Right, so. Possibly overanalysing review.
Quentin Tarantino made it big early on. The problem, for any film-maker who's as recognized and recognizable as Tarantino, is how to handle the audience's expectations – how to not be stuck making the same kind of movie over and over again. As brilliant as
Pulp Fiction was when it came, it's impossible to keep doing the same thing.
Kill Bill had the subtitle "THE FOURTH FILM BY QUENTIN TARANTINO" and delivered superficial Tarantinoisms – the violence, the fractured timelines, the comic-book imagery, the clever dialogue – in spades until we almost forgot that underneath it all, there really wasn't a whole lot more than cleverness to it. The problem of 1990s ironic postmodernism: ultimately, it had nothing to offer but references to itself – that's how we got
Scary Movie IV.
Death Proof, on the other hand, started out by being almost a Tarantino parody – only to kill itself and the audience's expectations of what was happening, and start over with a brand new focus.
Inglourious Basterds, in a lot of ways,has more in common with those last 40 minutes of
Death Proof than it does with any of his previous movies. Both in the way it ends with an explosion of rather gratuitous violence that the audience is explicitly told makes our heroes as violent as the bad guys, but we still can't help applauding; and in the way it seems like a post-Tarantino Tarantino movie – one which leaves out most of the superficial trickery, performs rather than shows off, and cuts to the basics.
Because yes, it's tremendously entertaining, if maybe a bit long and with one or two too many faceless side characters. It's violent, it's got great dialogue that's never as self-consciously witty as some of Tarantino's earlier stuff but still zings, it digs out obscure actors and gives them the sort of roles that you know they loved playing. Christoph Walz as Landa, especially, is a revelation; at the same time a thoroughly despicable character and one of those villains you can't help but love for their sheer bad-assery, always a step ahead of our heroes, and so gleefully selfishly lovably evil that I almost cheer for him. And seeing Daniel Brühl ("Goodbye Lenin") as a "nice guy" Nazi is actually creepy – he's one of the characters that's played almost completely straight, as opposed to Pitt's and Walz's larger-than-life ones. In fact, the lone huge Hollywood name – Pitt – is almost a side character, more Chekhov's gun than the gunman himself. The nazis are portrayed as insane, and the higher up the crazier, but our "heroes" aren't really very nice either as they kill, butcher, slaughter, torture their way through Nazi-occupied France to a big showdown with Hitler himself – damnit, it's practically
Wolfenstein 3D: The Movie.
But at the centre of it all, as always in Tarantino's movies, is the image. Both in the sense of pure "wow, that looks cool" cinematography, and in the sense that it's all about selling an image of yourself.
We will be cruel to the Germans and through our cruelty they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, disfigured bodies their brothers we leave behind us and the Germans will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, at our boot heels, and the edge of our knives. And the Germans will be sickened by us, the Germans will talk about us and the Germans will fear us.
Inglourious Basterds, fittingly for a movie featuring Joseph Goebbels, is about the power of a good story to change the world around it. In Tarantino's world, WWII is far enough in the past to get the "Once upon a time..." treatment; this isn't the
real WWII, it's a mythical version of it in which the ending can be re-written just like Disney re-wrote Grimm's (German) fairy tales; and he loves playing with the idea of himself as both propagandist and subverter of propaganda (carve a swastika on the surviving nazis so they won't get to spin their own story when they get home; re-cut their own propaganda movies to beat them at their own game; Tarantino, as always, is all about hiphop-style battles and one-upmanship). At one point, we see a bunch of nazis watching what's very obviously a Tarantinoized take on a Nazi propaganda film, complete with dozens of American soldiers getting gunned down in spectacular fashion by a lone Nazi hero. I, and others in the audience, can't help but laugh at the obvious self-reference... and just then, he cuts to Hitler, who's watching the same movie and is also laughing his ass off along with us.
Ahem.
But damnit, the man knows what he's doing, he's using it better with every movie, and it works.
Inglourious Basterds is simply one hell of a romp, mixing and subverting genre clichés all over the place in a way that's pure joy to watch, while still sticking to the plot, making his usual tricks work for the story rather than just be there for their own sake, and never drifting into self-conscious cinematic masturbation. He has the characters speak four (five if you count Pitt's dialect) different languages in what looks like a bid for authenticity that's bound to scare off a few viewers (subtitles, eww!), and even turns it into a plot point in several key scenes, yet happily undermines it by having both plot and characterisation be just enough over the top that nobody in their right mind would ever think something like this happened. This is a fairy tale, after all.
(Of course, and I don't think I'm nearly the film geek I would need to be to appreciate it fully, Tarantino is still a magpie. In previous films he's ripped off kung fu, blaxploitation, samurai, gangster and... well, every genre under the sun; he's now added both US and European war movies (and spaghetti Westerns) to the mix. I'll be damned if the big finale (not the final scene, but the big final shootout) here doesn't owe a debt of gratitude to Elem Klimov's masterpiece
Go And See, for instance.)
So the question above remains: why? Does Quentin Tarantino have anything of his own to say? Well, yes. It still says "How fucking cool is it that people pay me to do this?" in huge letters everywhere, but he does it so well, and the further he gets from
Pulp Fiction, the more of a chance he'll have of doing something truly powerful.
Quentin-san, may your walls fall, and may you live to tell.
.
