Inglourious Basterds
Ever since he burst onto the scene in 1992 with his glorious debut feature, the smoothly hilarious heist flick Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino has made it very clear that he loves to hear himself speak. Or rather, he loves to hear his troupe of actors spin his dialogue into easily quotable morsels brimming with humour and imagination. But sometimes, Tarantino's gigantic ego gets in his way and his obsession with hearing his words ring through a cinema's sound system becomes too unwieldy for his quirky, creaky narratives. The filmmaker's arrogance and cocky attitude is now on full display in his messy, meandering World War II epic Inglourious Basterds, which collapses under the weight of its own pretensions.
At first, Inglourious Basterds, with its intentionally misspelled title and bold revisionist intentions, seems like a movie filled with potential. This is Tarantino's strange idea of an ode to war, a movie drunk on the possibilities afforded when fantasy tramples history. But while the idea is inspired, the execution is aggravating and ridiculous. As is the norm for Tarantino, several plot threads converge into one big, bloody climax, which makes me wonder if Tarantino even knows how to structure his movies any other way.
This time around, there's the story of the Basterds, a group of Jewish American soldiers led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, exhausting a lame spin on his usual shtick). The Basterds embark on a Nazi-killing mission, in which each soldier is ordered to collect one hundred Nazi scalps. That plot point ensures that the movie is filled with a large quantity of gruesome gore, which is something that Tarantino does very well. It may not count for much, but Inglourious Basterds certainly knows how to earn its R rating through lots of blood and guts.
Despite their prominence in the title, the Basterds are only one piece of the narrative puzzle. There is also the tale of a young Jewish woman named Shosanna (Melanie Laurent, one of the movie's few bright spots), who escapes the wrath of Nazi soldiers and ends up running a movie theatre in Paris. Shosanna plays a large role in the progression of the story and it is through her that we meet Tarantino's comical version of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth, just trying to keep up with Tarantino's manic vision).
Another subplot involves German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (the lovely Diane Kruger, providing a necessary spark in her handful of scenes), who moonlights as a British spy. Running through each storyline is Colonel Hans Landa (impressively portrayed by Christoph Waltz), a menacing Nazi officer who operates as the movie's main villain. Landa would be more effective in a stronger movie, since his dangerous voice and killer smile are mostly wasted in the midst of the movie's cartoonish tone. Waltz tries his hardest, but Landa is never given enough room to become a truly scary and intimidating villain.
But Laurent, Kruger, and Waltz do provide a trio of strong performances, which certainly helps prevent Inglourious Basterds from slipping into the realm of total disaster. Unfortunately, the movie is otherwise stuffed with maddening casting decisions that make no sense and only serve to cheapen Tarantino's tale. BJ Novak, one of the many stars of the NBC version of The Office, shows up in the movie and manages to look idiotic and completely lost for every frame of footage he is a part of. Horror filmmaker and Tarantino buddy Eli Roth plays a sadistic Basterd nicknamed the "Bear Jew" and it is safe to say that Roth has no future in acting. Even useless comedian Mike Myers makes a cameo appearance that is hugely distracting and painful to sit through.
Each of these performers, both the good and the bad, are merely pawns in Tarantino's silly and sadistic tale of heroic soldiers slicing up evil Nazis. Tarantino is too busy listening to his own dialogue and patting himself on the back to notice that his narrative is a thin collection of plot points stretched, taffy-like, to an uncomfortably pointless length of 152 minutes. Multiple scenes drag on for long periods of time for no better reason than to bathe in the words spilling from the lips of each character. The dramatic (or occasionally comedic) purpose of a scene is quickly drowned in the arbitrary ramblings that punctuate the script.
Inglourious Basterds is arguably Tarantino's most self-indulgent work to date. Perhaps that sounds like a good thing to some, but I often wish that Tarantino would just put his head down and focus on telling a story. Instead, he buries the narrative under a dozen layers of self-congratulatory idiocy, eventually suffocating the story's potential. Tarantino clearly loves his work and he wants the world to know it. When Pitt's Aldo Raine remarks to another character that "this may just be my masterpiece," it's obvious that Tarantino is thinking of himself and his own movie. Ego is all well and good when you have the talent to back it up, but Tarantino, as talented as he can sometimes be, seems to be losing sight of the big picture. He is currently lost in his own world, apparently unaware of the muddy, misbegotten movie curdling at his feet.
