Inglourious Basterds

A failure so complete that it is infuriating as opposed to merely disappointing, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is the third consecutive miss – following 2004’s Kill Bill: Vol. 2 and 2007’s Death Proof – from a filmmaker who was once a major voice in the contemporary cinema. Grinding where it should glide, dismal where it must dazzle, this World War II fantasia is almost cruel in the way it presents what were once Tarantino’s strength – heady, substantial dialogue, a true moral compass and an ability to draw strength anew from his cast – as the reasons for his downfall.

It would be easy to say that Inglourious Basterds is too long at 150 minutes, but it is not merely a matter of a filmmaker working without checks (although that’s plainly a problem). Virtually nothing works to the degree that scenes or performances actually cohere into something more; the movie’s cumulative effect is barely appreciable.

Tarantino’s film is a spaghetti western presented into an alternate World War II history where in 1944 a group of Jewish-American soldiers, the titular Basterds, rampage behind German lines in occupied France while Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy come to Paris for a film premiere. There is no point comparing it to reality as there is simply no connection. Tarantino, to his credit, embraces his own take on history and pursues it to unlikely and bloody ends.

His belief is that cinema is the ultimate power, and references to filmmaking dot the unwieldy plot: a British officer (Michael Fassbender) is a former critic, while a German film star, Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger, in another wooden performance) is a key double agent, and much of the final act plays out in a Parisian cinema. It’s the ultimate, hollow expression of Tarantino’s need to make films purely about other films.

Yet for someone so cannibalistic with their own art form, he gets the basics utterly wrong. The movie’s key protagonist, for example, is Col. Hans Landa, a German S.S. officer who delights in his nickname 'The Jew Hunter'. It is Landa (Christoph Waltz) who opens the picture, in a 1941 prologue where he arrives at a farmhouse, cued by one of several classic Ennio Morricone works, to question a farmer and ultimately massacre the Jewish family hiding beneath the floorboards (the one escapee, Melanie Laurent’s Shosanna, goes on to run the cinema where the plotlines subsequently converge).

Precise and playful (he opts for milk over whiskey), Landa is plainly more than he initially allows. But Tarantino never truly shows us why he is to be feared. Arriving with troops he’s plainly in control and his drawn out conversation with his host is merely a matter of making clear his ultimate power until the man blinks and turns collaborator. Landa is neither persuasive nor canny, and he doesn’t trick or tangle his adversary in his own words. His reputation, which precedes him, does all the work; the comparisons with Tarantino himself are obvious.

At least Waltz knows how to punctuate Tarantino’s parched take on suspense. Brad Pitt, as the Basterds’ commanding officer, Lt. Aldo 'Apache' Raine, gives a horribly constricted performance. All the vitality and looseness of Pitt’s latter period performances is lost to a horribly affected accent and a lopsided facial squint – he could be auditioning for a Popeye remake.

The writer/director intermittently jazzes up the narrative flow with his usual gambits, including the use of chapters, Samuel L. Jackson as the narrator and sudden diversions into stylised back story. But the focus is gaudy effect, not meaning. We see how a German soldier (Til Schweiger, who has inherited Kirk Douglas’ dimpled chin) killed 13 Gestapo officers, before being whipped and then rescued from execution by the Basterds, who he joins, but Tarantino never bothers to tell us why he betrayed his country.

The film is a revenge fantasy, both on an individual and mass level, that’s happy to imagine the Nazis receiving their own vile treatment. The idea that this is simply sinking to their dreadful level never occurs to Tarantino. So it is intermittently bloody, with flashes of action between the overly drawn out conversations as people are machine-gunned or scalped, but nothing is at stake so the body count is purely academic. Even the film’s ultimate act of revenge is delivered with almost perfunctory competence. There’s no joy, no drama, in fact very few genuine emotions at all are at work here.

The idea that the ways in which two people converse with each other can open them up to an audience – try and recall the vivacious, telling exchanges between Mia and Vincent in Pulp Fiction – has been lost to Tarantino. He’s more interested in indulging Mike Myers, who delivers his shtick English accent as an upper-crust general. What’s to be gained from that apart from a few audience titters as the first “jolly good” of many is wheeled out? Tarantino can’t even manage to sustain Landa, turning him into a giggling caricature for his final scenes.

With Inglourious Basterds nearly everything that made Quentin Tarantino an American original, an incisive voice within a commercial framework who lived for the possibilities of cinema, has been eroded. He’s undisciplined, self-indulgent and tone deaf. He’s lost to us.

* (1 Star)