Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds
Starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Diane Kruger
Aug 30, 2009
It would be easy to just let one's guard down and assume that Inglourious Basterds is a great film because it was born from the mind of a great filmmaker. However, This critic left Inglorious Bastards a tad befuddled: It was clear there was something there, but just what in the heck was it?
Problem With the Cirtical Mind
That’s the problem with the critical mind: when it is stimulated the natural response is to fill in the blanks with philosophy or psychology; siphon meaning from the images and attach symbolic significance to whatever crosses its path.
But now, two days later, Inglourious Basterds has emerged as a great film. As is the case with most great works of art, especially transgressive ones, it needed to be caught up with. The heart of the matter is that Quentin Tarantino is a man who is so desperately, maybe sometimes foolishly, in love with the cinema that there is a certain intoxicating joy that seeps out around the cracks of every frame. Watching his films, one can almost sense Tarantino just off screen somewhere, grinning like a child as his visions and idiosyncrasies are brought to life: taking references from other films and making them into truly original works of art.
Tarantino's Love of Film
What it boils down to is that Tarantino loves making films and makes the kind that he probably would have loved to have watched at the now legendary Video Archives in Manhattan Beach where his home film schooling took place. Approaching Tarantino is often times that simple, nothing more and nothing less.
His films are exercises in film style, telling stories that know they exist in the filmic universe and are therefore liberated from any sort of forms or conventions, allowing him to go as far as rewriting history as he does in Inglourious Basterds, and get away with it.
On top of it all Tarantino is a master of film language and character development, of story structure and of allowing his actors to go just over-the-top enough for them to see the other side of caricature. The result is glorious entertainments that are always unique, funny, exciting violent, you name it; but never boring.
The trick that bothers the critical mind is that there are no hidden meanings in Tarantino’s films; no invisible undercurrents running below the surface. Tarantino’s special brand of film homage has always prided itself on letting it all hang out: what you see is what you get. Any symbol or artistic flourish or ongoing theme are simply a man trying to share his love of film style with his audience, like the kid who always calls you over to screen his favourite DVDs. Freud once said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and finding the courage to admit that is sometimes half the critical battle.
The Basterds
Now, the story: The Basterds are a group of American Jews who are dropped into occupied France during WWII in order to kill and scalp as many Nazis as they can. They are headed by Lt. Aldo Raine who, as played by Brad Pitt, is a fast talking, hard chomping, southern fried son of a gun who only has one amusement: killing the enemy.
His team also consists of a bevy of men, including two German Nazi killers and the Jew Bear (Eli Roth) who bashes Nazi heads in with a baseball bat, seen in a scene that will go down as classic Tarantino.
One of Tarantino’s strengths has always been in the way he uses dialogue in order to convey images and emotions that pictures would not. Take the scene in question, which is prefigured by one of a survivor telling Hitler of how the Bear Jew operates, creating an imagine of violence more startling than any dramatization could be and makes the blood curdle when a captured Nazi is threatened to either give up information or meet the Bear Jew himself. This also allows Tarantino to keep the actual action when it happens off screen at no loss to the audience. Here is but one example of the writing, the direction and the structure of both plot and scene unifying to create a complacent whole.
Christoph Waltz as Landa
The villain Landa a.k.a. The Jew Hunter (Christoph Waltz) is introduced in an opening sequence that will rank as one of the best Tarantino has ever constructed. Not only is the sequence a mini masterpiece in and of itself, but, as with the last sequence discussed, it sets up Landa for the rest of the film, his dialogue and the way he handles it telling the audience more about his character than any depiction of physical evil ever could.
Another thread involves a French Jew girl (Melanie Laurent) who escaped Landa in the first scene and inherited a theater in Paris that plays German movies and attracts Pvt. Fredrick Zoller, a war hero who is now starring as himself in Joseph Goebbels’ newest propaganda film that will be premiered at her theater.
In attendance will be several other key war figures and even Hitler himself. The girl’s plan: to use the highly flammable nitrate film stock to burn down the theater while everyone is inside and effectively end the war. With the same idea are The Bastards who, with the help of sexy film starlet Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger being given the Josef von Sternberg treatment), will gain them entrance into the event while posing as Italians, which provides one of the film’s biggest laughs.
Verdict
Now, that’s enough with plot. What it boils down to is that Tarantino has gone and made a war film unlike any other; the war film that he would have wanted to watch as a kid, put together with the love and admiration of many other war films that have crossed his path, and the more one loves watching films, the more they’ll probably fall in love with Inglourious Basterds.
It’s not a perfect film, but as Pauline Kael once famously said: great ones almost never are.
