Inglourious Basterds
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA/Germany, R, 153 m, 2009
Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Stars Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, et al. 

The embarrassment of all but euphoric reviews that have been written up for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds bears out that most (mainstream) critics are dolts. While scanning the blurbs at Rotten Tomatoes, I came upon some real howlers: “A brilliantly made, polarizing affair” and “A piece of bravura filmmaking” and “A nerve-jangling, suspenseful, violent, rollicking good time.” But here’s my favorite: “It’s so rich in cinematic value, it’s difficult for me to understand how a film critic could fail to be impressed by it.” Well, Mr. Dodo, I guess it depends on what kind of film critic you’re talking about. The kind who thinks Tarantino is the cat’s whiskers? Alas, there are plenty of those in this rotten biz: Roger “Crash is a film about progress” Ebert, who—I shit you not—once gave a four day, line-by-line, frame-by-frame analysis of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction at the University of Virginia; James Berardinelli, Ebert’s far less skilled but far more unsightly protégé, who believes Tarantino to be “a virtuoso of the genre”; and that uncultured cretin Peter Travers, who wrote of Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2, “Tarantino has made the hottest mix tape in the history of cinema.” Well, if apple-polishing, boot-licking, dick-sucking tributes to ol’ banana chin are what float your boat, gentle reader, I suggest you vamoose The Film Palace and pick up a copy of Entertainment Weekly or Rolling Stone—those magazines (which aren’t even fit reading material for a hillbilly’s johnny house) are doing the Mashed Potato over Tarantino’s latest heap. That’s hardly a surprise, but I’ll be damned if I can account for why every other professional faultfinder is giving this overloaded, overcooked, and so, so, so overlong revisionist history lesson a pass. Inglourious Basterds is the work of a bigheaded brat whose fantasy about how he would’ve won WWII drops a smelly deuce on the memory of every valiant soul who joined the choir invisible while taking on the Third Reich. Of course, any critic who dares to call the movie’s shaky sense of morality into question is very much in the minority here; most are so taken with Tarantino’s affected and infuriatingly self-satisfied style that they can’t see the big picture.

But I shouldn’t just goof on the critics; audiences are spaced-out over this pap, too. At present, Inglourious Basterds is enjoying an 8.5 rating on The Internet Movie Database, which puts it at #69 on the site’s “Top 250.” Still, I don’t think that reflects the opinion of most cinéastes, at least I pray to God that it doesn’t. The sad fact is that the majority of IMDb’s visitors don’t know much about film history: 63 of the pictures in the “Top 250” were made in the last 10 years. That naturally doesn’t leave room for classic artworks like Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages or A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate or Abel Gance’s Napoléon, but contemporary masterpieces such as Artificial Intelligence: AI and Vozvrashchenie have also been slighted to make room for both frickin’ volumes of Tarantino’s abhorrent Kill Bill. Young males dig on Tarantino’s movies because they play into their dumb, hedonistic fantasies, but older viewers (especially women) want a little more from the cinema than constant allusions to trashy exploitation flicks and the occasional spatter of gore.

Inglourious Basterds (the misspelled moniker is inspired by the English title of Enzo G. Castellari’s Quel maledetto treno blindato) follows a ragtag troop of US soldiers, all of whom are Jewish, as they infiltrate Nazi-occupied France in an attempt to spread fear amongst Hitler’s goon squads and ultimately bring down the big cheese himself. The Basterds’ leader, LT. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, probably miscast), calls for each of his men to collect no less than one hundred Nazi scalps, setting the stage for what a lot of audiences are undoubtedly revved up for (but I seriously dreaded): the mass evisceration of jack-booted goose-steppers. Given Tarantino’s output over the last several years, it’s not unreasonable to expect such a thing, but I’m relieved to tell you that Inglourious Basterds isn’t quite the cruel and numbingly violent revenge flick that Kill Bill Vol. 1 was. Surprisingly, we don’t spend a lot of time with the Basterds as they go about their grisly business of mutilating Nazis; most of the picture consists of supporting German and French characters chewing the fat in their native tongues. (Those who shy away from foreign fare because they don’t like to “read” movies have their work cut out for them here.) Things start off just a breath shy of brilliant (I’m docking a point for all those tedious nods to the spaghetti western—we got our fill of those in Kill Bill Vol. 2, thank you very much) with a protracted game of cat and mouse between Pierre, a French dairy farmer (played beautifully by Denis Menochet) who’s hiding a Jewish family beneath his kitchen, and an SS officer, COL. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who’s trying to ferret out the family so he can put them down and check them off his list. One of the family’s teenage daughters manages to escape before the Nazis empty their rifles into the kitchen floor, so ending chapter one. (There are five in all.) When we catch up to the Jewish escapee, this so-called Lebensunwertes Leben named Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), a few years later, she’s living in Paris under an assumed name and running a small cinema, which following a chain of events too convoluted to even attempt to get into here, will be used in the Basterds’ plan to do away with the entire German high command—including you know who.

There are more than a few passages in Inglourious Basterds that are smartly designed (the mise-en-scène is nothing if not exquisite), but in terms of bracing the overall picture, they don’t amount to a pile of hot German bean salad. When the show’s over, you’ll be inspired to carry on like the most insufferable of film snobs about its technical prowess, but you’ll also be left as tongue-tied as Hitler on Judgment Day when someone asks you what point it serves. I believe Tarantino to be a gifted fellow, and while he may have a firm grasp on the mechanics of filmmaking, he’s not a deep enough thinker to come up with anything of true greatness. He’s just another fanboy; all of his movies from Reservoir Dogs on have been homages. I long for the day when he dispenses with the meaningless references to Brian DePalma and Sergio Leone and at long last makes something halfway consequential—perhaps even, dare I say, personal. He appeared to be well on his way there with the eloquent and very funny Jackie Brown, but since then he’s only regressed, like Woody Allen. (I’d refer you to Whatever Works, but I don’t need it on my conscience.) He’s also developed a tin ear: the musical cues in Inglourious Basterds—particularly David Bowie’s awesome “Cat People” (the version from the soundtrack to the movie of the same name, that is), which couldn’t have been used more inappropriately—are simply awful. Thank heavens for Waltz; he’s the only reason to sit through this junk. (Kill Bill Vol. 1 was junk, too, but it was lean and mean junk. Inglourious Basterds, which is every bit as bloated as Kill Bill Vol. 2, should’ve been subjected to the same sort of ruthless cutting that Death Proof was in Grindhouse.) You know things are going south when you start cheering on the villain, but the Basterds are so merrily sadistic they’re loathsome. In the moral cesspool that is Tarantinoland, their ethnicity gives them carte blanche to partake—even revel—in the very acts for which they’re condemning the enemy. Tarantino’s righteous indignation backfires, and badly: you almost feel sorry for some of the Nazis. But what makes it even harder to root on the Basterds is that Tarantino has cast the parts with all the wrong people, namely his bud Eli Roth, the sick mind responsible for those appalling Hostel movies. He plays the “Bear Jew,” a knuckle dragger who gets off on cracking Nazi skulls with his baseball bat. (I guess charity doesn’t need to be considered if the men you’re fighting are blonde-haired and blue-eyed.) Roth is the last person you want to see play a golem like this because he’s such a lousy actor—and a pussy to boot. And then there’s the unfortunate Brad Pitt, who I can buy as, say, a cocksure soap salesman, but not as a grizzled, gravel-voiced, badly scarred sumbitch like LT. Aldo Raine. That part calls for an actor with some mileage, some depth. How about Clint Eastwood? If you’ve seen him in Heartbreak Ridge or the excellent Gran Torino, you know what I’m talking about. 

Look, even if Tarantino had gotten everything right in all but the last reel of Inglourious Basterds, the idiotic climax that features Hitler and Goebbels dying in a barrage of the Basterds’ bullets still would have been more than enough to render the whole works null and void. A much better film on a similar subject is Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, which serves up one hell of an exciting story without dishonoring history in the process. (It also has David Bamber, who’s a far more convincing Hitler than Martin Wuttke.) It’s obvious that Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino’s bid to be accepted as an artiste, but all he’s shown us is that he’s an even bigger ding-dong than we thought he was.  

January 20, 2010

© Copyright 2010 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.