Inglourious Basterds

(2009)

Directed by

Quentin Tarantino

Review by Zach Saltz

Posted - 9/7/09

Note: This review contains spoilers beginning at the sixth paragraph.

Quentin Tarantino’s fifth feature film, Inglourious Basterds (sic), begins with an unexpectedly terse, brilliantly underplayed extended exchange between Nazi Colonel Hanz Landa (Christoph Waltz) and a French farmer hiding Jews.  Save Landa’s distracting use of an oversized pipe, the scene is as mature, tense, and riveting as anything Tarantino has ever created.  It serves as the background for the film’s female protagonist, Shosanna Dreyfus (a ravishing Mélanie Laurent) whose family is killed by Waltz, and will be presented, a couple of years later, with an intriguing opportunity to play out her revenge on him and the rest of the Nazi regime.

Oh yes, the film also involves a group of Nazi-scalping Jewish fighters, led by a backwoods good ol’ boy named Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), as they hunt down German officers, kill them, and scalp off the top of their heads in unsurprisingly frank detail (lest we forget this is a Tarantino film).  The film gradually drifts toward a convergence of the two storylines, those of Shosanna’s and the Basterds – the premiere of the latest Nazi film where major SS command, including none other than Hitler himself, will be in attendance.  Both Shosanna and the Basterds know that if this chain of command is eliminated, all Nazi power will fall and the Allies will win the war. 

Of course, merely describing the plot of a Tarantino film does not do it justice.  There are myriad elements in Inglourious Basterds that make the film a joy to watch.  The director’s trademark dialogue (often translated into German and French for this picture) is still sharp and compelling, particularly in the sequences involving Shosanna’s interactions with a dashing young Nazi officer (Daniel Brühl) and later her first encounter with Landa since his execution of her family.  In fact, it may come as surprising that the film belongs more to Shosanna, a more fully-developed, better-realized character, than the rather anonymous Basterds, who are introduced briefly and quickly forgotten.

There is quite a bit to like about Inglourious Basterds.  I am always appreciative of how Tarantino weaves his labyrinthine narratives with the utmost confidence, meaning that few scenes are rushed and many interesting albeit insignificant characters are introduced.  Though violent and over-the-top at times, the film’s ingenuity and rich citadel of characters is enough to propel it along sequences which, in the hands of another director, may have been labored and dull.  I have nothing but deep admiration for what Tarantino is doing here.  Weaving together three or four storylines in a motion picture as complex and delicately rendered as this one is certainly commendable.  But it is impossible for me to deny aspects of the movie that are disappointing. 

Of course, following a line of successes as streamlined as his first four films have been, it may be impossible for anyone to meet such high standards.  But for a filmmaker who not only met but surpassed those standards with his last feature (Kill Bill: Volume Two), I feel as though there are three particularly contentious elements of Basterds that need mentioning (stop here if you do not wish to read spoilers):

One of Tarantino’s best qualities as an artist is his ability to consistently reinvent himself, dealing with decidedly different genres and story formulae.  It is very difficult, for example, to find any elements of Reservoir Dogs in Jackie Brown.  But in Inglourious Basterds, the director finds himself using his previous feature, Kill Bill: Volume Two, as copious source material: namely, the use of chapters, the revenge-driven motive Shosanna (comparable to those of Beatrix Kiddo) and the recurring Ennio Morricone score. There are two sequences in the film, (a standoff between the Pitt and the lengthy final showdown between Raine and Landa, which are practically replicas of scenes from the earlier film.

There is another scene of the film that is troubling, and this involves a game played where the players put cards on their heads and guess the name that is written on them.  There is one such game where Tarantino’s comic payoff is unmistakably racist.  His dialogue has certainly bordered racist before (the famous “Sicilian” exchange between Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken in True Romance comes to mind), but here, there is no other point to the scene than to exploit the similarities between African-American slaves and gorillas.  The fact that this observation is made by a Nazi makes no difference.  The intention of the dialogue is clearly comic in nature, and comes off as unfunny as it is off-color.

And finally there is the issue of the Holocaust in the film.  Tarantino is evidently working in the confines of a Nazi-torture-porn genre that does not exactly wish to divulge with any sense of humanism the grave tragedy of the mass execution of 6,000,000 Jews (such a marketing strategy would admittedly sell less tickets than Brad Pitt gleefully exclaiming that he’s ready to scalp some Nazi scum).  But Tarantino’s revisionism here is fascinating and disturbing, on many levels.  Hitler, Goebbels, Heinrich, and all others at the top of the Nazi chain of command are killed at the end of the film, which takes place in June, 1944.  What does this say about the Jews that died between this time and the end of the war, one year later?  Is it not irresponsible for a filmmaker dealing with an event as impactful and meaningful to the course of human history as the Holocaust to shortchange its significance?  Art should never be confined by arbitrary guidelines of appropriateness, but Tarantino’s intentional ignorance of history does not respect the lives lost as well as the social, political, and ethnographic impact of the Second World War.  This film will be seen by millions of audiences hungry for Brad Pitt to rip the brains out of Nazis, and many of them, I fear, will leave the theater with a false perception of how the Holocaust was ended (one is reminded of those studies showing 70% of Americans cannot place Iraq on a world map).  As a person with relatives who died both as Jewish prisoners and American men attempting to liberate them, it is personally difficult to reconcile Tarantino’s role as a storyteller and that of an observer and recreater of history.

And yet am I not propagating the same distorted image of the Holocaust by praising Tarantino and awarding the film four stars?  It’s one of 2009’s best features, yes, but rarely has a film made the line between truth and fiction so clear and palpable.  It is morally abhorrent to place this film in the same cannon of such films dealing with the Holocaust as Shoah, Schindler’s List, and The Grey Zone.  But as a Tarantino film – chalk full of outrageous violence, offbeat characters, and wry, practically trance-inducing, movie-and-pop-culture obsessed dialogue – it is undeniably rich in entertainment value, but little more.

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