Inglourious Basterds (2009)
The continued mystery of his intentions has kept Quentin Tarantino (largely) in favor with the critics and the movie-obsessive, they enjoy the prolonged chase and debate: the attempt to figure if he’s an idiot-video raised primitive accidentally prodding nerves of “deeper meaning” (whatever that is – usually code for white bread mid-class Oscar tear-jerk) with the religious intensity of his devotion to movies and pop cult in general; or a more cunning prankster who intentionally eludes with found objects. And the intensity has kept general audiences (usually) interested. I read a Tarantino interview sometime ago with his claim that his movies affect adults in the fashion that children’s movies affect children, that his movies put them in touch with the primal thrills of a story they haven’t heard hundreds of times prior to stepping into the theatre. Much of QT’s proclamations can be taken as self-aggrandizement (the Hitchcock/Spielberg strategy of director-as-star: get those asses in the seats) but this is on-the-money: most every scene in his pictures, even the superfluous, burns with a fleeting, desperate, hyper-consciousness, every thing seems to count, putting us in the hang-on-every-word/image story-pleasure-zone of children. There’s a glee to Tarantino, you resent the hype but you enjoy the carnival nature of his good time, of laughing with your friends, “Yeah, I just saw that (naughty) new Tarantino movie”. Tarantino’s pictures have a distinctive look of derivation, if that makes any sense, even the earlier, visually shaggier ones: they all resemble beautiful paintings left in the attic for 50 years – grainy vibrant pop art (one of his clearer, skin-deep, lifts from Godard; Tarantino has clearly watched the legend and thought “wouldn’t it just be awesome if something propulsive and fun looked like this?”). And, of course, QT always delivers the requirements of his favorite pictures just a beat off, nurturing an “anything goes” illusion; when you’re usually, in actuality, dropped off at the stop you expect (did you honestly think he was gonna deny the Bride her babe, after all that?).
Inglourious Basterds, his latest, after articles from Cannes, after months of all-over-the-place reviews, after flip-flops, endless interviews, gossip over running time, turns out to be about what you might have expected from Tarantino had the press left you alone. Except its better. I like to think of myself as a fairly understanding, democratic sort, but I, for the life of me, can’t follow those who see Basterds as Tarantino fanning his bad boy flames while a richer picture percolates along. Inglourious Basterds seems to be the picture that QT has always had in his head, and has taken other movies and countless hoopla to get to: that revelation released by his (explicitly) working movies into the guiding moral force of his picture, promoted from sight gag window-dressing (and even those are more pointed here – allowed parody dimensions). Movies, as others have written, are the savior of Inglourious Basterds, but they’re also more – movies are a settling of tension, pretense and hypocrisy. The picture, a WWII movie more or less in name only, is comprised of ten or so scenes over 150 minutes, all of which concerning, as has also been written, negotiations, needling; negotiations amongst all sides for all purposes, of dubious, mysterious, shifting loyalties, German/American/French/British/all-of-the-above, usually sorting who’s gonna die at the end of the encounter, and who’s gonna live to weather another life/death finagling.
The characters of Inglourious Basterds are all stereotypes: the “jolly good show” Brits; the removed, chic, superior French; the leering, cunning, ironically calm Nazis, the redneck badass from the God-knows-where in the American south, etc. In past Tarantino pictures, stereotypes were played for fun and for structure-deep subversion, in Inglourious Basterds, these stereotypes are knowingly wielded by those aware of the effect of their presences, to throw one another off the scent; the characters consciously playing to the propaganda and generalizations of the time (generalizations that haven’t faded, watch the clear, understandable, guard of the German actors when they’re, idiotically, asked what Germans think of the picture). Life is role-playing, even in tranquility, and Tarantino, though nowhere near the first, is suggesting that war is only a heightened round of the game everyone already plays. And movies, which are obvious games, are the breath of honesty – a mass delusion more truthful than life because the delusion of the movies is quantifiable, acknowledged. And this explicit, moving understanding gets to what Tarantino has been after all along – going all the way back to the hoods debating Madonna and to a contract killer and an off-limits woman taking periodic solace in the pretend babes of an intentionally/knowingly gaudy diner. In Inglourious Basterds – Tarantino definitively proclaims pop the great social leveler, and only a man with his unapologetic devotion could suggest such a thing without courting and landing absurdity. We were off to think QT some sort of über-hip trafficker in irony: we took it as irony because we doubted that one’s love for anything could be so overpoweringly obvious without some qualifier. But that’s exactly what Tarantino’s love is: unqualified.
Inglourious Basterds is a “men on a mission” movie with essentially four beginnings and an end. Characters are continually given long introductions only to be dealt quick, shocking deaths that have you wondering “why bother?” We spend much of the picture trying to get our bearings, waiting for it to find some sort of flow. (People who complain that Basterds is nothing but talk misunderstand many of the “men on a mission” movies – which are 2 hours of talk, half an hour of tonally startling bloodshed.) The repetition, which has been a liability in certain QT pictures, is a point here: we’re all trying to get one another to see our way of seeing things, for domination, survival, sex, money, prestige, kinship, understanding. Except most of us don’t have the danger of war movie clichés hanging over our heads – and the merge of Tarantino’s tricks with a larger desperation imbues Inglourious Basterds with an unexpected poignancy – the repetition and the dwarfed expectations (one character, toward the end, meets a particularly unanticipated, prolonged, nasty end, it’s one of the worst things I’ve had to watch in a QT movie) wedded to the movie-movie passion, give us a sense of fragility that we don’t feel in many, theoretically realistic, war movies in supposedly superior taste, because the inevitability, the dullness, the good intentions, dull our senses; we sit through them, congratulate ourselves for our safe, removed interest and promptly forget; or, worse, we drink in the carnage under the guise of sympathy for the deceased. I don’t want to make Inglourious Basterds out to be more than it is, but in garish, horror movie terms it redeems the dubious war movie by bluntly wallowing in the war movie’s dubiousness.
Tarantino is a kind of fetish-moralist; like De Palma, he gets off on death and women and both, and then scolds himself. Tarantino gets off on war for its movie possibilities; he has no interest in the political beyond the political inherent in movies. Yet, he can’t help humanizing his stereotypes; he shows more feeling for his movie people than most “responsible” filmmakers for theirs. Tarantino can’t remove himself from them, and, if anything, he’s grown closer to his types over the years – Inglourious Basterds is one of his best acted pictures, certainly since Jackie Brown. Christoph Waltz, as the “Jew Hunter”, relishes in the showy tics and tacs, while picking at the pathologically self-centered cowardice underneath (the Jew Hunter, in typical Tarantino shifting, is off-ed not with a gun or a knife, but with a curveball side-exit – again, everything’s a negotiation. Eli Roth, a co-star here, pulled a similar gambit in his too-derided Hostel part II). As a German movie star doubling as a double-agent, Diane Kruger is rescued from the thankless hot chick roles of Troy and the National Treasure movies, and she has a few surprising moments, including one on loan from Kill Bill 2. Michael Fassbender, seen earlier this year in Hunger, has a humdinger of a “pip pip” exchange with Mike Myers and Rod Taylor, and an even better near-death moment with Leni Riefenstahl as incidental savior. There’s Brad Pitt, lending the picture an illusion of commerciality; and while I didn’t find his “I’m a character actor too” showboating as off-putting here as I normally do; I was still, at times, left wanting a more conventional, less ironic, convincing man-man in the role, someone who more naturally glows the Marvin/Bronson/Meeker/Ryan anti-glow (this would’ve been an ideal Bruce Willis reunion).
The performances that haunted me most were Mélanie Laurent’s (and yes, her resemblance to another Tarantino leading lady is unmistakable), as the Jewish theatre owner seeking revenge, and Daniel Brühl’s, as the German Audie Murphy trying to bed her. Their courtship, and its unsentimental, mercilessly curt conclusion, furthers Tarantino’s ambiguity – his inner-fan’s hunger for trope and his artist’s hesitance to indulge it. There seems, if you permit me a reach, to be some auto-consternation going on – the picture idolizes Laurent, her theatre, the artistry of the German propaganda, only to viciously cut them down – movies equally seen as victim and avenging angel (which could reflect the dicey-ness of how far Tarantino wishes to take the controversial Jew wish-fulfillment angle). The picture spiritually ends with one of Tarantino’s grandest, most audacious, unsettling set-pieces, think Dirty Dozen filtered through the troubling self-actualization of De Palma’s Carrie and you’re close, and rushes to a somewhat defeated close. It’s as if Tarantino – having made a picture of virtually all inside baseball movie code, a war film boiling one of the worst historical tragedies down to MacGuffin (but how many other movies less obviously, equally opportunistically, do the same?), with its mastermind as SNL-style buffoon – is openly wondering if his movie has the right to exist, even if he, as always, had to make it. That ambivalent passion is hard to shake; this is an odd and exhilarating movie.
Well said. Very fine review, and I particularly like the way you describe the finale:
“The picture spiritually ends with one of Tarantino’s grandest, most audacious, unsettling set-pieces, think Dirty Dozen filtered through the troubling self-actualization of De Palma’s Carrie”.
Excellent review, Chuck. You’ve taken apart an audacious movie with an audacious review, and I think you’ve nailed it. Tarantino’s meta commentary in IG runs so deep and in so many different veins, I have to wonder at which point he decided to scrap his original concept for IG and decided instead to deconstruct the genre by ways of the means itself: the very notion of cinema is the scalpel (as I understand it, large chunks of the original script were deleted in favor of this leaner narrative).
I wish all of IG had worked for me though, because it really is impressive what he’s doing here, but virtually all the Basterds portions of the movie left me fairly cold (save the electrifying bar sequence). Oh well, I have to applaud anyone swinging for the fences like this, especially when they’re putting a fair number of balls over the wall.
Excellent analysis.
It took me a long time to come around to the idea that Quentin Tarantino doesn’t suffer the same ironic hipster detachment as most of his fans. I think it was when I saw Enzo Castellari’s Inglorious Bastards and found it to be a fun lark, but a strange movie to be inspired by, yet it’s true: tarantino lives and breathes this stuff and there isn’t a trace of irony in his passion.
Anyway, your line near the beginning made me think of that.
A dangerous game is played when trying to figure out an artists intentions and it’s played all the time with Tarantino. It breaks into extremes between the fans and the haters, but I think both sides are off the mark.
I don’t think he’s a consciously messagey filmmaker, but he layers every scene with ambiguity and complexity. Does even he know what it all means when he’s making it? I doubt it, but does it matter really?
I like your allusion to him as some kind of found object savant. QT is Seraphine.
Yeah, I try not to kill anybody’s movies with over-labored meanings, that tends to drive me crazy. QT is particularly dangerous in that regard, because, as you say, you can take it either way you want it. (All that college-bong nonsense reading into Rhames’ neck bandaid, or the glowing suitcase, comes to mind.) I don’t think of him as too “messagey” either, though his pointed lack of message, in itself, says something. And especially when you hear what Tarantino reads into certain favorites of his, I think its fair to chase him around a little. He’s a smart guy, he knows how to bury the lead.
“Tarantino is a kind of fetish-moralist; like De Palma, he gets off on death and women and both, and then scolds himself. Tarantino gets off on war for its movie possibilities; he has no interest in the political beyond the political inherent in movies. Yet, he can’t help humanizing his stereotypes; he shows more feeling for his movie people than most “responsible” filmmakers for theirs.”
You nail it there. And that’s what makes his films confounding, the writer in QT takes on each persona, even the Nazi who gets his due from The Bear Jew tells Aldo to “Fuck yourself” and it’s clear that QT feels that is the right response and not the one that dooms him…
My good friend Jason Giampietro, an amateur filmmaker and musician, who doesn’t mince his opinion (he took me to task for my sentimental reaction to GOODBYE SOLO for example, and we’ve had some famous rows) told me yesterday that Tarantino was a “deuce bag,” an obvious acceptance of the Jeff Wells position, and also as he felt he had run out of visual ideas. It’s clear from this superlative review, which i hung with on every sentence, that’s there’s far more afoot than summary dismissal. I’m sorry I don’t feel the magic, and I was repulsed by the scalpings an dbody gorges, but I knew beforehand that would be the general direction. The passgae from your review above highlighted by Christian is most interesting.
I am here at your site to let you know that I honor your opinion, that I read your review, and while I don’t agree with much of it (seems like you and rarely agree, but that’s fine enough) I respect the excellent writing and the perception. I hope that’s fair enough.
“I don’t think he’s a consciously messagey filmmaker, but he layers every scene with ambiguity and complexity. Does even he know what it all means when he’s making it? I doubt it, but does it matter really?”
I think most good directors are guilty of this. It’s difficult to layer meaning and subtext into something without overdoing it. Usually intentional meaning and subtext=annoying and pretentious overexertion.
I’m interested to hear what everybody here thinks about the supposed “immorality” of this one. I didn’t get it as immoral at all, or even amoral. In fact, I think that you could make the case that it’s more “moral” in its depiction of war as bloody, unpredictable, and unmerciful to the individual.
Travis: When my opinion is acknowledged at this site, I will be happy to engage you in the discourse you are calling for. While my taste in films seems to be quite contrary to the proprietor of this site quite regularly, I have faithfully come here both to support and compliment the writer, even while politely disagreeing. The name of the game in blogging is to honor the writer by reading his/her review, and then to comment constructively. As a site coordinator myself, I strive to attract this kind of discussion. If the silence continues I will get the message, and will stay away. There isn’t much more I can do at this point.
Sam, no offense meant. I’ve been off/on acknowledging comments for months now, and nothing personal is directed toward anyone – I appreciate all comments and opinions whether they line with me or not. Part of it is catch-as-catch can, part of it is that your, and others’, opinions are pretty full-formed, and I don’t really see a need to argue, as my argument has already been written.
It would certainly seem that you and I approach most pictures differently, I think I’m a tad more cynical, though I can be surprising, I’m a sort of sensitive gorehound, certain things in, most recently, Orphan and IG hit me fairly square, but I saw beyond that, to what I thought the people behind those movies were getting at.
Sam, you’re one of my most committed readers, and you know movies inside and out, you don’t think I want to piss you off do you?
Ah, Chuck you are a sweetheart. This is why I knew I could get your attention this way! LOL! I will come back later today and engage Travis in an amiable way. I appreciate the efffusive compliments there, and admit I am prone to ’snap’ moments, but I am Mother Theresa next to my site colleague Allan Fish, who is the blogosphere’s equivalent to the Marquis de Sade.
I hear what you are saying about the comment situation. I apologize for being antsy. You have alwats been a gentleman, and a man I would be quite happy to have as a friend. In fact you are a friend! Ha!
With one mention of Bruce Willis, you have dashed everyone else’s praise of Pitt. Willis would have been PERFECT.
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.