Inglourious Basterds (Finally)
Inglourious Basterds comes out on DVD today. Here's the review I've been fussing about with since August when I saw it in the theater--
Back in July I watched the film The Boy In the Striped Pajamas about the young son of a Nazi official who befriends a boy his own age interned at the concentration camp his father is in charge of. Reading over reviews of this movie, I found a recurrent complaint-that the Nazi’s were basically British. That is British actors, speaking English accented English. Not long after, looking up reviews of Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie I ran across similar criticism-that German characters were being played by English and American actors speaking in their native accents.
Reading these reviews I remember wondering what level of authenticity would be satisfactory. Was it enough to give German characters German accents? Realistically shouldn’t they speak German with subtitles? Wouldn’t that alienate English speaking audiences?
In its way, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds came along and resolved these questions. Set in Nazi occupied France during the second World War, Inglourious Basterds not only portrays the different languages that are in play (German, French, English and some Italian) but shows them being wielded like Uma Thurman’s samurai sword in Kill Bill.
In many ways, Inglourious Basterds is not so much an action film as a linguistic film. Critics have called it talky, but that’s sort of the point. It’s about words, about language. The verbal interplay of the characters is as meticulously choreographed as the epic kung fu ballets of Kill Bill.
Yet ironically, the masters of the word in Inglourious Basterds are the Nazis. Christoph Waltz is absolutely stunning as Col. Hans Landa aka “The Jew Hunter”. Speaking German, French, English and Italian he dances verbal circles around all the other characters, from a French dairy farmer harboring Jews to the American commandos of the title.
Nearly as clever as Landa is Major Dieter Hellstrom (August Diehl), the Nazi officer who chances upon the covert meeting being held between German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), British film critic/spy Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and the two German speaking Basterds. Although Hicox is fluent in German, Hellstrom detects something amiss with his accent and ultimately reveals him by catching him in a minute faux paus. In the meantime, Hellstrom does a bang-up job playing a twenty questions sort of guessing game. He’s quite something. Did I mention he gets his testicles blown off? And Landa, for all his smarts gets a swastika rather brutally craved into his forehead.
I think that one of the points of Inglourious Basterds, is to cut through the cerebral and linguistic mind games of the Nazis with raw bravado and brutality. Tarantino sums this up nicely with a shot of a Nazi officer’s head being lined up against a baseball bat. Swing batter swing and suddenly the supposed superiority of the Uber men isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. This seems to be what Tarantino wants to do, but I’m not quite sure that it works. The Basterds don’t seem at all heroic, just vicious. They seem to wallow in mayhem for its own sake, enjoying every minute of it. They’re a juvenile fantasy, stupid, brutal and largely incompetent when required to do anything more than bust heads. If the film had just been about them, I wouldn’t have liked it at all. Luckily the film is not so much about the Basterds as it is about a storyline that runs on a collision course with that of the title characters.
So the Basterds have the balls, the Nazi’s have the brains, but the heart and guts of Tarantino’s film belong to a young Jewish woman named Shosanna (Melanie Laurent). The last surviving member of her family (they are in hiding and discovered by Landa) Shosanna reinvents herself as the proprietor of a Paris cinema and becomes involved with Marcel, a black Frenchman.
Shosanna is a woman warrior willing to sacrifice herself for vengeance and to end the war. An amazing, blazing character. Marcel is right beside her, stoic and supporting. They are both the heart of the film, personifications of Tarantino’s love and devotion to women and blacks. Without them there is no film.
That’s the problem with Inglourious Basterds, 90% of it is bravado and theatrics and show. Only a small portion of it seems to be about what it’s about. It’s a fierce, radical film with entirely too much clever padding. As much as I love the scene in the basement bar and Christoph Waltz and his milk and cream and Dieter Hellstrom and King Kong it’s clever, it’s padding. It’s my baby Tarantino being boy rather than a man and cutting to the chase which is Shosanna and film and fire.
Back in July I watched the film The Boy In the Striped Pajamas about the young son of a Nazi official who befriends a boy his own age interned at the concentration camp his father is in charge of. Reading over reviews of this movie, I found a recurrent complaint-that the Nazi’s were basically British. That is British actors, speaking English accented English. Not long after, looking up reviews of Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie I ran across similar criticism-that German characters were being played by English and American actors speaking in their native accents.
Reading these reviews I remember wondering what level of authenticity would be satisfactory. Was it enough to give German characters German accents? Realistically shouldn’t they speak German with subtitles? Wouldn’t that alienate English speaking audiences?
In its way, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds came along and resolved these questions. Set in Nazi occupied France during the second World War, Inglourious Basterds not only portrays the different languages that are in play (German, French, English and some Italian) but shows them being wielded like Uma Thurman’s samurai sword in Kill Bill.
In many ways, Inglourious Basterds is not so much an action film as a linguistic film. Critics have called it talky, but that’s sort of the point. It’s about words, about language. The verbal interplay of the characters is as meticulously choreographed as the epic kung fu ballets of Kill Bill.
Yet ironically, the masters of the word in Inglourious Basterds are the Nazis. Christoph Waltz is absolutely stunning as Col. Hans Landa aka “The Jew Hunter”. Speaking German, French, English and Italian he dances verbal circles around all the other characters, from a French dairy farmer harboring Jews to the American commandos of the title.
Nearly as clever as Landa is Major Dieter Hellstrom (August Diehl), the Nazi officer who chances upon the covert meeting being held between German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), British film critic/spy Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and the two German speaking Basterds. Although Hicox is fluent in German, Hellstrom detects something amiss with his accent and ultimately reveals him by catching him in a minute faux paus. In the meantime, Hellstrom does a bang-up job playing a twenty questions sort of guessing game. He’s quite something. Did I mention he gets his testicles blown off? And Landa, for all his smarts gets a swastika rather brutally craved into his forehead.
I think that one of the points of Inglourious Basterds, is to cut through the cerebral and linguistic mind games of the Nazis with raw bravado and brutality. Tarantino sums this up nicely with a shot of a Nazi officer’s head being lined up against a baseball bat. Swing batter swing and suddenly the supposed superiority of the Uber men isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. This seems to be what Tarantino wants to do, but I’m not quite sure that it works. The Basterds don’t seem at all heroic, just vicious. They seem to wallow in mayhem for its own sake, enjoying every minute of it. They’re a juvenile fantasy, stupid, brutal and largely incompetent when required to do anything more than bust heads. If the film had just been about them, I wouldn’t have liked it at all. Luckily the film is not so much about the Basterds as it is about a storyline that runs on a collision course with that of the title characters.
So the Basterds have the balls, the Nazi’s have the brains, but the heart and guts of Tarantino’s film belong to a young Jewish woman named Shosanna (Melanie Laurent). The last surviving member of her family (they are in hiding and discovered by Landa) Shosanna reinvents herself as the proprietor of a Paris cinema and becomes involved with Marcel, a black Frenchman.
Shosanna is a woman warrior willing to sacrifice herself for vengeance and to end the war. An amazing, blazing character. Marcel is right beside her, stoic and supporting. They are both the heart of the film, personifications of Tarantino’s love and devotion to women and blacks. Without them there is no film.
That’s the problem with Inglourious Basterds, 90% of it is bravado and theatrics and show. Only a small portion of it seems to be about what it’s about. It’s a fierce, radical film with entirely too much clever padding. As much as I love the scene in the basement bar and Christoph Waltz and his milk and cream and Dieter Hellstrom and King Kong it’s clever, it’s padding. It’s my baby Tarantino being boy rather than a man and cutting to the chase which is Shosanna and film and fire.