It's a rare piece of pop
culture that can make the outcome of World War II uncertain and thrilling in
2009. It's a precious artifact of film that several main characters are Nazis
and SS officers with the reputation of supervillains (even among their own
ilk), and yet they are nuanced and compelling. And it's a one-in-a-million
triumph that so many flocked to the cinema to see handsome Brad Pitt lead a
group of impossibly heroic and completely fictitious Americans to save Europe,
only to be confronted by unmarketable, un-heroic, and unfriendly violence. I
read the film this way: there's nothing charming, clever, or particularly noble
about picking up a big stick and slamming it headlong into the atrocities
committed by the ultimate evil. It's not meant to be glorious, just necessary.
I should probably talk
more about the film. It's a two and a half hour study in various forms of
narrative tension. Each chapter, as the movie segments its interconnected
stories, is a different variation on the same theme: the human reaction to
intimate contact with that which disgusts you. From Colonel Landa's seemingly
amicable interrogation of the farmer Lapatite, the Basterds and their
prisoners, Shoshanna's lunch with Zoller, Goebbels, and the SS, and the
impromptu barroom conversation between Operation Kino agents and the Nazi revelers,
we see how every character--however small and inconsequential to the climax of
the story--responds to the people they are forced to interact with. Even the
negotiations between Landa and Pitt's Lt. Aldo Rain have a sneering disdain
from both sides. When the tension of these interactions boils over into
Tarantino's trademark wild, somewhat cartoonish violence, it's not the main
attraction. It's merely the result.
Strangely, a movie with
such palpable hate and fear and rage and disgust as a thematic backdrop still
manages to indulge in Tarantino's other trademark: really snappy and funny
dialogue that appropriates the absurdity of mundane conversation. Stylized
though his characters always are, the screenwriting instinct to make their
over-the-top diction (Pitt's cowboy-like American, Christoph Waltz's bemused
detective act, and even Mike Meyers in a startlingly weird cameo as,
ironically, the most British Brit who ever did anglicize) pair with a brazen,
dismissive syntax is always more interesting than it is realistic.
Visually, it's a great
treat to watch Tarantino play with the coloring and cinematography of a classy
war picture and twist it to his own sensibilities. The spaghetti western
influences and "chop suey" genre editing smack an audience across the
face and jump-start the pacing of what could have easily been one long-ass
movie. It's also worth noting how much fun the filmmaker must have had with the
costuming, highlighting just how theatrical and clownishly absurd Nazi uniforms
could look in the right context, say Hitler himself in a giant red cape and
magician's white gloves while pitching a toddler's fit over ...I don't know,
how Jewish those rascally American guerrilla fighters are.
This review was originally posted at Kyle's Letterboxd page. Follow him there for movie reviews and lists as well as some sneak peeks of Cinema Autopsy, his bad movie essay book available soon.
