Inglourious Basterds is Great Cinema but Falls Short of Being Tarantino’s Masterpiece.
When the opening credits for Inglourious Basterds rolled and Tarantino’s name flashed across the screen, I had an unexpected well-up of emotion that I hadn’t had in a movie in many years. Even though I’m a huge Tarantino fan I wasn’t expecting this. Basterds is the film that has been haunting Tarantino for years as his unfinished masterpiece with a massively long development process almost all in his quest to perfect the script. I had a great time with it, but the farther I get away from my first viewing and my first impressions of it continue to gel I have to admit that even with how incredibly well done it is, Basterds is a deeply flawed film.
Of the pure movie joy I’ve had over the past 15 years Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and Reservoir Dogs are some if the most enjoyable cinema ever produced. I loved Jackie Brown and Death Proof as well, though not in the same class in my mind. Inglourious Basterds is a damned fine spy thriller. 
The opening sequence sets an incredible tone and is among the most masterful sequences that QT has ever produced. Set in Nazi occupied France, a group of German soldiers lead by Col. Hans Landa pays a visit to a dairy farmer with three daughters. We quickly find out that the purpose of the visit is a follow up. Nine months earlier, the Germans had raided the farmers house searching for the Jewish families from the area as they were being rounded up after the occupation began. Landa is nicknamed “The Jew Hunter” for his prowess in smoking out Jews in German occupied areas, and now he has returned to the farmer’s house for a second search for the last Jewish family from the area that can’t be accounted for.
In a testament to Tarantino’s ability create magic on the screen, there is a level of intense unease built in a soft-spoken and simple conversation between Landa and the farmer that has you squirming inside. It’s a great start to the film and an immediate establishment of Chris Waltz’s performance as Hans Landa as brilliant. Waltz simply destroys the screen in every scene he’s in and is another name in the long line of actors that have given career performances in front of Tarantino’s cameras.
By the end of the film, we have had several scenes similar to the one that opens the story and it’s interesting that almost every single one was crafted with nothing more than characters sitting around tables and talking to each other. With the fair amount of brutality in the movie, it’s actually quite an achievement that the most memorable and expert moments are seeded simply in human interaction. Therein lies the brilliance of Basterds as well as the key to what holds it back.
Basterds follows two parallel storylines that do not intersect throughout the first two and a half acts. First, we have Mélanie Laurent playing Shosanna, a young Jewish girl who has taken on an alternative identity to hide from the Nazi occupiers and owns a cinema in France. Being the only surviving member of her family after being hunted and killed by Nazi soldiers, she is put in an uncomfortable situation when her theater gains the notice of the Germans and she is asked to premier a German film glorifying the heroics of a Nazi sniper who managed to survive a three day assault of American and allied forces. Even though she is disgusted by this prospect, she has little choice in complying with the request and decides that it is her duty to take the opportunity to make a difference in the war. Laurent, who’s entire performance is in French with subtitles, has a very magnetic screen presence. She’s beautiful, charismatic and has a tough, driven charm that brings electricity to the screen in every scene she’s in.
The other story is about a unit of misfit Jewish-American solders led by Lt. Aldo Raine, Brad Pitt in a cartoonishly over the top southern accent, charged with going undercover into France and ambushing small Nazi occupation units with the orders of killing them in brutal, horrific fashion to spread fear and unease amongst the German soldiers. While the initial trailers may lead one to believe that Basterds follows the gruesome exploits of this unit as they slaughter Nazi soldiers, we see very little of these soldiers in action and for as much screen time as they have we learn virtually nothing about any of them other than just bare basic background info of a couple of the men. This is really where the structure of Tarantino’s film fails for me.
On both sides of the stories being told in Basterds, we never really learn anything about Shosanna, Raine or any of the supporting characters, nor do we have any key moments with any of them that develop or move them beyond how much we know about them from the first time we meet them. There is a complete and utter lack of emotional connection to any main character. When the closing credits roll not every main character comes out alive. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say this. In WW2 spy thriller you’d be silly to think that every main and supporting character lives up until the end credits, but in this film, there’s almost no grief, sorrow, or emotional reaction at any the misfortune of any of these people. 
This is what holds back Basterds from being Tarantino’s masterpiece. He’s made a brilliant war/spy film that is crafted and executed with more skill and maturity than anything he’s ever done before, but in the end, it never becomes about the people. Instead, the characters are simply set pieces with Tarantino rolling the dice that the audience’s emotional attachment to the piece will come in the form of the common goal of defeating the Nazis. In fairness, there is success in this approach. When a group of our characters become locked in an intense psychological conflict late in the film where they are trying their best to pass themselves off as German officers and get sucked into a situation they were trying avoid, namely getting dropped into a room of real German officers and soldiers, you find yourself not giving a crap about whether any of our heroes live through it or not, but you do have a strong attachment and sympathy for their mission to invest yourself in rather than any one or more of the soldiers at hand. The film almost plays as a series of vignettes focusing on extended, uncomfortable psychological conflicts like the one recounted above.
In fairness to Inglourious Basterds, this approach does work, but it ends up making the setbacks and tragedies a little less powerful and the victories a little more hollow. For as much time as we spend with many of these characters, you’ll be amazed at how little you end up knowing any of them. Of the Basterds unit, beyond Pitt’s Raine, I don’t think I could name any of the characters on sight. They have virtually no dialogue and no development beyond one brief classic Tarantino flashback introduction to one of the more psychotic of his band of Basterds.
So what do we end with as the end credits of Inglorious Basterds roll and the house lights come up? Make no mistake, we have a first rate World War 2 thriller that is full of magical moments. In a sense, it manages to prove that Tarantino has an incredible skill for producing multiple moments of on-screen magic and the ability reach directly into the audience’s chest to increase the heart rate. Gone are most of the recognizable trademarks of Quentin’s classic character banter full of pop culture references and kitsche and instead Basterds is yet another testament to his ability to honor classic film genres by recreating all the things that make those genres classic with as much or more skill than you’ve ever seen them. He accomplishes things with Basterds that he’s never done before as a filmmaker and it’s a worthy addition to the Tarantino catalog. It certainly deserves to be mentioned in the same breaths as both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, but it’s still lags behind those in my mind as a fully rounded achievements.
Can I recommend this film? Absolutely. It’s a helluva a lot of fun. You’ll be dragged through a fantastic series of events as two very different war stories are told completely independently as you watch them roll towards a massive climactic event where both are destined to overlap. You’ll be amazed at the rules Tarantino breaks to end the movie as he did, and you will get that moment of utter satisfaction at the last of shot of the film–without spoiler, but suffice to say it’s a classic Tarantino trademark shot. Most QT fans will have something to grin about from Basterds, but I will always have that little twinge of disappointment in my overall disconnection from the characters at the expense of Tarantino’s assumption that all the audience needed was to be on board with the universal emotional attachment to the struggle against the Nazi oppression.
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Tags: Movie Reviews, Tarantino
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2 Responses to “Inglourious Basterds is Great Cinema but Falls Short of Being Tarantino’s Masterpiece.”
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September 16th, 2009 at 10:18 am
I got out to see this film and agree with the assessment. This film was a great watch but I really felt it was a little too long for what was really developed at points. I thought that more time could have been paid to the Basterds themselves or to character development/background as you said.
One thing that surprised me was how humorous the film was. I mean, I was dying at some points. The Bear Jew, I think, will take on it’s own cult away from the film kidn of like Globo Gym Purple Cobras from Dodgeball. I can just see fantasy football teams every being “Bear Jews.” EYEtalian as well.
I’m not a tarantino fan at all really but this was a good one to see though it really could have been spectacular.
September 17th, 2009 at 12:17 am
I took my kid, who I’ve just started introducing to Tarantino. We saw it opening weekend. He suprised me this weekend on the way into 9 by telling me that he wanted to see Basterds again. It is very talky, but that’s the brilliance of the film in a way. The bar scene is absolutely one of the most tense scenes I’ve ever sat through in a theater before and it was virtually all dialogue and brilliant acting and direction. The brawl/firefight at the end of that scene was sort of a release after all that damned tension.