INGLOROURIOUS BASTERDS

[Warning: the following commentary contains spoilers so do not proceed unless that's your intention.]


I was surprised to enjoy this film. I enjoyed its cinematic flourishes and the emblematic Tarantino stylings that put an edgy luster and somewhat unique take on a well worn genre. I say surprised because the prima facie proposition for a potentially irreverent and worse, flippant, narrative of a yet another Nazi era movie didn't seem so palatable to me. What could Tarantino's mostly form over content directorial sensibility add to this well exposed period of history without going dangerously to the edges of over-vilification and even Nazi fetishism that has been the trap of other films?

Of course it is a reinvention of the 1978 original named with subtle variance as, "Inglorious Bastards" directed by the Italian filmmaker, Enzo G. Castellari as opposed to Tarantino's remake as, "Inglourious Basterds." The essential storyline with both films has a rough and tumble crew assembled by US or Allied Forces tasked with an impossible mission to infiltrate and upset the Nazi effort. Indeed, I only happened upon the closely mirrored stories because I accidentally put Enzo's version on my Netflix queue expecting Tarantino's. Comedy of errors but edifying nonetheless.

Without going into a full critical exposition of Inglourious Basterds, I would say one of the 2 most memorable scenes in the film for me were the opening scene played out by Col. Hans Landa, who has the notorious moniker of, The Jew Hunter, who visits a French farmer and his 3 daughters to confirm they are not harboring a Jewish family. The pastoral beauty of the French countryside, the rustic innocence of farm life, and the almost cliche prettiness of the farmer's three daughters is juxtaposed with the sudden arrival of the Colonel and his entourage of German soldiers. The Colonel's interview of the farmer in his dining table builds from false congeniality to a mounting tenseness resulting from the fact that the Colonel is ruthless and preternaturally gifted in the subtle extraction of squeezing truth out of his subjects. The scene of course ends with the inevitable tragedy of the family beneath the floorboards being massacred except one of the girls in the family, Shosanna Dreyfus, who manages to escape and sets up the plot for her later revenge.

The second scene that seemed to stick to the roof of my visual palate was the very ending where the entire upper echelon of the Nazi command including Adolf Hitler himself attends a small but exclusive screening of Goebbels' propaganda film, "Nation's Pride." Shosanna unravels her ultimate revenge for the massacre of her family by locking the entire German audience in the screening room and setting them ablaze by igniting a small mountain of highly flammable film behind the screen. As the film screens toward its ending, the audience suddenly sees a spliced image of Shosanna who appears like an apparition from some projected human conscience appear before them to issue their death sentence. The fire ignites and flickers up the screen image of Shosanna with perfect aesthetic as if it were intentionally to be included for some demonic movie trailer for hell and the audience panics and stampedes to the exit doors which have been locked. As fire and smoke begin to consume the entire room, the beam of the projector light continues to cast an eerie pallor of Shosanna amidst the amorphous smoke and pandemonium. She couldn't have staged a better finale for her ending but alas she is not able to appreciate her masterful creative destruction since she has been shot by her ironic Nazi admirer, Pvt. Zoller. What gets her shot is a moment of last minute human compassion as she has already shot the Private in the screening room but has a momentary lapse in judgment and approaches the fallen Private who surprises her with a round of bullets.

Compassion is not rewarded in this film. Shosanna's hesitation kills her. Col. Landa's willingness to let Shosanna escape from the farm massacre comes back to haunt him even though he leverages that opportunity for self-interest. There is of course the brutality of war and the utter banality of evil of the genocidal agenda of the Nazi's so an equally brutal and unmerciful response is often made in some Faustian moral calculus that allows narratives that pit pure evil against the forces that fight it to be utterly justified. Lt. Aldo Raine's (Brad Pitt) reign (no pun intended) of terror on the Nazi's was a programmatic attempt to instill fear and undermine the firm confidence of the Germans. To this tactical and strategic end, it has a certain undeniable military logic but it still is hard to celebrate their violence even to their German counterparts which they brutalize with bats to the head and scalpings. This is a general problem with Tarantino's film strategy. You sometimes have the sense that he sets up story lines and characters for the express purpose of allowing the audience to enjoy naked violence. In the Kill Bill series, the cartoonish stylization mocks its own genre and provides the enzyme to digest the graphic violence. In Inglourious Basterds, the Nazi tableaux is a backdrop which gives any resistance to the Nazi's a blank check to indulge in their most violent response.

The weakest link of the film is Brad Pitt's character, Lt. Aldo Raines. All I see is Brad Pitt not Aldo Raines and a knowing wink to the camera by Brad Pitt saying, "Hey it's me Brad, I'm being cheeky."

One of the strongest character links and acting performances is by Christoph Waltz who plays Col. Hans Landa. His ability to portray paradoxical ill attuned evil intelligence against hints of a boorish buffoon is masterful. He pulls off being crafty, manipulative, and disarms you with unexpected etiquette and charm but he proves to be a master of deception since he is not committed to any ultimate allegiance but harbors an agenda of survival and self-admiration.