As I may have already mentioned, I am the World’s Biggest Tarantino Fan (TM). I was very upset, therefore, when I saw the trailer for his latest film. It looked like a joke, and not a funny one. Brad Pitt with a comedy accent, Hitler having a tantrum, silly explosions – it was hideous. “Why?” I thought. “Why has this had to happen? What has got into my Quentin? It isn’t even cool. How could Tarantino make a film for which the trailer isn’t cool? You’re telling me you can’t cut together two cool minutes from the whole film?”
Well, whoever made that trailer did the film a disservice. No, it isn’t perfect. And yes, Brad Pitt and Hitler are ridiculous in it. But there are cool bits, tense bits and moving bits that certainly make it worth seeing, even if it still isn’t the sum of these good parts. I’m saying this now because I am going to be doing a lot of complaining in this review and I don’t want you to think I am just a ‘hater’, as they say in hip hop parlance. So I reiterate: do see it because you will enjoy it.
Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino’s first period piece, but as you would expect, it isn’t exactly Merchant Ivory. The Germans have occupied most of mainland Europe, and America has decided to send an elite killing squad of Jewish soldiers into enemy territory to wreak their revenge on the Nazis. They are led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a shouty redneck, and prove very successful at scalping Nazis. The band of misfits becomes involved in a joint British and American plan to assassinate Hitler. Parallel to this, the film follows Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a young Jewish woman living in Paris under an assumed name who also gets a chance to kill the Führer and end the war.
It seems silly to criticize the film for being historically inaccurate, as its premise and the outcome are obviously based on fantasy and not fact. However, Tarantino could have made a much better film by making the whole thing slightly more realistic. There are really two films here: one is serious, tense, moving and superbly acted (Shosanna’s story), and the other could be called Carry On Follow that Panzer.
Laurent has an inner strength and quiet beauty as Shosanna. Her unwanted love interest, a young German war hero, is played by the adorable Daniel Brühl, who gives a pitch-perfect little performance. The best part of her story, however, is of course Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa. His stunningly evil and multi-lingual performance as the Nazi ‘Jew Hunter’ deserves an Oscar. Creepy, clever and charismatic, he reminded me of an Austrian John Malkovitch. Waltz has created one of the all-time great film villains.
The story following Brad Pitt’s ‘bastards’ has its moments (special mention goes to Diane Kruger and Gedeon Burkhard) but all the truly awful bits happen in these passages. Firstly, Mike Myers’s cameo as a British general is so bad that it almost ruins the whole film. I know his parents are from Liverpool, but that doesn’t automatically mean he can do an upper-class English accent. His pronunciation of the word ‘basket’ is particularly painful. And the weird thing is that the part isn’t even written with any jokes in it, so it’s not like his comedy skills are required. Unfathomable.
Secondly, Eli Roth appears as one of the bastards and I really object to this. The guy can’t act. Here he is too scrawny for the part of ‘the Bear Jew’ and his whiny voice is annoying. I’m still upset that his incomprehensible speech at the bar in Death Proof ended up on the soundtrack album when it is the worst bit of that film. I’m sure he and Quentin are great friends, but how many brilliant bits of dialogue are spoken by women in that film and didn’t make it onto the album? Is he now going to be in every Tarantino film? Are they another Scorsese and DiCaprio pairing we will have to endure?
And now on to my third problem with this film: the music. There is no great Tarantino Music Moment here, and this is the first time this has happened in his career. Even Four Rooms had that scatty theme from Combustible Edison. This situation is truly disappointing, because along with that bit at the beginning of James Bond movies where he shoots the camera to John Barry’s score, when Tarantino uses a song correctly it is the coolest thing you can see in a cinema. But I have a bigger problem with the use of music in Inglourious Basterds than mere disappointment.
In the first flush of his career in the early nineties, Tarantino gave many interviews talking about his use of music, and in all of them he made the same point: when a movie uses a song, it owns it forever and it shouldn’t be used again. He always used the same example, that Dirty Dancing should not have used the Ronettes’s Be My Baby because the song already belonged to Scorsese’s Mean Streets. His use of old film scores in the Kill Bill films and Death Proof therefore riled me, but I’m a forgiving sort of girl and convinced myself that it was ok because the music he was using was from quite obscure films. Inglourious Basterd’s soundtrack is again mostly made up of old Ennio Morricone scores, but some of them were also reused in Kill Bill! His only (failed) attempt at a Tarantino Music Moment is with David Bowie’s Cat People (Putting Out the Fire), a song specially written for the quite well-known film Cat People! Tarantino has certainly gone against his own rules with this double-reusing and there is no excuse for such lazy behaviour for such meagre results. Why can’t he just employ a composer to write a score for him like a grown up?
Perhaps because he isn’t a grown up. This film could only have been made by someone who has been given free rein to do whatever he wants, because it really is quite mad. Tarantino shows that he can do great work (the opening scene is tremendous), but also that his ability to self-edit has shrunk with the growth of his ego over the years. Inglourious Basterds is certainly an interesting film with a well structured (if silly) story and some wonderful performances. It deserves to be seen and enjoyed for its many pleasures. However, some may find it easier to ignore its failings than others.
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