8/24/09
INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, the new WWII adventure from director Quentin Tarantino, is not the movie I expected to see. It is, however, the movie that Tarantino needed to make in order to maintain his reputation as one of Hollywood’s most original directors. If you’ve read my review of Death Proof, Tarantino’s half of the Grindhouse project, you may remember how critical I was of his self-indulgence and refusal to take the genre film beyond the realm of mere homage. I took no pleasure in savaging Death Proof, since I am a huge fan of Tarantino both as a writer and a director, but that film was bad on most levels and – worse than just being bad – it gave an impression that Tarantino was out of ideas and energy. INGLORIOUS BASTERDS proves that my fears were unfounded, and I’m genuinely glad.
First, let me talk about what INGLORIOUS BASTERDS isn’t. It is not, strictly speaking, a WWII mission movie in the vain of The Dirty Dozen or The Guns Of Navarone. Yes, there is a small commando unit on a general mission to wreak havoc in occupied France, but these so called Basterds represent only a small part of what Tarantino is cooking up in this film. INGLORIOUS BASTERDS isn’t a revenge fantasy either. Even though the individual Basterds are consciously selected for the fact that they are Jews, the violence they inflict on Nazis is much less cathartic than say in Ed Zwick’s DEFIANCE, and in most ways far more disturbing. This fact was the biggest surprise and the main reason INGLORIOUS BASTERDS confounded my expectations: it was not a feel-good Jews kill Nazis romp suggested in the trailers. What INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is, is a series of sophisticated verbal sparring matches (many of them in subtitled); battles of wits designed to ramp up suspense, punctuated by splashy explosions of sudden and graphic violence, built around some of the most interesting and un-self-conscious dialogue of Tarantino’s career.
There are actually three parallel story-lines that give INGLORIOUS BASTERDS its unique structure. Besides the Basterds who are led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt if full-tilt redneck mode), we also follow Shosanna (Katherine DeNeuve clone Mélanie Laurent), an undercover Jewess running a movie theater in occupied Paris, and a British film critic (the excellent Michael Fassbender) assigned to contact a famous German movie star (Diane Kruger) who’s – maybe - an Allied spy. The character who connects them all is Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a brilliant SS officer/bloodhound morbidly nicknamed ‘The Jew Hunter’ for his ability to track down escaped Jews, and who also happens to be both psychotic and pragmatic. Waltz gives the breakout performance of the film: his charming, creepy Landa is a villain for the ages. Watch him get an Oscar for this role.
Is the film flawless? No. Frankly some of the sequences drag a little due to the fact that they are presented virtually in real time, and the film as a whole is a bit light on action, but these are minor qualms. Quentin Tarantino has accomplished exactly what he needed to accomplish here: to move his art beyond mere parody and empty homage into something evocative of the cinema of the past, yet completely original. This film is clever, yet lacking in anachronism, referential, yet confident in its own voice. Ultimately INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is a rich, layered dissection of the power of language. All language; French, German, English, the language of cinema itself, and the language or Tarantino’s fabulous screenplay. Language drives the plot, it betrays, it seduces, it kills, and in the end… it triumphs.
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