Inglourious Basterds

The most important thing to remember about Ingloruious Basterds is that it isn't really about the 'inglourious basterds' at all. The exploits of Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his band of Jewish-American nazi-hunters take up about one third of the film's screentime, with none of that time devoted to classic 'guys on a mission' camaraderie. Quentin Tarantino has often called Inglourious Basterds his take on the 'guys on a mission' World War Two film, but it's not representative of the genre. In Tarantino's typically episodic fashion, Inglourious Basterds alternates between the story of Pitt's bloody-thirsty commandos and a young Jewish woman hiding out in occupied Paris and plotting revenge against the Nazis who killed her family. The two narrative strands dovetail at the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film attended by all top echelon of the Nazi party. Along the way, Tarantino skimps on most of the elements that define the 'guys on a mission' genre. He ignores, for the most part, the ambushes and shoot-outs in favor of one 'guys on a mission' trope in particular: the classic "fool or hide from the Gestapo" scene. Inglourious Basterds is basically the scene on the train in The Great Escape when Gordon Jackson and Richard Attenborrough try to get past the Nazi officer with their forged papers, over and over.

Quentin Tarantino is the undisputed master of the cinematic bait and switch. His last three films have been presented as pulpy, kinetic genre riffs, but Kill Bill Vol. 2, Death Proof, and now Inglourious Basterds all proved on inspection to be heavy on dialogue, light on conventionally satisfying action, and fully intent on subverting audience expectations. Death Proof and Basterds in particular are, in many ways, the same movie. Both appear at first glance to pay explicit homage to an exploitation genre, slasher horror and WWII "men on a mission" films respectively. And both torment the audience in exactly the same way, by steadily building tension through long conversational scenarios that test the viewer's patience and capacity to withstand suspense, and then releasing the tension with an act of spectacular violence. The main difference is that Death Proof only uses the shtick twice, while Inglourious Basterds pulls the rubber band back and lets it go repeatedly. That, and the whole "using World War Two and the Holocaust as a sandbox for Tarantino's vulgar shenanigans" thing.

Some people will no doubt be offended by Tarantino's gleeful defiling of history, but they shouldn't b. Ingloruious Basterds isn't about the Second World War or the Holocaust. Even more than the rest of the Tarantino oeuvre, Basterds is a movie about other movies. It's WWII as filtered through the lens of fifty years of film history, with references as diverse as the prototype "men on a mission" film The Dirty Dozen to Jean-Pierre Mellville's examination of the French Resistance Army of Shadows. Hell, the British SAS officer who meets up with the Basterds halfway through the is a professional film critic! But whereas most Tarantino movies are content to exist inside a hermetic world of film reference, Inglorious Basterds actually offers smart observations on the unique cultural power of film as an art form. The fate of the world hangs on a movie premiere, after all, a propaganda film called "Nation's Pride" that Josef Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) sees as the key bolstering the will of the German people in the wake of the D-Day invasion. Meanwhile, the Basterds are content to create their own propaganda of the deed, terrorizing the whole Wehrmacht through their mythic brutality. One of the reasons that there is so little running time devoted to recording the Basterd's exploits is because Tarantino is more interested in showing the fear their exploits kindle among the Germans. Like the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs, the Basterd's Nazi killing is left for the audience to imagine, and in imagining, make all the more gruesome.

Since Tarantino doesn't spend much time among the Basterds, there's plenty of time to devote to self-contained episodes of sustained suspense. These individual scenes are expertly crafted, walking the fine line between agonizing tension and agonizing tedium, but because these sequences don't build on one another, they fail to build sufficient momentum to avoid diminishing returns. Eventually, some time in the middle of the second hour or so, the conceit begins to run out of steam, but even at its most exasperating, there's always something on the screen worth looking at. You've got the usual labyrinthine Tarantino dialogue, filled as it is with tossed off asides that take the viewer by surprise with their off-hand depth. There's Tarantino's delightfully restless camera, enlivening even the most interminable exchange. And, of course, there's the ensemble of game performers, with Christoph Walz standing out as a playful, charming sadist in an SS uniform. Walz is getting a great deal of deserved attention for his work here, but that shouldn't overshadow a rollicking piece of character acting by Brad Pitt. Anyone who doesn't enjoy Pitt's rootin,' tootin,' Nazi-scalpin' cracker must be allergic to fun. Pitt is the source of much of the film's humor, which is surprisingly prevalent for a movie featuring a character nicknamed "the Jew Hunter." In the end, any sense of dissatisfaction with Inglorious Basterds is spawned by the repetitive structure, and the wistful sense that nothing Tarantino could put on screen would match the imaginary movie that the premise: "Quentin Tarantino movie about Jewish soldiers scalping Nazis in occupied France" conjures in the imagination.