A Basterd's Work...

Inglorious Basterds (A-)

Lt. Aldo Raine: You know somethin', Utivich? I think this might just be my masterpiece.

This is a weird movie. Let's call it a deeply flawed masterpiece. (And perversely, its flaws make it such a good film...) I'm saying that because while it's got so many problems, there are characters and scenes and bits of dialogue that take it off into the stratosphere of classic film-making. So let's get the problematic stuff out of the way:

-It feels like the second or third film in a series. Or like the climax to a cult T.V. show like 'The Prisoner'. None of the 'good guys' outside of Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent and maybe Eli Roth have anything like a distinct presence. So the movie assumes you know all about who they all are and what their motivations are about...

-Some of the scenes go on for way too long, and repeat the same effect of drawing out the tension in a scene for an inordinate amount of time. (The scene in the cellar, especially, made me start to feel like the Hugo Steiglitz character in his flogging fantasy/flashback...)

-While the foreign actors more than hold their own, (see below) putting Brad Pitt, Mike Myers and Eli Roth in the movie seem more like 'stunt casting' than a well thought out plan...

-It's really self-indulgent. Well, when is a Tarantino film NOT self-indulgent? That is, Tarantino lives in a world where everything is based on movies, and movie references. So everyone and everything in his films relates more to a film reference to the way people talk and behave in real life. So ultimately, there is nothing in any of his movies that you can take away and relate to real life in any way, shape, or form. In that sense, he's the A.V. nerd trying to pretend he's one of the street toughs hanging out by the smoking section.


And yet...

It's got some of the most memorable characters that I've ever seen. German actor's Christoph Waltz's 'Col. Hans Landa' character, for instance, should get him an Oscar. In fact, one of the hallmarks of this movie is how all the 'bad guys' are nuanced, fleshed-out characters full of ambiguity and substance. It's a weird inversion of the nature of 'war/adventure' films where the Germans are the faceless, amoral killbots, and the heros are given as much backstory and distinct personalities as they need. (The 'Basterds' themselves all even look alike.) Indeed, in an early scene, Hitler himself compares one of the Americans to the Golem, the Jewish monster of clay.

Besides Landa, there's the character of Fredrick Zoller, the war hero who's being groomed by Gobbels to be a Germanic version of Audie Murphy. What's amazing about the Zoller character is how he's set up like the traditional hero of a rom/com. He's charming, witty, and as his behavior in the theater at the end points out, genuinely troubled about being touted as a war hero. (He's the only one in the seats not cheering or laughing at the dying American soldiers.) His pursuit of Shoshanna,(Mélanie Laurent) the revenge-seeking theater owner is played out like a standard rom/com trope. (The low-key nice guy is persistent towards his love interest, and goes out of his way to help her. In a traditional sense, she would eventually lose her resistance, and reciprocate his feelings.) In this case, his pursuit leads to his death, and not just because he's a Nazi. In the real world, any guy who behaves like a movie 'rom/com' hero is really a creepy, passive/aggressive, manipulative cretin with an over-inflated sense of entitlement. A 'Nice Guy', in other words. So, if you want to find it, there's a feminist sensibility in Tarantino's film.

Now onto Landa. Man, actor Christoph Waltz must've felt like Christmas and his birthday came early the day he got this part! I predict Landa will be a part of pop culture alongside 'Daniel Plainburn' and 'Hannibal Lecter' as awesome villains. He is brutal, low-key, cunning, charming and goofy. And capable of being all those things in the space of thirty seconds. The opening chapter, where Landa confronts a French farmer hiding a Jewish family under his cottage, with its reference to the opening of 'The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, is a perfect short film in and by itself. The other observation about Landa I have is how his evil has a unassailable logic to it. From his monologue in the beginning comparing Jews to rats to his opportunistic offer at the film's end about how his switching sides to the Allies gives us a character who's mastered the art of always staying two steps ahead of everyone else. (Another neat bit: His diabolical reason at the film's beginning for switching from French to English while talking to the farmer. You think it's Tarantino's nod to American audiences' impatience with subtitles, but Landa's reason becomes chillingly apparent...)

Now let's look at Shoshanna Dreyfuss, the vengeance-seeking survivor of Landa's massacre in the first scene. I'm going to go ahead and tell you flat out that Tarantino's taste in leading ladies is simpatico with mine. (Blonde, blue-eyed, wide face, imperfect nose. Gives me 'wood', as they say...) She wins me over in her first face-to-face with Landa. They're discussing her participation in the premier of 'Nation's Pride', the propaganda film Joseph Gobbels is premiering at her theater-after much prodding by the love-lorn Zoller- and Landa starts playing his cat-and-mouse game with her. (I don't think he suspects her of anything in particular, it's just his standard modus operandi as a SD officer.Laurent's face this whole time is a study in restraint and grace under pressure. I also love her makeup ritual in the final chapter, putting rouge on her face like an Apache. (Quick film-geek bit: I was a little surprised she didn't kiss the bullets before putting them in her gun, like Zoe Tamerlane in Abel Ferrara's Ms. .45. Film-geek bit over.) Her final scene has her image projected triumphantly over a cloud of smoke, laughing gloriously over the Germans trapped in the burning theater below. I mentioned earlier how Tarantino's developing a feminist sense in his films. That is, he's a heterosexual writer/director who loves women without putting them on a pedestal or turning them into whores.

If there's an underlying theme in this movie, it's that the Germans believe that they can be both good Nazis and still remain decent people in some aspect of themselves. The officer at the beginning refusing to sell out his comrades, the Germans in the cellar scene celebrating the birth of one of their friends' sons, Zoller's belief that he can be a German war hero and win the love of a beautiful French girl, even Landa's conviction that he can switch sides at the last moment and still come out ahead. Better people than me have pointed out that Tarantino lives in low film, but he visits high film enough so that his body of work is engaged by the artistic potential in low film.

In this case, it's the idea of making a Jewish Revenge Fantasy. Most North Americans, not being Jewish, don't take this into account when doing WW2 films, since the Allies already took their revenge on Germany during the war. Generally in movies, Jews during WW2 are portrayed as Noble Victims, or the Ineffectual Resistance. (That is, when they do take a stand, it's usually symbolic, and the Jewish protagonists have the burden of being tormented by their conscience.) In the case of Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino figured, What the Hell, might as well go all the way and wipe out the Nazi High Command in one go. I'd defend his revision of history on the grounds that: 1) The Nazis lost anyways, 2) if the High Command escaped, Shoshanna's and the Basterds revenge wouldn't have meant anything, rendering the movie moot, and 3) I likes me some plot twists in my film entertainment. Look at it like this: Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie gave us Valkyrie (Which, as long as I'm here, gets a C) which is set up like a standard thriller. Problem being, since the ending is a foregone conclusion-Hitler, does not, point of fact, get killed in the bomb, there's no tension and you're just stuck watching Col. Von Stauffberg march to his doom. In terms of drama, it's a case of Great Evil switching over for Slightly-Less Evil, which isn't a mitigating factor in High Drama.

In conclusion, while it's not as good as Pulp Fiction, I'd put it at the second best film he's done. The High Cinema parts and the Low Film parts don't mesh together as successfully as in Pulp Fiction, but that's only because he's stretching himself into an uncharted territory.