Movie Review:Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Movie Review:Inglourious Basterds (2009)

August 21, 2009
Tarantino Avengers in Nazi Movieland
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: August 21, 2009

From the moment the charming, smiling, laughing Nazi in “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino’s latest cinematic happening, sweeps onto the screen, he owns this film even more than its maker. Played by a little-known Austrian actor, Christoph Waltz, Col. Hans Landa is a vision of big-screen National Socialist villainy, from the smart cut of his SS coat to the soft gleam of his leather boots. There might be a fearsome skull (the death’s head, or totenkopf) grinning on his cap, but Colonel Landa has us at hallo.

“Inglourious Basterds,” first shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May, is Mr. Tarantino’s sixth feature. (The bifurcated “Kill Bill” is really one film.) In many respects it looks and, as important, sounds like a typical Tarantino production with its showboating performances, encyclopedic movie references and streams of self-conscious dialogue. The whistling on the soundtrack comes straight from the Sergio Leone catalog via the composer Ennio Morricone, and the American avenger, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), is a nod to the Hollywood actor Aldo Ray, a sandpaper-voiced 1950s Everyman who often seemed most at ease wearing Army fatigues, as he does in Anthony Mann’s 1957 masterpiece “Men in War.” (Mr. Ray’s widow, Johanna Ray, served as one of the casting directors for “Inglourious Basterds.”)

Raine leads a pack of Jewish avengers, the inglourious basterds of the misspelled title, who occupy one part of the sprawling narrative and whose numbers include a bat-wielding American nicknamed the Bear Jew (the director Eli Roth, dreadful). Also elbowing for attention is a young French Jew, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who’s running a cinema in Paris under a pseudonym, and a German Army hero, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), who dangerously woos her, unaware of her true identity. There’s the British film critic turned spy, Lt. Archie Hicox (a very good Michael Fassbender), and the German movie star turned spy, Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). Mostly, though, there is Landa, whose unctuous charm, beautifully modulated by Mr. Waltz, gives this unwieldy, dragging movie a much-needed periodic jolt.

Mr. Tarantino likes to take his sweet time — he can be a master of the slow windup — but rarely has one of his movies felt as interminable as this one and its 2 hours 32 minutes. The film is divided into five chapters organized around specific bits of business and conversations that increasingly converge. The second introduces the basterds while the third brings Shosanna together with her German suitor, who introduces her to Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth). Landa swans in, and a ludicrous plot to kill Hitler is unveiled. The fourth chapter throws in an unrecognizable Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill, a barely recognizable Mike Myers as a British commander and a risible fiction: a suave film critic (Mr. Fassbender).

As usual Mr. Tarantino gives you a lot to chew on, though there’s plenty to gag on as well. Much depends on whether you can just groove on his framing and staging, his swooping crane shots, postmodern flourishes (Samuel L. Jackson in voice-over explaining the combustibility of nitrate prints) and gorgeously saturated colors, one velvety red in particular. The film’s opening sequence, much of which takes place inside the restricted confines of a farmhouse room, is a marvel of choreographed camera movement and tightly coordinated performances. When the scene moves inside the farmhouse, you admire how neatly the German soldiers outside are positioned within one of the windows, a shot that recalls the framing of an image in Monte Hellman’s 1971 cult classic, “Two-Lane Blacktop.”

This sequence crystallizes much of what is pleasurable about “Inglourious Basterds” even as it underscores the film’s pronounced failings. Set against a sweeping stretch of green French countryside in 1941, it opens with a dairy farmer, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet), chopping wood. As his ax looms ominously in the foreground of the shot, he readies himself for some unwelcome German visitors. Colonel Landa, nicknamed the Jew Hunter, has come looking for hidden prey, a task for which he is, as he explains in a long verbal jag, eminently suitable. Because Germans are like hawks, Landa explains, most cannot think like Jews, who are more like rats — a characterization that, of course, was a privileged metaphor and ideological instrument in the Nazi’s campaign against European Jewry.

The invocation of Jews as rats is ghastly — both times I’ve seen the movie I could almost hear the audience holding its collective breath — but Landa keeps smiling and talking and charming, and Mr. Waltz’s performance is so very good, so persuasive, seductive and, crucially, so distracting that you can readily move past the moment if you choose. Mr. Tarantino makes it easy to do just that by capping this exegesis with an abrupt sight gag: after asking the farmer if he can smoke, Landa pulls out a pipe so comically large it immediately undercuts his threat, transforming him from a ferocious Jew hunter into a silly man whose flamboyant pipe suggests he suffers from some masculinity issues.

The joke fades quickly, as they do in this film, because Landa has already guessed there are Jews hiding where you might expect to find rats, under the floorboards. Mr. Tarantino reveals them in their hiding place, the camera slipping through the floor to show the terrified family members prostrate, their hands over their mouths and eyes wide in fear. It’s a shocking moment partly because this image resonates with horror, but it’s also shocking because it comes cushioned with laughs. Yet the shock dissipates because the Jews are irrelevant here. What matters is how he builds the tension with unnerving quiet and a camera that circles Landa and the farmer like an ever-tightening rope. What matters, to Mr. Tarantino, is the filmmaking.

But too often in “Inglourious Basterds” the filmmaking falls short. Mr. Tarantino is a great writer and director of individual scenes, though he can have trouble putting those together, a difficulty that has sometimes been obscured by the clever temporal kinks in his earlier work. He has also turned into a bad editor of his own material (his nominal editor, as usual, is Sally Menke) and seems unwilling or incapable of telling his A material from his B. The conversations in “Inglourious Basterds” are often repetitive and overlong and they rarely sing, in part because the period setting doesn’t allow him to raid his vast pop-cultural storehouse. A joke about Wiener schnitzel just doesn’t pop like the burger riff in “Pulp Fiction.”

The film’s most egregious failure — its giddy, at times gleeful embrace and narrative elevation of the seductive Nazi villain — can largely be explained as a problem of form. Landa simply has no equal in the film, no counterpart who can match him in verbal dexterity and charisma, who can be the Jules Winnfield and Mia Wallace to his Vincent Vega as Mr. Jackson and Uma Thurman are to John Travolta in “Pulp Fiction.” Leading with his chin, Mr. Pitt gets off some funny lines, particularly when he’s pulling his Southern-flavored vowels out like chewed gum, but the character is too broadly drawn to carry weight. The same holds true of Ms. Laurent, a pretty face who all but slides off the screen.

This isn’t to say that the film’s representation of National Socialism, its repellent invocation of the Holocaust crematoriums in the final blowout and calculated use of the Jews-as-rat metaphor are not vulgar in the extreme. Mr. Tarantino likes to push hard against accepted norms, as his chortling exploitation of spectacular violence and insistent use of a noxious epithet for blacks has shown in the past. But complaining about tastelessness in a Quentin Tarantino movie is about as pointless as carping about its hyperbolic violence: these are as much a constituent part of his work as the reams of dialogue. This is, after all, a man who has an Oscar for a movie with a monologue about a watch stashed in a rectum.

Cartoon Nazis are not new to the movies, and neither are fascinating fascists, as evidenced by Ralph Fiennes’s Oscar-nominated turn in “Schindler’s List.” Unlike those in “Schindler’s List,” Mr. Tarantino’s Nazis exist in an insistently fictional cinematic space where heroes and villains converge amid a welter of movie allusions. He’s not making a documentary or trying to be Steven Spielberg: Mr. Tarantino is really only serious about his own films, not history. In that sense “Inglourious Basterds,” which takes its title if not its misspellings from an Italian flick in “The Dirty Dozen” vein, is simply another testament to his movie love. The problem is that by making the star attraction of his latest film a most delightful Nazi, one whose smooth talk is as lovingly presented as his murderous violence, Mr. Tarantino has polluted that love.

“Inglourious Basterds” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The basterds like to scalp their Nazi victims, and Mr. Tarantino likes showing their knife work in graphic detail.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Sally Menke; production designer, David Wasco; produced by Lawrence Bender; released by the Weinstein Company and Universal Pictures. In English, French, German and Italian. Running time: 2 hours 32 minutes.

WITH: Brad Pitt (Lt. Aldo Raine), Christoph Waltz (Col. Hans Landa), Eli Roth (Sgt. Donny Donowitz), Michael Fassbender (Lt. Archie Hicox), Diane Kruger (Bridget von Hammersmark), Daniel Brühl (Fredrick Zoller), Mélanie Laurent (Shosanna Dreyfus), Denis Menochet (Perrier LaPadite), Sylvester Groth (Joseph Goebbels), Mike Myers (Gen. Ed Fenech) and Rod Taylor (Winston Churchill).





via:http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/movies/21inglourious.html?ref=movies