Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France
Review: Inglorious Basterds (2009)
Despite Lt. Aldo Raine’s (and perhaps by extension Quentin Tarantino’s) closing words, “I think this just might be my masterpiece”, post-modern Inglorious Basterds is a far cry from Tarantino’s sophomore effort, Pulp Fiction. While narratively it comes close to replicating the same quality of secondary story strands leading up to a final denouement, Basterds suffers from uneven character development, plotting and style. Despite this, it’s an engaging and interestingly morally irresolute film that had me talking.
The first thing one will come to realize is that the titular band of Jewish-American Nazi-killers are not the main focus of the film: they share the screen with renowned ‘Jew Hunter’ German detective Col. Hans Landa and a young woman who escaped the massacre of her family, Shosanna Dreyfus. In a sense, this film is Shosanna’s story, and retribution belongs to her, not Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine and his killers. The Basterds themselves feel like Robin Hood and his merry men; slightly one-dimensional, empty shells devoid of humanity. Like Errol Flynn and his men, they are pompous and eerily jolly in their disregard for the mayhem they cause others. And while Flynn’s on-the-fly gibes were bearable due to the righteousness of his actions, Aldo Raine’s come off as skewed righteousness. One need only to bear witness to Raine’s Little John, the ‘Bear Jew’, bashing in a German officer’s head with a baseball bat as the others cheer him on from the woods to make both the connection and the disconnection.
Don’t get me wrong: the death of the Nazi elite is hardly a crying shame; though there is something off kilter and uncomfortable about the wanton violence on screen - maybe because of its mix of comedy. This is not alien territory for Tarantino: the same mix of dark humour and violence is his notable trademark (one need only remember John Travolta’s gun accidentally going off due to a speed bump in Pulp Fiction). Speaking of trademarks, Inglorious Basterds has some very similar moments to Pulp Fiction. It is a film heavy on intense scenes of dialogue that lead to a bloody showdown by their unravelling. The very first scene in the movie is sure to go down as a classic. This is helped by Christoph Waltz’ Hans Landa, probably the best reason to see the film. His playful drinking of a glass of milk brings to mind Samuel L. Jackson’s washing down of a Big Kahuna burger with a soda. We know Landa is playing with his subjects, because we know he is smarter than them. This knowledge brings an extreme level of intensity to every scene he occupies.
While both Landa and Jewish escapee Shosanna Dreyfus are well fleshed out characters, Tarantino dropped the ball on the rest. We are given hints to some of the background stories of the Basterds, but these are never realized. Once, the action stops mid-scene to introduce a character a la Kill Bill - but only once. I got the feeling more than once that Tarantino had trouble shaking some of the influences of his last mega project. The use of Ennio Morricone and one-time Basterd bio seemed out of place in this new world he was trying to create. Considering this project has been on his mind for years, it’s possible he had fleshed out these scenes early and was too attached to them to let them drop: even though one of the main rules of writing is the ability to let go.
An underlying theme that was well developed and could have been utilized more was the importance of language and cultural traits. More than once ignorance of other languages or customs leads to death. Landa himself speaks English, German, French and Italian during the movie: and this reflects on his survival rate. If anything, the characters who survive and speak only one language can attribute this to dumb luck. One scene has the Basterds undercover as Italian filmmakers, only to be outdone by Landa who speaks it fluently - Brad Pitt on the other hand, humorously says one or two words with a heavy Louisiana accent.
Inglorious Basterds cannot be mistaken for anything but a Tarantino film. It has some of the best pot boiler sequences he has ever scripted, but lacks the coherent whole of his other films. Some of this may due to it being a sort of ode to cinema (evidenced by the finale at a movie theatre): it borrows from spaghetti westerns, references German filmmaker Pabst, Clouzot’s Le Corbeau, recreates a WW2 nationalistic film as the final act’s centerpiece, and even seems to channel Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for Hitler, lending his scenes less gravitas. In the end, if you come out of the theatre feeling like you should have loved the movie but didn’t, it may be due to its unneveness.
Film Reviews | 
August 29, 2009
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