jarring and felt entirely out of place. It got me to thinking about Cat People, which got me to thinking about people turning into cats after having sex. Then I started briefly thinking about Nastassia Kinski and how later in her career she changed the spelling of her first name to Nastassja because that of course, would get the casting agents calling. That led to me thinking about her dad Klaus Kinski, which made me think about Nosferatu, True Blood, Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Throwing back, I somewhat belatedly began to think of how crazy Werner Herzog is and how much crazier Kinski drove Herzog, who obviously didn't need the help. And I started to imagine that by using this song, Tarantino somehow wanted to get me thinking about German film history (Riefenstahl! Pabst!) and doesn't that just sound like something he might do, but then the big Giorgio Moroder-produced drum break kicked in and I started thinking about Flashdance, Dance Fever and the one time I saw some French ice dancers skate to this music and how their routine sort of rocked. Whew. I suppose it's not appropriate to blame Tarantino for my adult-onset ADD, but he wrote and directed a good, strong film. I probably could have enjoyed it even more had he not let his uber-fondness for film-geek touches get a bit out of hand.
Tarantino likes to go back to the well of his familiar early and often. The scenes play out like stand alone dramas which are all later seamlessly interconnected. He jumps between genres when introducing members of the Basterds. He employs Samuel L. Jackson in a narration sequence and Harvey Keitel's voice is heard during a noteworthy phone call. There is a Mexican standoff in the basement of a French tavern between Raine and a new father. It reminded me greatly of the scene where The Bride realized she was pregnant in Kill Bill Vol. 2. The opening sequence on the dairy farm and the Operation Kino scenes retain the ebb and flow of so many of his earlier works. Fraught with tension throughout, there are comedic elements interspersed with sheer terror, usually concluding in a hailstorm of bullets.
I tend to agree with the lyrical assessment that the opposite of war is not peace, it is creation. And yes, I did crib this from Rent, but I think it's applicable when reviewing this movie. Putting Hitler, Goebbels and many of their highest-ranking goons inside a French cinema, plotting their demise as they lustily cheer on a crap piece of German propaganda is the greatest revenge a lover of film, beauty and art can wage on a group of bigoted thugs who brought so much death and devastation to a continent. Many of the characters in Inglourious Basterds look for their revenge, some triumphantly, some in vain. Tarantino posits here that the greatest revenge of all to be gained is that of creation over destruction.