Tarantino’s irreverent take on World War Two has much to recommend it, not least a career making turn by actor Christoph Waltz, and at times displays a mastery of staging, writing and tension that is breathtaking. It does, however, also contain all of Tarantino’s faults as a moviemaker, with too much flab where they should be lean and his usual casual disregard for characters we have invested time in.
The first chapter (he loves his chapters) is by far the best. In occupied France, a family is visited by SS Colonel Hans Landa (Waltz). Articulate, friendly and urbane, Landa, known as ‘the Jew Hunter’, is looking for Jews and in a nail biting scene set entirely in the owner’s kitchen the Nazi slowly but surely sets a trap, knowing full well that a poor Jewish family are hiding under the floorboards. Waltz plays Landa as a charming cat, playing with is prey before the kill. It is an astonishing performance. The Jewish daughter, Shosanna, escapes and a couple of years later is running a small cinema in Paris. Here, a German war hero who has had his story made into a propaganda film tries to befriend her, leading to her cinema being chosen to premier the film, with the Nazi high command, including Hitler, in attendance. This is just one thread in Tarantino’s sprawling narrative: we also follow the Jewish American commando unit labelled the Basterds, led by Aldo Reine (Brad Pitt) in a largely comic turn, all silly accent and movie star moustache. The Basterds have been terrorising the Germans and scalping them like the Apaches of old. When they are asked to assist in an operation involving a British agent (a wonderfully posh Michael Fassbender) and undercover agent and film actress Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), the Basterds see an opportunity to end the war…
As the above testifies, there’s a lot going on in Inglorious Basterds, with multiple plots running through it, broken up into a number of chapters. While each section has much to recommend it, it means, as a whole, the film can lack direction and pace and often feels self indulgent. The weak link is actually the Basterds, who feel as if they’re wandered in from another film. Yes, they commit horrendous acts of violence and brutality (Eli Roth’s Bear Jew beats Germans to death with a baseball bat) but they’re a cartoonish bunch whose broad performances jar with the more realistic depictions of Nazi atrocities elsewhere in the picture. Their large amount of screen time also limits the time we spend with Shosanna, who should be the heart of the film and it especially means potentially interesting facets of the story, such as her romance with black Frenchman Marcel, are totally undeveloped, robbing the climax of much emotional weight.
It’s this inability to truly mine the emotional depth of his characters and story that remains Tarantino’s great failing as a director. Technical ability and dialogue are his forte but his films, including this one can be a hollow experience, a clever pastiche but little more. Inglorious Basterds is too full of characters with arcs that go nowhere. On the one hand this means there is a constant tension in one of his movies, as any of the characters could die at any time, but it also means that, as his career continues, that his work has become strangely predictable, leading the viewer not to invest in his characters as they will probably be killed off in a violent fashion, for little other reason than it makes an interesting tableaux. There is something strangely beautiful about the image of two of the main characters, in death, on the floor seen from above but the moment should mean more to us than an appreciation of a well framed image.
Once again, Tarantino’s film ends up being less than the sum of its parts so that the themes and messages within the narrative (such as the banality of evil, the power of cinema and, most importantly, the capacity for good and evil on both sides of the conflict) are drowned out by shootouts, smart lines and nasty acts of violence (the graphic death of one main character by another is just horrible). There is a visceral comedy to his rewriting of history in the final third and Tarantino is a brilliant director, no doubt about it, but one wonders if he’s ever going to grow up.
GK Rating: ***
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