Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds ends its two-and-a-half-hour run time with one of the main characters smiling directly into the camera, addressing the audience and stating proudly, "I think I may have just made my masterpiece." To say that the line is meant to reflect director Tarantino's mindset in regards to this, his sixth film, is apt (although I beg to differ: I still consider Jackie Brown to be his best film to date...let the arguing begin!) but somewhat premature. This isn't Tarantino's best film, but it's right up there, right next to Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction. Like that film, Basterds unwinds slowly, methodically, perfectly paced and with the characteristic dialogue and set pieces and ratcheting of tension that climaxes into one of the most perfectly staged, purely cinematic endings in recent memory.

However, don't let the title or the trailers fool you: this isn't a men-on-a-mission story. This isn't necessarily about the Basterds (they're in maybe one third of the film's run time). Their story unfolds tangentally along with that of the film's protagonist, Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent, who looks suspiciously like Julie Delpy), who owns a cinema in Nazi-occupied France (under the assumed name of Emmanuelle). The two stories intertwine when the Basterds plot to sabotage the premiere of Joseph Goebbels' newest propaganda film, Nation's Pride, starring Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl playing an oddly sympathetic Nazi war hero/movie star in the line of Audie Murphy), which will not only be attended by every high-ranking Nazi in the war (including Hitler, played as a caricature by Martin Wuttke), but is also being hosted at Shosanna's cinema. While the Basterds plot to sabotage the premiere by blowing up the theatre and everyone in it, Shosanna plans to likewise sabotage the film by igniting the highly flammable nitrate film negatives archived therein. That is the entire plot. Not exactly the "men-on-a-mission" film the trailers and posters suggest.

What is left to enjoy (or wait in anxiety for) are scenes of the Jewish-American Basterds killing and scalping Nazis and trying to acquire information on the location of Goebbels' premiere from the German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), Frederick Zoller's seemingly innocent courting of Shosanna, or Col. Hans Landa's (the incredible and charismatic Cristoph Waltz) suspicion of Shosanna after being introduced to him by Zoller at a luncheon with Goebbels. That, essentially, is the plot of the film. There are, however, moments when the film stops so Tarantino can indulge in several instances of characteristic pop culture masturbation.

I know, I know: pop culture is what Tarantino "gets", but the problem with this script (his second weakest, following the scripts for Kill Bill) is that there are scenes where people talk about 1940's-era pop culture just because. There is one scene which is a prime example: while the Basterds are waiting for von Hammersmark to arrive at a bar, the action cuts to the interior of the bar, where a group of Nazis are playing a drinking game. The game consists of writing the name of a character or famous person on the back of a card, passing the card (unseen) to the person on the right, and the person has to stick the card on their forehead and guess what character they are. The game comes into play later when the three German-speaking Basterds play the game with a Nazi corporal, but prior to the introduction of those Basterds, we don't need to see the other characters playing the game.

The above example is the singlar scene that I remembered, and the only time in the film where I actually felt the film's length and just wanted the action to begin again (I actually looked at my watch to see how long it took for the plot to get moving again). However, the opening scene (which introduces us to both Col. Landa and Shosanna) plays out just as long and "slow" (I guess "slow-burning" is a more apt description), but is infintely more suspenseful on virtue of the fact that what the two characters (Col. Landa and Mnsr. LaPadite, a minor character who is hiding Shosanna) are talking about is actually important to the story. This opening scene, along with the final forty minutes, features Tarantino writing with utmost skill.

For such an epic movie, the action seems very contained, and most of the exteriors are shot in medium or long shots, making the film seem a lot smaller in scale than the story itself is. Whether this was intentional on the part of Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson (who otherwise does a typically amazing job) is unknown, but seeing as the film felt slightly rushed, I wouldn't be surprised if it was scaled down simply due to scheduling.

Those squabbles aside, though, I did enjoy the film immensely, and it's only now, after having been able to mull it all over in my head and converse and find others' points of view that I think I understand The Point of it. In the August 24th & 31st issue of Newsweek, reviewer Daniel Mendelsohn laments that Inglourious Basterds, with its penchant for brutal violence perpetrated against a brutal regime, sells a message of "visceral pleasure of revenge" by "...turning Jews into Nazis". What he seems to warn against is the act of audiences internalizing and applauding such behavior and thus extraxt a deep emotional satisfaction from the revenge meted out by victims to their perpetrators. At its lightest, Basterds makes its protagonists as thuggish as its villains; at its worst, it's distorting the past and representing the victims as overpowering their oppressors (which is reflective, so Mr. Mendelsohn suggests, by our cultural tendency to find meaning and empowerment from tragedy: as he writes, "...it may be that our present-day taste for 'empowerment,' our anxious horror of being represented as 'victims' - nowadays there are no victims, only 'survivors'- has begun to distort the representation of the past, one in which passive victims, alas, vastly outnumbered those who were able to fight back."

Mendelsohn is right in asserting that the film is, indeed, a revenge film. But where I disagree with him is his assertion that this distortion of history (so obvious and blatant that you must have been living under a rock if you didn't notice it) is damaging to our society. The final 40 minutes of the film, where (SPOILERS!!!!!) the entire Nazi high command and Adolf fucking Hitler get machine-gunned to death in a burning theater (END SPOILERS!!!) speak volumes to the power of cinema as a weapon (both literal and figuratively). Hitler and most of the high command escaped justice, opting to take their own lives instead; at least in one film they get theirs (I almost want to count Raiders of the Lost Ark in this capacity also: there is nothing more satisfying than watching Nazis get their faces melted and heads detonated by the wrath of God Himself.)

The sight of Eli Roth pumping bullets into Hitler brought a cheer from the audience: this is something that, deep down, we'd wanted to see happen. Tarantino has already rewritten history by making a period film (face it: nearly every period piece - based on actual events or not- is embellished and, thus, a product of imagination. Did The Dirty Dozen receive such condemnation for Lee Marvin's detonation of a Nazi high command gala? If not, why?), so he might as well go all-out.

The aforementioned cheer, though, was unnerving in retrospect: it occurs after a scene in which the Nazi high command is watching a propaganda film based on Zoller's single-handed sniping of 80+ Allied infantry. As the bullets ring and buzz on screen, the audience cheers emphatically. Zoller, however, leaves and later tells Shosanna, "I don't really like those parts." Once the real bullets start flying and the Nazis start burning and the audience of which I am a member start cheering...how different is my reaction to those of the Nazis onscreen? Maybe that is the transitive power of film: to encite emotions we would otherwise not express.

Maybe Mr. Mendelsohn is right: revenge is a visceral pleasure. Maybe that's the point Tarantino was trying to make with the aforementioned juxtaposition. When the victims are just as ready for violence as their perpetrators, that reveals a lot of human nature, of our desires and our emotions. (And what would Mendelsohn say of this fact: the film is fucking HUGE in Germany. CHUD.com's Devin Faraci reports on that story over at his site, and I sympathize wholeheartedly with his interpretation as to why the success might have occurred.) If I didn't want violence, why, in any scene containing the Basterds and Nazis and there was TOO MUCH dialogue, why would I want a gun fight to break out? Why did I find the dialogue to go on for too long? Was it that I was expecting a different type of movie, or merely that the anticipation of violence overpowered my need to see characters exist in a fictional universe?

To be honest, I think Tarantino just thought it'd be fun to show Jews killing Nazis (something my Israeli coworker complained wasn't in the film enough). But I'm glad he left some room for discussion in there. I recommend it for anyone looking for a good late-summer entry.