Inglorious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino was 31 in 1994 when his film Pulp Fiction was nominated for three Academy Awards and he was anointed the Wunderkind of American cinema. Like fellow writer/director/actor Wunderkinds Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) and Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It), Tarantino invented a new, audaciously hip visual story telling language. And like them, he seems to have lost his groove, and his box office, after early success.

Inglorious Basterds is something of a comeback film for Tarantino after his sojourn in the world of high concept, high fashion violence in the Kill Bill films (2003-4). It’s an ambitious, alternative history of World War Two, a more down to earth revenge saga in love with film history. The movie is driven as much by style as by story, a real treat for the eye even when the plot boils over and characters morph into caricature.

There’s much to like in this film. The opening scenes, set in rural, Nazi-occupied France, are beautiful and calm, and very unTarantino-like. Enter Colonel Hans Landa (the tri-lingual German actor Christoph Waltz) who is paying a visit to a farm in search of a Jewish family he believes is hiding in the basement there.

We’ve all seen this horrible set-up enough to know where it goes. But Tarantino makes Landa genuinely gracious, an almost New Age Nazi man, who treats his farmer/victim like a mensch. Still, Landa is a Nazi and Tarantino is fascinated by violence. What’s different is that the inevitable Quentintine fury of beautifully choreographed bullets eviscerates only wood, not human beings. We do not see any murders, perhaps a first in a Tarantino film.

While the gun smoke still lingers over the farm house like a toxic sunset, Landa sees a young woman running away from the slaughter into an open field. But rather than using his pistol, he smiles cryptically, choosing to let her go. It left this viewer wondering what the heck Landa was up to. It was the high point of the movie for me, and I was literally on the edge of my seat.

We meet the young escapee, Shoshanna Dreyfus (played by the French actress Melanie Laurent), several years later as the owner of a small movie theater in Paris. Tarantino films her on a tall wooden ladder, dreamily changing the letters of a movie title on the marquee. The muted theater lights barely make a dent in the inky, empty street. It was quite a touching scene, a fragile moment of hope amid war rendered with great simplicity and power.

In conventional war movies, this is where the heroine meets her true love. Here Shoshanna meets Private Fredrich Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), a young German solider who has become a celebrity for killing hundreds of Americans. There’s no way Shoshanna will be attracted to the handsome, smitten Fredrich because, well, he’s a Nazi. Undeterred, in an effort to win her heart, Zoller persuades none other than Josef Goebbels, the brains behind Hitler, to use Shoshanna’s theater for the premiere of a movie he’s produced about Zoller’s exploits, with the young hero starring as himself.

It’s an offer she dare not refuse and even Hitler eventually piles on to the planned festivities, his entourage of ghastly thugs in tow.

This is where the movie started to unravel and spiral out of control. By putting all his sappily stereotyped Nazi big shots in Shoshanna’s theater at one time, Tarantino gives her a shot at avenging her family’s murder. They deserve it, of course, but this set-up is too ridiculous to believe. It’s like the scene in the Marx Brothers’ Room Service where ten different people come into the room one after another, toppers on top of toppers. And Tarantino adds even another layer to this already overloaded scene: a cadre of 12 Jewish-American soldiers who have their own plan to kill the Nazi high command.

These are the eponymous Basterds, guys who look like they’re waiting for the express bus back to Long Island after a day’s work in Midtown. But the formerly nice Jewish boys have been transformed by the horrors of genocide. They are like John Goodman’s para-military Jew, Walter, in the Cohn Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, both laughable and lethal. One of them, called the Bear Jew (Eli Roth), kills German soldiers with a baseball bat, probably a Martin Scorsese model. They creep us out even as we root for them to succeed, which probably says more about us than it does about them. Jewish mothers are advised not to take any of this personally.

And so it goes. Quentin Tarantino is himself an inglorious basterd, an ironic Hollywood
bad boy with a real passion for subverting societal (and cinematic) conventions. He wears this title as a badge of honor and believes it gives him the license to do pretty much anything to shock, dazzle or amaze us, or gross us out entirely. Personally, I wish QT’s films weren’t so hyped up on Darwinian adrenalin, the kill or be killed call of our animal nature. But then he wouldn’t be Quentin Tarantino, he’d be Stanley Kubrick.