It's easy to look at a scene like the diner roundtable in Death Proof and see little more than the faint, sad echo of the legendary diner scene in Reservoir Dogs. Or to watch the long, dull melee at the end of Kill Bill, pt. 1 and see a director convinced that he could take on any genre simply because he’d watched a lot of movies that looked like that. In short, Tarantino started to look more and more like a one trick pony who was very quickly wearing out his welcome (both with critics and audiences who had both greeted his recent films with a collective shrug).
It's easy, at this point in his career, to write Tarantino off as just another talented artist who believed his own hype and, unfettered by the pressures (both studio- and self-imposed) he felt when making Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, thought that anything he put on screen had to be great simply because he was the one who put it there. Some blamed the split between Tarantino and Roger Avery, his co-writer on Pulp Fiction, for Tarantino’s newfound propensity to let his stories drift (presumably it was Avery who reined in some of Tarantino’s weirder tendencies). Some blamed his clearly massive ego (for evidence see: his attempt, in the late 1990s, to become an actor). I know that as much as I enjoyed parts of Kill Bill and Death Proof, I was starting to believe that Tarantino had lost it and that his best films were far behind him.
And so, as I sat down to watch his new film, the two and a half hour Inglourious Basterds, I was prepared for a lot of meandering conversations that seemed convinced of their own brilliance but went nowhere, signified nothing and left me cold. Much to my surprise, however, Inglourious Basterds is a different animal altogether. Here, finally, is a film in which Tarantino has managed to splice together the two disparate styles he favors (long, drawn out dialogue scenes and explosive, provocative violence) in a more coherent way than anything he’s done in over a decade.
Split into five chapters (pretty much par for the course with Tarantino who, for whatever reason, just loves those interstitial title cards), Inglourious Basterds isn’t telling a couple different and unconnected stories (as in Death Proof) or telling five different parts of a story that really have no relation to each other (as in Kill Bill), but one story that only makes sense when looked at in five different ways. Each of the chapters has a distinct tone and storytelling style that makes sense only for that chapter. And telling each part of the story all the way through and then switching to the next part of the story works much better than cutting back and forth between them ever could. For instance, the random digression into Hugo Stiglitz’s backstory in Chapter Two (complete with grindhouse style freeze frame and massive on screen title) would feel incredibly out of place were it intercut with the somber character study that is Chapter One. And when the separate stories finally combine in the tour de force final chapter, everything (theme, character, style, etc.) coheres in a way that’s both unexpected and intoxicating.
As with all of Tarantino’s later films, Inglourious Basterds features a number of extended dialogue scenes. The crucial difference this time around is that, even though what the characters are discussing is sometimes quite banal (e.g. the guessing game the characters play in the basement bar in Chapter Four), the stakes of the conversation are life and death. For instance, in that bar scene, whether or not Archie Hicox (a British soldier impersonating a German officer) is able to keep up his end of the conversation is a matter of life and death. Thus, even though the scene goes on for a very long time, the tension in it continues to mount, heightening the viewer’s interest in the discussion rather than slowly eroding it. Similarly, in the film’s first chapter, an SS colonel interviews a French farmer about some Jewish families in the area. This is, again, a very long dialogue scene. But whereas in, say, Death Proof, the extended dialogue scene was about whether or not one of the characters should hook up with a random guy at a bar (and thus has basically no tension and nothing to hold the audience’s interest other than the words the characters are speaking), in the scene at the French farmhouse, the audience knows that the farmer is hiding a Jewish family in the basement. Regardless of what is actually said by Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, amazing) or Perrier LaPadite, the underlying tension of the scene is such that the audience will remain on the edge of their seats until the very end.
Another element common to all of Tarantino’s films is that of blatant movie love, whether manifested in long discussions of obscure films and filmmakers or in strange references that only a select few in the audience would ever get. For the most part, this element of his films has been a distraction at best and an annoyance at worst. I mean, does anyone really want to listen to a couple characters go on and on about films (like Two-Lane Blacktop or Dirty Mary Crazy Larry) that they’ve never heard of?
Like his other films, Inglourious Basterds features a number of characters who are in love with the movies and talk about them constantly. But unlike in his earlier films, the characters’ knowledge of films and filmmaking has real world consequences. For instance, Archie Hicox (the British soldier impersonating the German officer) was a movie critic before the war. And because of his extensive knowledge of German films is able to bluff his way through a confrontation with an SS major who thinks his accent sounds wrong. Similarly, the relationship that will eventually set up the film’s climax (and, in Inglourious Basterds' fairy tale version of World War II, the climax of the war itself) is begun over a shared love of and respect for German silent film directors.
But more than simply talking about films and filmmakers, Inglourious Basterds has something more to say about the power of film and the role it plays in the way we see ourselves and our history. The climax of the film, set in a packed movie theater that’s showing the premiere of Joseph Goebbels's latest Nazi propaganda film, features a plot to destroy all of the Nazi high command by igniting piles of old film stock (which, at the time, was made of a highly flammable material). In Inglourious Basterds, film, quite literally, has the power to end World War II. That’s how important Tarantino believes that film is and has been over the last hundred years or so. But more than that, he’s taken a familiar trope of his films and finally said something interesting with it.
Though that in and of itself is a pretty bold and brilliant statement on Tarantino’s part, Inglourious Basterds takes the discussion of the impact of film quite a bit farther. Introduced in Chapter Two, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, clearly enjoying himself and infectiously so) and his team of ‘basterds’ spend three years tormenting, killing and scalping every Nazi they come across. And those they don’t kill, they brand with a swastika on their foreheads. These 'basterds' are violent and vicious, everything we say we don’t want our soldiers to be. The Nazis, including Hitler himself, are terrified of them and see them as inhuman monsters. They tell ghost stories about them and give them nicknames like ‘The Bear Jew’ and ‘Aldo the Apache.’ And while we might on some level know that what Aldo and his men are doing is despicable, Brad Pitt is just so charismatic and fun and the scenes with the ‘basterds’ are just so clever that they’re hard not to like. Plus, they’re killing Nazis, the last century’s one great evil, so surely we can forgive a little cruelty and excessive force, right?
At the climax of the film, as Aldo and his ‘basterds’ set about trying to destroy the theater showing the Goebbels film (Nation’s Pride), Tarantino shows extended clips both of the film itself and the crowd’s response to it. Nation’s Pride is a fictional account of the story of Fredrick Zoller, a German private who singlehandedly killed three hundred Allied soldiers over the course of three days. Basically, the film is just one horrific death after another. No one is spared. Blood is flying everywhere. The bodies are piling up. And the packed audience in the theater is eating it up. And the audience watching that film within the film of Inglourious Basterds is, presumably, horrified. Can these people really be cheering the wanton murder of three hundred people? But then it dawns. How different are those people cheering on the deaths of Americans from us who were, only minutes ago, cheering on the violent deaths of so many Nazis at the hands of Aldo and his ‘basterds?’
There are a number of ideas at play here. First, obviously, is that Tarantino has equated his own audience with Nazis. This serves both as a reminder that Nazis were not nearly so facelessly evil as we’d like to think and that we are as easily manipulated as they were. The means might be different but the effect is the same. He is also saying that the only thing that matters in war is winning. Because our side won, we were able to turn the Nazis into the embodiment of evil. We’ve seen it in countless films (everything from the Indiana Jones films to Saving Private Ryan) to the point where, if a person shows up on screen wearing an SS uniform (or even a reasonable simulacrum thereof, as in Starship Troopers) the audience immediately knows that character is evil. That’s why we can watch the ‘basterds’ scalping their fellow human beings and not be as horrified as we should be. Indeed, that’s why we can watch what the ‘basterds’ are doing and not immediately call for their arrest and court martial. For the last sixty plus years, our films have said that Nazism equals evil. And by contrasting Inglourious Basterds with Nation’s Pride, Tarantino is showing us both how powerful the medium of film was in shaping that perception and how easily it can be exploited.
It may have taken more than a decade but Quentin Tarantino has, with Inglourious Basterds, finally found a vehicle that allows him to harness all his usual themes and techniques in service of story and a group of characters that can stand proudly alongside his earlier work. Sure there are still the occasional weird flourishes that pass all understanding (like why, for instance, ‘merci’ is sometimes subtitled as ‘merci’ and other times as ‘thank you’), but these pale in comparison to the thematic and symbolic richness of the film. There’s so much to chew over in Inglourious Basterds that I haven’t even scratched the surface. Take, for instance, the ghostly image of Shosanna’s laughing face, projected onto a wall of smoke, as is cackles at the brutal death of hundreds of people. Or the massive pipe Hans Landa pulls out of his jacket moments after comparing Jews to rats, which undercuts the menace of his character just enough to allow the audience to like him despite what he’s just said. And I haven’t even discussed the brilliant performance of Christoph Waltz who’s surely headed for a trip to the Kodak Theater next February. Like the directors that his characters adore and discuss at length, Tarantino has made a rich, dense film that is worthy of close and careful study. And if that happens, we just might get a couple of future cinemaphile characters talking about their love of Inglourious Basterds while hanging out in a diner and refusing to tip the waitress.
1 comment:
Nothing is better than a good "Starship Troopers" reference.
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