FILM REVIEW
8/13/09 (LONDON) Joel Meadows
Inglourious Basterds
Director: Quentin Tarantino;
Starring: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth
I went to see this film at a screening room in London’s West End, in Soho to be precise. I am a big fan of war films and I count The Great Escape amongst one of my favourite movies. Quentin Tarantino has been threatening to make Inglourious Basterds for a number of years with the script floating around. So in 2009 we get to see what he has been playing with for the last few years.
The fact is that his last effort, Death Proof, one half of his and Robert Rodriguez’s love letter to grindhouse cinema, was an unmitigated disaster because his ear for dialogue had completely deserted him and its plot descended into amateurish farce about halfway through. So you might think that he has considered the mistakes he made with Death Proof and tried to focus on how a film like Inglourious Basterds could work. If you thought that, then you would be sorely mistaken.
Tarantino is one of the luckiest people in Hollywood, or perhaps the world: starting life as a video shop cashier, he managed to get friendly with people in the movie industry. At the start of his career, it all looked very promising: Reservoir Dogs is a great film, Pulp Fiction, while flawed, holds up very well and Jackie Brown has a sense of style to it that preserves the atmosphere of the Elmore Leonard book that it is based on. But then it all started to go wrong. Kill Bill parts one and two were nothing more than poor pastiches of other people’s work and Death Proof showed that you could make films as badly now as they did back in the Seventies.
Inglourious Basterds, about a group of Jewish soldiers dropped into Europe during the Second World War to dispatch Nazis and a Jewish girl, Shoshonna, bent on revenge after the Nazis murdered her family, is the most indulgent film of the year and very possibly the most indulgent film released in decades. Tarantino will never be a great director like Scorsese, Coppola, Hitchcock or Reed because he is, at his heart, nothing more than a fan of the material. You might say that there is nothing wrong with admiring the practitioners within the industry that you work and you are correct. However, he never transcends being a fan and so Inglourious Basterds, at an arse-punishing two and a half hours, is a series of clumsy pastiches and idiotic set-pieces that don’t hold together in the least.
It begins with one of the most transparent nods to another film that I’ve ever seen, one that isn’t even a war film! The opening sequence tips its clown hat to Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West in an almost parodic way, where we see Denis Menochet, who plays French farmer Perrier Laperdite, wash his face out in the open to prepare for the arrival of the German soldiers. Brad Pitt, who has shown himself to be an accomplished and intelligent actor in films like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, plays Lt. Aldo Raine, who heads up the Jewish soldiers sent to collect Nazi scalps. He is so annoying that whenever he is on screen you have to resist the temptation to lash out at the cinema in anger. The rest of the soldiers are fairly interchangeable and Tarantino tries to invest them with some sort of iconic presence a la Steve McQueen or James Coburn but the fact is that a director of bad slasher flicks (Eli Roth) and a gaggle of vaguely familiar European actors just isn’t going to cut it.
So the question becomes whether anything redeems this film at all. Christoph Waltz as the Nazi Colonel Landa whose job it is to sniff out Jews in occupied France, acquits himself well considering the poor script and lack of characterisation and Melanie Laurent, who plays Shoshonna Dreyfus, is very likable on screen. But the flaws here are so immense that there isn’t a classic film hiding somewhere.
The problems lie in the script, directing and editing. Scenes that would work as short vignettes outstay their welcome by minutes. Mike Myers has a cameo as US General Ed Fenech, who we see briefing British spy Lt Archie Hicox but this scene is so badly directed that it’s almost painful to watch. The sequence where Hicox gets revealed to the Germans as an interloper starts intriguingly, with us seeing the Allied soldiers surrounded by Nazis, but it goes on far too long and the only way Tarantino knows how to end it is to get everybody to shoot at each other. And The film ends as incompetently as it begins. Everything builds up to this scene where Hitler and many high-ranking Nazis make their way to the screening of a propaganda film about German war hero Frederick Zoller, played well by Daniel Bruhl. This scene, which includes Pitt and co pretending to be Italian to infiltrate the Nazis, descends quickly into unfunny slapstick with Pitt clearly sounding American.
If it were directed by some green around the gills, straight out of film school naive graduate, it would have been laughed at and buried somewhere out of sight. Inglourious Basterds is a horrible, nasty mess which if we are lucky may bury Tarantinto’s directing career forever.