MOVIE REVIEW: Inglourious Basterds

by Jonathan Doyle

Inglorious Basterds takes everything you know-and-love (or hate) about Quentin Tarantino's films and exaggerates it to ludicrous extremes. There are too many characters, too much dialogue, too much violence and too little discipline. Paradoxically, this is both the secret of the film's success and the recipe for its ultimate undoing. Of all the films Tarantino has directed, this is the least cohesive -- and yet it features some of his most bravura sequences to date. For this reason, it's very possible that someone with extremely mixed feelings about Inglourious Basterds (ie. me) could feel just about the same as someone who thinks it's a masterpiece. The second guy's just a lot quicker to remember the film's peaks and forgive (or forget) its many valleys.

The most impressive sequences in Inglourious Basterds -- and there are many -- are not especially surprising because Tarantino's hitting the same notes he's been hitting for years. This is not to say that these sequences aren't impressive, but reading about them can't really compete with the act of experiencing them first-hand. However, the film also has some of the most peculiar shortcomings in recent memory. It's always admirable when a filmmaker dares to make a film this gloriously odd, but with self-indulgence comes sloppiness, inconsistency and unintended meanings.

The seeds of Tarantino's WW2 missteps are all over his previous film, Death Proof, but that film plays slightly better than Inglorious Basterds because its ambitions were so proudly modest. Basterds, on the other hand, comes just short of declaring itself a masterpiece (in a memorably self-reflexive line of dialogue). In its theatrical version, the first half of Death Proof is vintage Tarantino. Forced to fit into a compact time frame, he prunes everything down to the most essential, leaving the kind of suggestiveness that usually owes more to his fractured timelines than Death Proof's mysteriously elliptical linearity. Working in something approximating real time, Tarantino masterfully builds the pieces in the first half of Death Proof to an unforgettable, perfectly realized finale.

In the second half of Death Proof, Tarantino abandons the focus that distinguished the earlier section and test-drives the peculiar brand of recklessness that makes Inglourious Basterds such a frustrating -- yet endlessly watchable -- mess. Instead of economy, we get long-winded, unnecessary stretches of dialogue that wear-out their welcome. Instead of a carefully controlled tone and events that have a sense of consequence, we get trivial violence that foregoes emotion for hoots and hollers.

The memory of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 also weighs heavily on Inglourious Basterds, but the differences are crucial. Whereas Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is wisely built around the perspective of a single protagonist, Inglorious Basterds has no idea who its protagonist is, nor does it have a strategy for handling its extended ensemble, most of whom do little more than die onscreen. The script suggests that Shosanna Dreyfus is the real heart of the movie, but Tarantino never really allows her to forge a connection with the audience.

Mélanie Laurent brings a charismatic, Natassja Kinski-like presence to the role, but Tarantino has eliminated so much of her backstory (the Bride was all backstory) that she's reduced to little more than a plot device. On the page, she was one of Tarantino's most vital, flesh-and-blood characters, but onscreen she has roughly two characteristics: a) her family was killed by Nazis and b) she runs a movie theatre. When the script has more emotional resonance than the movie, you know you're in trouble.

Tarantino also fails to juggle the pieces here with the precision that his controlled sensibility requires. If this were a film by Robert Altman or John Cassavetes -- filmmakers with a flair for loose, open-ended narratives and authentic rough edges -- the narrative messiness might not be a problem, but Tarantino is their opposite. Due to his almost perverse preoccupation with cause-and-effect (effect-and-cause in his less linear films), virtually every detail appears designed to set-up or pay-off another detail.

This schematic, almost mathematical need to connect all the pieces makes for satisfying viewing when Tarantino shows the good judgement and discipline of a Reservoir Dogs or a Pulp Fiction, but in Inglourious Basterds, his intentions drown in endless stretches of forgettable WW2 exposition (actually, the problematic mid-section isn't terribly different from a similar, if significantly shorter, lull in the Butch section of Pulp Fiction). Even when characters are talking about plot of some ultimate significance, they spend too much time laying foundation we don't need. Worst of all, from a dialogue perspective, Tarantino's choice of period deprives him of his not-so-secret weapon: contemporary pop culture.

There's also the issue of Tarantino's reality-challenged worldview awkwardky colliding with historical fact. Though the film is tonally all-over-the-map, Tarantino reserves his greatest tonal stumbles for the scenes that draw most heavily upon our knowledge of WW2. He can't decide if he wants our reactions to be informed by the horrific scars of the Holocaust or if he's just thumbing-his-nose at convention. For reasons that are never made clear, the Nazi kills vary from powerfully real to preposterously cartoonish and the motive for these tonal distinctions is invisible.

Tarantino loves to talk about older filmmakers losing their touch. To protect himself from this criticism -- his greatest fear is to be uncool -- he jams his films full of brutal, detached violence. Ironically, this may be starting to have the opposite of its desired effect. This brand of violence still felt fresh and amusing in the mid-nineties, but it now feels hopelessly passé, like a misguided relic from a more innocent era. Remember when comical violence still felt surprising and new? Neither do I.

In praising the inventiveness of his approach, Tarantino tends to draw a false dichotomy. He suggests that you can either make an uptight, heavy-handed war film in the spirit of Defiance and Valkyrie or you can make a hip, irreverent movie like Inglourious Basterds. He forgets the far more stimulating possibilities suggested by Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, a masterful film with the wit and originality of Tarantino, the historical credibility of more traditional WW2 films and a worldview that is both sensible and provocative.

Tarantino also gets into trouble when it comes to audience manipulation. In his hands, you want to applaud the playful slaughter of Nazis, but as a directorial strategy, this is far too easy. Rather than shape our sympathies dramatically, Tarantino relies on history outside his film to make his villains detestable. This strategy is so primitive and transparent that you start to resist his manipulation, in spite of your hard-wired disdain for Nazis.

This is not to say that anyone will come out of this film feeling sympathy for Nazis -- in light of Tarantino's sub-one-note depiction of these characters (Hans Landa notwithstanding), that's not possible -- but getting-off on their slaughter, you start to feel programmed, rather than genuinely engaged. Tarantino doesn't give his audience room to have a personal experience with this film, he simply tells us what to feel. For many in the audience, the natural response will be to resist this manipulation, ignore the intended effect and try to get to the bottom of Tarantino's real motives.

Which brings us back to Kill Bill, Vol. 1. In the finale of that film, Tarantino kills dozens of characters in ridiculously brutal, yet playful ways. He wants us to have ironic fun enjoying something we're supposed to find repellant (ie. mass murder), so he makes the victims anonymous -- most are unknown to the audience, some even wear masks -- and foreign, as American audiences have been conditioned to think of non-Americans as disposable (in movies and reality alike). To achieve a similar effect in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino finds a clever excuse to kill even more characters in his finale. This is where he exposes his real reason for making a Holocaust movie: nobody feels bad when a Nazi gets killed. You can kill hundreds of Nazis -- with fire, bombs and machine guns -- and it's just good entertainment. Or at least that's how Tarantino sees it.

Through its simple-minded disdain (and trivialization) of the German elite circa WW2, the movie functions like the propaganda that's depicted onscreen -- justified propaganda yes, but with all the shallowness that label implies. As far as Tarantino is concerned, everyone affiliated with the Nazis is as guilty and disposable as their leaders. Could some of the German victims in the finale be noble rebels with secret plans to bring down the Third Reich? Of course not. They're Nazis. Nazis bad. Dead Nazis good.

Tarantino asks that we watch the film through a prism of simple-minded hatred, which only serves to create an identification between the audience and the Nazis. We're supposed to applaud the deaths of characters we know nothing about simply because they are affiliated with a man we know to be evil. Yes, some of this brutality is depicted as ruthless, cold-blooded and psychotic, but Tarantino applauds this more than he questions it. There are undoubtedly clever ways to play with the parallel between Goebells' propaganda and Tarantino's, but QT chooses to ignore them.

This is not to suggest that Inglourious Basterds is a failure, it's just an extremely problematic, morally questionable success. And yet it is a success. The three ostensible leads (Laurent, Cannes award-winner Christoph Waltz and Brad Pitt) all deliver terrific performances, Pitt being the surprising stand-out (as Lt. Aldo Raine). On paper, this isn't an especially distinctive character, but Pitt brings him vividly to life, investing Raine with genuine mystery, charm and an attitude that is utterly his own. Watching Pitt embody this character, you can't help but wish that Tarantino had stuck with his original plan to make a true men-on-a-mission movie, rather than another genre mishmash (the blaxploitation affectations are especially jarring). The rest of the basterds are relatively anonymous -- and oddly silent -- but this only adds to the authority of Pitt's peculiar comic performance.

To Tarantino's credit, the film's best ninety minutes (roughly the first and last third) rank with the best work of his career, but it's regrettable to see such skillfully visceral filmmaking used in the service of a hugely undisciplined vision. On paper, Tarantino had everything he needed to craft the career-defininig film he's been building toward since Reservoir Dogs, but in grasping for an arbitrary deadline (the 2009 Cannes Film Festival), he may have prevented this deliciously mischievous film from fulfilling its true cinematic destiny. Instead, we are left with a film that may be Tarantino's first true guilty pleasure.