Tarantino Can't Top Real World War Two with His Fantasy Version

Rating: 6/10 (28 August 2009)

"Inglourious Basterds" wants to be World War Two on steroids. It wants to be bigger, stranger, bloodier, meaner, funnier, more stylish than WW II ever was. Here's the problem: World War Two WAS on steroids. It WAS bigger, stranger, bloodier, meaner, funnier, and more stylish than anything a sheltered film geek like Quentin Tarantino could dream up.
Tarantino didn't have to invent a group of Jews who fight Nazis; there were such Jews, including the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, who staged the first urban uprising in occupied Europe, The Bielski Partisans, who fought in the forest, and the Treblinka and Sobibor Uprisings in death camps. Nothing Tarantino could invent could be stranger than the life of Oswald Rufeisen, a Jew who survived by posing as an SS man; his memoir, "In the Lion's Den," is far freakier and gasp-inducing than anything in Tarantino's film. No filmmaker will ever make a more over-the-top or diabolically stylish production than Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 documentary of the Nuremburg Nazi Party Congress, "Triumph of the Will." Tarantino has a reputation for stylish violence; the violent scenes in "Inglourious Basterds" are not as violent nor as innovative in their use of violence as those in "Saving Private Ryan" or "The Passion of the Christ." Tarantino also has a reputation for witty, stylish dialogue. Again, the real World War Two produced plenty of unforgettable lines: "Peace in our time," "Who remembers the Armenians?" "I shall return," "Nuts." Tarantino's most daring ambition is to provide a more ignominious end for Hitler than Hitler's real demise. Sorry, can't be done. Hitler died a betrayed, solitary loser, knowing full well that everything he had strived for was lost. A far better movie, "Downfall," depicts Hitler's nightmarish real life descent into Hell; Magda and Joseph Goebbels' historically accurate deaths in "Downfall," preceded by their murder of their own children, are as creepy as it gets. Tarantino can't top history.
"Inglourious Basterds" consists, for the most part, of a series of relatively disconnected dialogue scenes; the sensationally violent scenes are few and far between. Dialogue goes on and on and on. Yes, there are some gems, and some tension is created, but the simple fact is that Tarantino needs an editor. I never thought I'd be so bored in a lurid, violent movie about Jews wrecking revenge on Nazis. There are three different scenes of Nazis and resistance members who are hiding something sitting around tables, consuming food and drinks, and hoping that the Nazis don't discover their secrets. The first time Tarantino does this it is very powerful. The third time it just drags, and you think, "Come on. Don't you have anything else to say?" Suspension of disbelief and conventional narrative structure work magic on the brain, inviting identification. Tarantino does everything he can to push his viewers away from involvement in this film and to remind viewers that he, Quentin Tarantino, quirky film genius, is the real star.
The Basterds of the title are minor characters; the plot hops from place to place, character to character. When top Nazis appear on screen, a hand scrawled note appears on the film, with an arrow and the Nazi's name. Some scenes, like the opening involving a Nazi interrogation of a French peasant, are played as if real, and other scenes are obviously played with lots of winking and nudging at the audience. Musical styles shift throughout the movie. "This is really a salute to Spaghetti Westerns!" some of the music shrieks. Experimentation is welcome, but all this "Hey, don't forget, Quentin Tarantino is behind the camera; I'm famous for quirky films" winking and nudging broke my involvement with the film and made it a real slog for me. I didn't care about what I was looking at, and I got bored.
"Inglourious Basterds"' opening scene is flawless. Nazis arrive at an isolated French farmhouse. A girl is hanging sheets on a line. Given Tarantino's penchant for saluting past films, I immediately thought of Andrzej Wajda's "Ashes and Diamonds," and was ready to see a character bleed to death all over those clean sheets. Not so. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a Nazi "Jew Hunter," is there to interrogate the farmer (Denis Menochet). Menochet is brilliant in this scene, a study in stoic, peasant masculinity. Waltz waltzes into movie history. His fastidious, precious, melodramatic performance as a perfectly evil Nazi enters cinematic history. His life will never be the same.
The rapturous embrace of "Inglourious Basterds" by critics and film fans is kind of depressing. It's sad to think that there are young people who will think that this is what World War Two either was like or should have been like, and it's sad to think that they are so divorced from history that they don't get how wrong both assumptions are. Years from now scholars will study kids who think that no Jews fought back till Tarantino invented them.