They scalp Nazis, don''t they?
When Quentin Tarantino touched down in Manila to attend Cinemanila and roll through floodwaters in a trike a couple years back, we asked him how the writing was going on “Inglorious Bastards” his 600-page WWII epic (which then carried a conventional spelling). “I’m putting pen to paper right now,” the hyperkinetic director shot back upon arrival at the airport — as though even while moving, he was writing dialogue and directing characters to skin Nazis in his head.
The fruits of Tarantino’s febrile imagination are now on display in local cinemas, and it’s one of his best, most entertaining outings in a while. Shaggy, over-long in parts, curiously structured though it is, Inglourious Basterds is certainly something we have not seen much lately: a real movie. You know: something that evokes what movies used to do, transporting you along, via story and image, within a director’s (sometimes crazy) iron will grasp.
Speaking of iron wills, it’s no accident that Leni Riefenstahl, the former actress turned infamous propaganda filmmaker, gets name-checked in Inglourious Basterds. Spurred by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, she crafted some of the most compelling imagery in cinematic history to document the “glory” of Nazi Germany in films like Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Tarantino must have felt like giving her props, knowing how hard it is to carry off such a sprawling tall tale, to make a lie seem almost credible. He does, in his own way, though in the end there’s not much weighty substance to this “Once Upon a Time” revision of the war. Some critics have complained that the movie is simply bad history, but one feels compelled to state the obvious: this is way beside the point. It’s not the History Channel, it’s the Tarantino Channel.
Overlapping three storylines, and bringing it all home to a Paris cinema in 1945 Nazi-occupied France, Tarantino follows the path of Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a surviving Jewish-French girl who escapes the clutches of the meticulously murderous Standartenführer Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz in an Oscar-worthy turn), known to his victims and colleagues as “The Jew Hunter.”
Elsewhere, we pick up on the exploits of First Lt. Aldo Raines (a.k.a. “Aldo the Apache,” a curiously clipped Brad Pitt) who, in flashback, is seen training a squadron of Jewish American soldiers (known as “The Inglourious Basterds”) to hunt down and scalp Nazis with extreme prejudice. The third storyline involves British agents’ efforts to assassinate top Nazi leaders with the help of the Basterds and German actress/double agent Bridget von Hammersmark (played well by model Diane Krüger).
A bit about the acting here. It is fortunate that Tarantino manages to cast a few diamonds amid certain actors who stink up the place like home-shopping zirconium. I’m speaking here of Mike Myers, who supposedly pleaded with Tarantino to be cast because his own parents were in the British Armed Forces. Myers mugs shamelessly, puts on “the British voice” and even arches his eyebrows. He’s less Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove and more Mike Myers as Austin Powers’ granddad. It nearly pulls the rug out from under Tarantino’s carefully constructed artifice. Thankfully, his role is brief.
Pitt is not much better, doing less interesting things here than usual. Channeling John Wayne (and, possibly, parodying George Clooney), he throws on the Texas accent like an old saddlebag but mostly strikes a tinny note. Better are Krüger and Waltz, who do their own dangerous waltz involving a missing shoe, Cinderella-style, and a suspicious leg cast (yet another opportunity for the notoriously fetishistic Tarantino to shoot a woman’s unclad foot). Waltz’s work here is so watchable that he can even make ordering a glass of milk for a young lady seem heart-stoppingly sinister.
Curious to many is the spelling of the film’s title, which the director has never explained, though it must be the director’s way of putting his own indelible mark on the germ of the story, a 1978 Italian “macaroni combat” film called The Inglorious Bastards. (That one did not feature Nazi-scalping Jewish soldiers but a ragtag bunch of prisoners who escape a prison-bound train and end up volunteering for a suicide mission to defeat the Axis Powers.)
But this being Tarantino’s world, you just have to let him take the reins and run with it, and you’ll either end up shaking your head and muttering (as we did after watching Kill Bill II) or end up feeling that kinetic/cathartic release of true cinema when the lights finally come up (as we did while watching the minor but entertaining Death Proof). As usual, you’ll lose track figuring out how many other movies are buried beneath the palimpsests of his best scenes (the lengthy basement café encounter between undercover British agents and a snooping SS officer is priceless, though reminiscent of other movies, which perhaps simply means that Tarantino has absorbed WWII movie history like a film nerd SpongeBob). Other times, his homages are more direct, as in the final sequence in a barricaded cinema house which channels Carrie so fiercely you expect to see a bucket of pig’s blood suspended from the rafters. Brian De Palma is clearly a recurring inspiration here, back when De Palma was mathematically stealing and reinventing every move in Hitchcock’s playbook.
The Pulp Fiction maestro’s pop instincts are hamstrung somewhat by doing a period film, but he still manages to work in plenty of soundtrack music from other movies (Charles Bernstein, Dimitri Tiomkin, Lalo Shifrin, lots of spaghetti-western stuff by Ennio Morricone) and even an icy homage to ‘80s David Bowie (Cat People [Putting Out Fire]) set against some stylized styling by Laurent.
As is his wont, Tarantino brings in a lot of young actors (mostly playing the Basterds) who will be more familiar to TV audiences and splatter movie audiences than film connoisseurs — people like BJ Novak (The Office) and Eli Roth (Hostel). Only trouble is, he doesn’t give them a whole lot to do. Other than a few lines and comic turns, the Basterds are curiously backgrounded in a movie that is named after them. This is either by design, or due to what must have been a sprawling 700-page script by the time Tarantino decided to cut the cord. True, The Basterds’ presence is written into each storyline, ensuring that they’re connected to the main set pieces. But the overall impact of the “Basterds” legend, we learn, is reverse propaganda meant for the Nazis more than anything else.
Propaganda must have been much on Tarantino’s mind while writing/directing Inglourious Basterds. There’s the Nazi propaganda of the aforementioned Riefenstahl films; then there’s the propaganda of Hollywood westerns and war films, a steady diet upon which Tarantino has clearly subsisted through much of his life, though he seems to have spat out the “moral lesson” bits and simply chewed over and over again on the gristle of action and storytelling.
Some critics have harped on the reverse-fantasy angle of the movie — Is it right to glorify such graphic violence against Nazis? Does this not make us, viewers and Jews alike, as bad as the Nazis? I say “feh” on that. Nobody complained when Steven Spielberg liquefied a troop of Nazis in their own facial goo during the CGI climax to Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was just good cinema. Sometimes you have to venture into the realm of the impossible and fantastic to keep cinema alive. After all, Tarantino did plainly begin his tale with: “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-occupied France...”
So don’t expect the History Channel.
