Now We Are All Sons of Bitches
2009 // USA - Germany - France // Quentin Tarantino // August 21, 2009 // Theatrical Print
A - I really should know better at this point. My reaction upon hearing of an upcoming Quentin Tarantino film is reliably a mixture of excitement and trepidation. When I think about it for more than a moment, however, this response seems disgracefully childish, if completely understandable. I was one of countless thirty-somethings whose early appreciation of independent American film was driven primarily by Tarantino's first two films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Consequently, my responses to his subsequent films are tinted by an unfortunate reactionary urge, whispering at me to contrast his latest feature with the Real Tarantino on bombastic display in Dogs and Fiction. Of course, this is monstrously unfair. Tarantino has grown significantly as a director in the past fifteen years, parlaying his success as the American wunderkind of thrilling, densely referential cinema into ever more ambitious works. Even as he refined the familiar stylistic trappings that are comfortable for him (the "how," if you will), he has tackled increasingly challenging stories and themes (the "what"). With a little effort, I've shaken off my blinkered way of looking at Tarantino's post-Fiction output. What's more, I've come to regard Kill Bill Volume II and Death Proof as among most vital works of American cinema in the past five years. And so here we are with Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino's answer to the World War II film. And damn if it doesn't exhibit every sign of continuing the director's recent arc of daring, socially aware films that triumph as both giddy entertainments and bracing studies of desperately held cultural values.
The eponymous Basterds are a squad of eight Jewish-American soldiers who, under the command of Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt with mustache and comical Tennessee drawl), are recruited to conduct a campaign of terror against Nazis in German-occupied France. Among their number are Donny Donowitz, the "Jewish Bear" (an overwrought Eli Roth), who spatters Hun brains with a baseball bat, and Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), an officer-fragging anti-Nazi German solider whom the unit rescues and recruits. Tarantino presents the Basterds as avenging angels, vessels of Jewish and American wish fulfillment and a fantastical "What If" correction to history. They take no prisoners, just scalps. Most captives are summarily executed, but a few are released... after Raine carves a swastika in their forehead with his enormous Bowie knife. (Already thinking ahead to the assimilation of former National Socialists into post-war Germany, the lieutenant explains, "I'm gonna give you somethin' you can't take off.") Tarantino doesn't shy away from the grisly, brutal quality of the Basterds' mission, which at bottom is nothing more than behind-enemy-lines terrorism, all with the intent of demoralizing the Reich's war machine.
Consistent with Tarantino's approach to violence in his previous films, Basterds takes a conflicted stance towards its gruesome, often stomach-churning bloodshed. In the main, the film glories in its violence, drinking deeply from it in a kind of adolescent crimson haze. Nazis are, of course, the last group on which it is socially acceptable to visit atrocious violence in fiction, but rarely has a film so thoroughly and unashamedly exploited this principle. There is a theory that Raiders of the Lost Ark might have begun as George Lucas' homage to the pulp serials of the early twentieth century, but Steven Spielberg lent it the tone of a childhood revenge fantasy against the Third Reich. Basterds embraces this function much more explicitly than Raiders ever did, reveling in vicarious vengeance with a giddiness that invokes the exploitation tradition that Tarantino adores. (Basterds' subtitle might as well be Die Screaming, Adolf!) However, as with Kill Bill's bloodbaths and Death Proof's manglings, Basterds' violence is tightly enmeshed with the film's thematic explorations.
Ah, but I need to back up a bit and clarify that Inglourious Basterds regards the righteous killers of its title as mere secondary characters. The film's marketing, as is typical for Tarantino's features, is amusingly deceptive, in that the film is not principally focused on Raine's unit. In fact, the protagonist of Basterds is Shosanna, a French Jewess played to wary, smoldering perfection by Mélanie Laurent. If one were inclined to affix a label to a Tarantino film (a questionable enterprise), Basterds is not so much a "war film" as it is a thriller about survival and revenge. Tarantino divides his film into five acts, and, Pitt's top billing notwithstanding, the Basterds don't even appear until the second. The first act, which tells the story of Shosanna's terrifying encounter with the SS while hiding in rural France, is a slow-burn genre slice of heaven all on its own. Tarantino is rarely credited for his phenomenal skill as a writer-director of thriller sequences, for which he has few equals among American filmmakers. Every aspect of the first act ratchets the tension up another notch: the texture and arrangement of furnishings within a cramped farmhouse, the pauses and glances of the characters, and a script that tightens with the inevitability of a noose. (Another tense standoff, set in a basement bar, is the film's other high point.) Christoph Waltz, as the malevolent "Jew-Hunter" Colonel Hans Landa, provides oily slatherings of menace to these scenes, helped along by Tarantino's customary doting regard for his performers. None of it is remotely authentic, but, as with the director's previous films, Basterds seduces you and sweeps you along, rather than coldly manipulating you. Tarantino's features are always compelling entertainments in their bones, and Basterds is no exception.
However, Tarantino has also striven to wed pure cinematic delight to more sophisticated concerns, albeit in a manner that is always exceedingly slippery. Thus, like a stage magician, Tarantino draws the eye with badass gangsters, ninja clans, and car chases, while with his other hand he tackles our unexamined notions swirling around aging (Jackie Brown), identity (Kill Bill), and the intersection of gender, sex, and violence (Death Proof). With Basterds, it's not until after we've been introduced to Shosanna and to Raine's Nazi-hunters that Tarantino begins to reveal his deeper purpose: to explore the role of film in providing a shared history, cultural identity, and cathartic reconciliation of our desires with reality. Four years after she slipped through Landa's grasp, Shosanna is living incognito in Paris, where she owns and manages a movie house. Joseph Goebbels' newest propaganda star, a German soldier (Daniel Brühl) who plays himself in a jingoist war picture, becomes smitten with Shosanna. He uses his newfound clout to move the film's premiere to her theater, where she will be expected to roll out the red carpet for the luminaries of the Reich. This brings the Basterds into the picture, as they have a scheme for the premiere that involves a German starlet (Diane Kruger) and a lot of dynamite. However, Shosanna and her projectionist lover (Jacky Ido) have a plan of their own, one so joyfully, deliciously murderous that it might give even the Basterds pause. Appropriately, Shosanna intends to use both physical film prints and the projected image itself to deliver her overdue message of vengeance, with the result quite intentionally evoking The Wizard of Oz.
Tarantino puts all of these events in motion without any regard for historical accuracy, but that, as they say, is the whole point. Basterds doesn't just twist the facts; it stomps all over them with a stormtrooper's boot. It then remolds the resulting pulp of fact and fiction—a blob of The Diary of Anne Frank here, a chunk of The Dirty Dozen there—into an alternate history that concludes with sweet justice, although not exactly the way we might wish. Basterds' milieu is one where the world didn't turn a blind eye to the Holocaust, where former Nazis didn't vanish into civilian life, and where the righteous wrath of a few tough-as-nails Americans literally brought the war to an end. Yet while Tarantino recognizes the allure of this fantasy and indulges it, he doesn't want us to swallow it uncritically. Basterds is certainly the most "meta" film that the director has ever made, balancing its reverence for the emotional and purgative power of cinema with a palpable trepidation about the sinister potential of that power. It's not a coincidence that Shosanna uses a film to obtain her revenge against the Nazis, just as Tarantino is doing, just as, indeed, nearly every World War II film does. Basterds suggests that the enduring popularity of WWII as a film subject points to our fundamental need to eradicate, again and again, the twentieth century's personification of human evil. Far from exorcising the fascistic currents within our own society, however, this ritual Nazi-slaying only ensures the survival of the Reich in the public consciousness, and runs the risk of establishing nationalistic myths, just as Goebbels' propaganda film does.
Tarantino is deliberately vauge when it comes to how exactly we should feel about his film, which is emblematic of the director's customary tapdance between his love of visceral thrills and his bold, deconstructive urges. He clearly wants the audience to have as much fun as he is having, but he also asks that we examine how that enjoyment implicates us. Certainly, the punishment that the Basterds mete out is more tribal than the personal justice visited on Death Proof's Stuntman Mike. Should we feel remorse for enjoying the sight of humans being mutilated and executed for what they are rather than what they have done (even if what they are is racial supremacists and vicious authoritarians)? Despite all of Pitt's droll wisecracks, plainly intended to elicit cheers from the audience, Tarantino asks what exactly we achieve by visiting these places again and again. In the cineplex, it is always Berlin, 1944. While Inglourious Basterds quenches our longing to annihilate the swastika-adorned boogeyman, it also offers a frantic, sarcastic hope. If we riddle the Nazi elite with a blizzard of bullets, if we burn their corpses to cinders, if we rewrite history so that our victory is complete, what then? Will Hitler finally die for the last time? What, one wonders, would we make films about?
