Discussing the failure of Stage Fright, Hitchcock commented matter-of-factly to François Truffaut (in the latter’s book-length interview), “The great weakness of the picture is that it breaks an unwritten law. The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture. That’s a cardinal rule, and in this picture the villain was a flop.” If only by the master’s yardstick, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a smashing success. Its villain (the Nazi Jew-hunter Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz) looms so large, we forget, at times, that there’s a nominal hero in Brad Pitt. (The latter embodies a basterd named Lt Aldo Raine and proves, yet again, that he’s one of the world’s biggest stars. He drew droves of ticket-buyers to the long, glacially paced The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and he’s repeated the feat here, with a film that, along with the aforementioned qualities, is mostly not even in English.)
War-movie villains are usually pitched along the continuum between sleek menace and sadistic monstrosity — Waltz, instead, walks a tightrope over broad comedy, as if he were starring in the most elegantly muted Mel Brooks farce. It’s a hammy, self-conscious, outrageously entertaining performance, and it almost makes you overlook the fact that the character implodes when you anticipate an explosion.
Basterds is hammy, self-conscious, outrageously entertaining, and it almost makes you overlook the fact that it ends on an anticlimax. It makes the two-and-a-half hour film either the longest act of cinematic foreplay or the longest Seinfeld episode, with rococo riffs swirling up to... nothing. The problem isn’t anything lofty — like, say, the lack of a moral dimension, though it’s certainly curious that Tarantino could locate throbbing veins of morality in a blood-spattered funhouse trip like the Kill Bill diptych, while Basterds remains gleefully amoral. In the film’s most disturbing scene, when a German soldier refuses to rat out his fellow-men, Pitt and Co do not acknowledge that he’s doing the “honourable thing”— they mercilessly bludgeon him to death.
So yes, our sympathies shift uncomfortably during that moment, with the villain acting heroically and the heroes behaving like devil-incarnate villains — but no, that’s not the problem. After all, it’s a filmmaker’s prerogative to treat his material the way he wants to, and if Tarantino’s aims are just on the level of a super-elaborate jape, a chortle-chortle revenge fantasia that assumes dark-fairy-tale dimensions, then ours is not to reason why, but simply react as the characters do or die.
The problem — if, indeed, it can be called that — is that the whole of Basterds is significantly less than the sum of its mightily entertaining parts. After a first viewing, you may leave the film with a “huh?”. In Tarantino’s typical style, Basterds is divided into chapters, and each chapter ends with a big bang — sometimes literally — but there’s no accrued big bang when the chapters come together in your head.
And what a film Basterds would have been had that happened, if only based on a single image from the final chapter, irresistibly titled Revenge of the Giant Face. The visage in question belongs to Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), who runs a cinema hall in Paris and who’s spliced close-ups of herself into a rah-rah Nazi-party movie being unveiled before Hitler and Goebbels and other notorious luminaries of the Third Reich.
At some point, there’s a fire, the screen is consumed by flames, and the giant face, cackling with unconcealed delight, now hovers on a thick wall of smoke. The effect is holographic, suggesting a virtual-reality version of events. It’s as if it weren’t Shosanna but the Muse of Cinema herself, throwing her head back and laughing at her power to rewrite (Nazi) history.
It’s an epiphanic image — but Basterds doesn’t earn this epiphany, which appears like a tacked-on coda from elsewhere, from a German movie of the time perhaps, made by an Expressionist auteur who realised that the director was indeed God, capable of transforming victims into victors.
Intentionally or inadvertently, Tarantino ignores this subtext. His film is a result
of his wanting to play God and engineer happy endings where there were none in reality, but he’s not interested in putting himself into the movie the way Shosanna inserted herself into that other movie. He’s content to stand on the sidelines and stage a jokey aside where Hitler asks an aide for some gum — again, just a bit of shtick. Its very entertaining shtick, but you miss the grand sense of the greater picture in, say, Jackie Brown. It’s hard to shake off the feeling that Basterds is all icing, no cake.
So it helps if you have the world’s biggest sweet tooth. One of the cheekiest achievements of Basterds is how the film, simultaneously, frustrates your inner academic while flooring the inner art-lover. At least while watching the movie, every one of the abovementioned what-might-have-been considerations is incinerated by Tarantino’s dazzling art. More than ever before, his chapters here appear to be mini-movies, complete unto themselves — where another director would braid shorter strands of the various stories into an ever-tightening climactic knot, Tarantino stacks the spools of story threads in neat order, letting each one unravel in its entirety before dawdling over to the next.
The results are monochromatic patterns of glorious exposition, startlingly single-minded in content and smugly oblivious to present-day audience attention spans. This is a film that delights in its villain’s love for dairy — his first interrogation scene incorporates a glass of milk, the second squeezes in dabs of fresh cream.
The scenes play out in languorous dream-rhythms before exploding into nightmares — it’s just that you’re already sitting up in a cold sweat. When Landa interrogates the dairy farmer, Tarantino cross-cuts between their faces, and then he lets his camera swing around them in a graceful arc, so that we now see, in the frame, the door and the window. He seems to be preparing us for something — a Jewish rescue squad breaking and entering, perhaps? — but the scene simply continues as before, with talking, and more talking, and then more talking.
We’ve heard of directors tugging at our heartstrings, but this director is more interested in our frayed nerves — he plucks them lazily, teasingly, sending up shivers of anticipation, and then he stands back and grins as we clench our fists at being fooled... yet again. A scene in an underground tavern, in particular, is unbearable.
We’ve always been told that the pen is mightier than the sword, but here we actually see it — in Tarantino’s hands, words are more terrifying than weapons. Some of these words wrap themselves around entertainingly windy discursions, like Landa’s treatise on why rats are deserving of contempt while the similarly rodent-like squirrels aren’t. And some of these words are just plain showstoppers, as when Pitt refers to “disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies.” (Has there been a war movie earlier that allowed Allied alliteration?)
The unexpectedness with which Tarantino uses words is paralleled by his unheralded musical cues. When could-have-been lovers kill each other, the splatter of their gunfire is drowned in a surge of exquisitely romantic movie-music, as if informing us that love and death are but two sides of the same coin. With a more high-minded director, this would have been the scene that launched a thousand film-school theses about the twinning of eros and thanatos.
But not with Tarantino, whose career — built around the most inglourious of movie genres — seems almost perversely tailored towards demolishing the myth that high-class craft should be placed in service of high-minded cinema. But what’s undeniable is his love for cinema — not just the exploitation movie and the Spaghetti Western and the war movie and the splatter movie, but for cinema cinema.
Like his other films, Inglourious Basterds is stacked with such a surfeit of name-dropping that a serious film buff should not, at any cost, venture in without a diaper. But that’s simply the surface. This is possibly the only wartime adventure set in a movie theatre for such an extended duration, with
35-mm nitrate film as one of the primary weapons of mass destruction.
Even when Pitt and Co break a renowned Nazi-killer out of jail, the language is pure movie-language. “We just wanted to say we’re a big fan of your work... I think you show great talent. And I pride myself on having an eye for that kind of talent. But your status as a Nazi killer is still amateur. We all come here to see if you wanna go pro.”
That’s the reason, more than anything else, we celebrate Tarantino. You think this is going to be just another variation on The Dirty Dozen, perhaps cheekier, gorier, funnier — but little else. What you don’t expect is a near-profound meditation on movie-love, from a director who’s quite possibly unrivalled, today, in his love for the movies.