by Greg Oguss
I don’t have much to say about Quentin Tarantino’s “Grindhouse”-Goes-to-War extravaganza, “Inglourious Basterds,” other than an observation about how impervious to criticism it is. I’m not suggesting that words fail me when confronting the instantly recognizable Tarantino aesthetic. Since he’s seemingly exhausted every other blood-and-guts movie trope (heist films, samurais, vampires, hot rods), it’s actually a bit of a relief he’s finally gotten around to raiding a different cabinet of movie staples, that of the World War II epic.
The plot weaves together two underdeveloped stories. A Nazi-hunting troop of Jewish allied soldiers—led by Brad Pitt’s southern-fried Lt. Aldo Raine—cross paths in German-occupied France with a revenge-minded Jewish peasant girl whose family has been slaughtered by Hitler’s “Jew Hunter,” Col. Hans Landa (memorably played by the little-known Christoph Waltz). The glibly macabre take on the horrors of war (with Waltz and Pitt frequently launching into Tarantino’s trademark monologues, in multiple languages no less) places “Basterds” securely in the shallowly entertaining, tongue-in-cheek territory of “Grindhouse” and the “Kill Bills.”
Back in the early 90s, Tarantino could believably claim to find the gore-soaked ending of “Reservoir Dogs” to be “very moving and profound.” These days, nobody expects dramatic profundity from Tarantino’s films, least of all the director himself. Rather than talk about what happened to the ‘seriousness’ of films like “Jackie Brown”—as I heard a patron doing on the way out of the Glendale Americana—it seems more apt to wonder about the disappearance of the gleeful inventiveness which originally endeared him to legions of fanboys. The obvious explanation for the shift is that Tarantino’s new impervious-to-criticism formula has proven even more crowd-pleasing. The success of “Kill Bill” rescued him from the writer’s block purgatory he endured after “Pulp Fiction,” a time when the Tarantino backlash began to build thanks to ill-conceived appearances in sub-par films, sitcoms and a starring role in a Broadway revival.
At this point, that backlash is a faint memory. With slick-looking, campy mayhem, Tarantino has found his mass audience-friendly sweet spot. At the very least, his tongue-in-cheek style does produce a reliable number of giggles per film (e.g., when Pitt’s Lt. Raine lists all the difficulties of “fighin’ in a basement…number one being, you’re fightin’ in a basement!”). But the campiness means the laughs are more often of the groaner variety, such as when Raine, acknowledging a compliment about his proficiency at carving swastikas into Nazi foreheads, remarks, “Ya know how ya get to Carnegie Hall? Practice!” Ba-dum-bum.
It’s not a lack of “Pulp Fiction” twists which makes “Basterds” a bit stale. The climax, which plays fast and loose with history, will probably seem a clever twist to most. That is, unless you’ve read about the film’s historical inaccuracy and are smart enough to figure out a historically dubious movie about a plot to kill Hitler stands a better chance of succeeding than one might think.
The real problem seems to be Tarantino has grown so fond of his accumulated bag of tricks that they’re now compulsory in every film. In “Basterds,” we get another female-revenge quest, along with the de rigueur references to other movies and dialogue about film culture (though nothing as funny as the movie-heavy dialogue in “True Romance,” “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction.”)
Okay, so Tarantino loves talking movies, ass-kicking women, and the 70s. But is that reason enough to cram each element into every film he makes? The instant that 70s-style bubble font he’s adopted came on-screen in the opening credits , I was counting down the minutes until the same font would crop up as a super-title on a dramatic freeze-frame a la Roger Corman. Sure enough, twenty minutes in, a freeze-frame of the German soldier turned Nazi hunter Hugo Stiglitz—his name splashed across half the screen in electrically colored bubble letters—announced a rapid-fire montage of the character’s back-story narrated by the distinctive voice of Samuel L. Jackson.
Those devices remain effective in an appropriately cheap-and-nasty way. But as the movie bounces from monologue-laden scenes to gory set pieces, the taciturn Stiglitz remains a nonentity, a stark contrast to the unforgettable bad-asses that Jackson has played in earlier Tarantino movies. Besides Pitt’s Warren Oates-meets-Clark Gable interpretation of Lt. Raine and Christoph Waltz’s widely praised portrayal of Landa, the film is a collection of unmemorable, mediocre performances and one truly awful one by Eli Roth.
As bad as Roth is, I’m fairly certain Tarantino feels like Roth’s wooden line readings are perfectly in keeping with the campy tone of the proceedings. Which leads back to the point about the movie being immune to criticism. “Basterds” is precisely what it sets out to be: a stylish- looking, bloody drive-in-ization of “The Dirty Dozen” plot, a film Tarantino has been talking about re-working since at least since 1994.
With this modest achievement comes a gloating sense of self-satisfaction (a tendency even in Tarantino’s best films). The film’s final line features Lt. Raine acknowledging proudly, “I believe I’ve created my masterpiece,” as he gazes at the swastika-adorned forehead of his latest victim. With Raine now standing in for Tarantino himself, the director is gently making fun of his own tendency to invest such time, energy, and pride into another campfest (equating the ludicrousness of taking pride at carving swastikas in Nazis with the ludicrousness of being proud of a film about the subject).
Hearing this line, I instantly thought of a moment from Tarantino’s first appearance on the Charlie Rose Show. Flush with new celebrity, he talked of how he’d “studied” the careers of all his film generation idols (meaning Coppola, De Palma, possibly even Scorsese) in order to prevent what happened to them from transpire with him. Being too polite to specify, he presumably meant the things all successful artists grapple with—“selling out,” creative exhaustion, etc. In 2009, flush with his biggest opening weekend ever, he seems to be moving through middle age just like those wunderkinds did, with all his ‘masterpieces’ looking like they’re behind him.
