"That's a Bingo!" OR "The Shoe Is On the Other Foot"

Photo courtesy Tyler Stout, via We Are Movie Geeks

Fanboys know that Tarantino's WWII flick has been a long, long time coming. The celebrated, controversial, eponymous writer/director announced sometime before the turn of the millennium that he intended to create his own version of the Dirty Dozen (a classic American WWII movie of the earnest, macho 1960's sort, wherein Allied soldiers facing court-martial for various capital offenses are offered the promise of full pardons for undertaking a suicide mission). In the time between this declaration and the eventual release of Inglourious Basterds, a sidelined Tarantino created Kill Bill and the Planet Terror portion of Grindhouse.

I remember very vividly after the release of Kill Bill Pt. 1 in 2003, (which, if generally well-recieved, still achieved nowhere near the universal acclaim of his earlier seminal films Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs) one particularly scathing Internet comment on the film that accused Tarantino of smoking too much weed, watching too much kung-fu and becoming too deluded to realize the difference between quality and self-indulgence in his filmmaking. So if one sect of ultra-loyal Tarantino worshiping fanboys were always unequivocally excited for his WWII project, by the time of Kill Bill, an increasing subset of geekdom was becoming more vocally dubious about his abilities. Can anyone blame them? As it is with any long-in-development project from an artistic giant, e.g. Guns and Roses Chinese Democracy, the more time that goes by, the less likely it is that the results will come anywhere close to justifying the wait.

But of course, the majority of the moviegoing public has minimal-to-no knowledge about this back story. They simply began seeing trailers a few months ago with a hillbilly-accented Brad Pitt talking about killing Nazis and then, FLASH: Tarantino's name, and they either bought into that premise or they didn't.

Fortunately for Tarantino, and, more fortunately for the film's producers, the Weinstein's (who are struggling financially as David Segal expertly reported in the New York Times), Inglourious Basterds looks to be a critical and commercial hit. True, it's not going to match the stellar success of Pulp Fiction - and again, what could? - but it's going to come close, maybe even ascending to his second-highest gross by the time its all said and done. And yet I would argue that the most fortunate people in this whole situation are actually us, the American moviegoing public, fanboys and the less-rabid folk alike. Why's that? Well, the simple truth is that Inglourious Basterds is just a thoroughly well-made film in all aspects. It's confidently written, inspiringly directed, expertly acted, and cleverly edited. It's entertaining, intellectual, insightful, violent, humorous, daring, fun, occasionally romantic and at least in a few notable instances, appropriately tragic. Yes, the film is also occasionally sadistic and gory, but c'mon, that's Tarantino, and, as I alluded to before, you're either down with that side of his work or you're not.

On more than one occasion, as those close to me will attest, I have actually been conspicuously among "you're not" segment of the population, as in I've not always been sold on Tarantino's artistic merit. I found Pulp Fiction to be highly overrated (for a film about hitmen and other unsavory characters, there's more than a few stretches of time where it's damn boring) and Reservoir Dogs to be more gratuitous and nihilistic than it was subversive. I remember vocally criticizing the first Kill Bill for its monotony of violence, but it has grown on me tremendously, especially in light of Kill Bill Vol. 2, which I still personally enjoy the most out of all his films (any director that has the chutzpah to blacken the screen for minutes at a time, relying solely on audio to move the plot forward, deserves my unbridled appreciation).

Yet in the run-up to to Inglourious Basterds I felt a strange sense of excitement, of honest anticipation. Even reading the early mixed-reactions out of Cannes didn't dissuade me in the slightest, in-fact, I felt an even stronger conviction that I would enjoy this film. It wasn't just the marketing that sold me, for some odd reason I was eager to see what Tarantino would do with the setting, with the actors. More on that last point: He is well-known for re-invigorating the careers of actors in deep slumps (see Travolta circa '91, Carradine circa '03), but in this case, he's got a leading man at the top of his game (Brad Pitt) and some notable ascending names (B.J. Novak, Eli Roth).

Whether it was some sort of unnoticed maturation, evolution in my own moviegoing taste or an overall low-quality year of films, or some combination thereof, I really, genuinely wanted to see and appreciate Inglourious Basterds for what I thought it would be: a violent, Grimm-stye adult fairytale set in WWII era France.

So it was that I found myself in the awkward position of defending the picture a day-or-so before it's official release, prior to myself or it's would-be detractors seeing it. What happened was this: At my internship, during a fairly ordinary lunch period on the sun-scorched roof-patio of our office building here in DC, a common discussion about weekend plans ensued. I proposed the idea of getting a group of interns to see Inglourious Basterds on opening (Friday) night, only to be greeted with reactions of harsh distaste, even disgust at the suggestion. Two of my fellow interns, friends of mine, were unapologetic in their pre-determined aversion to and boycott of the film. Amidst my own surprise and rising defensiveness (I thought it was a fine idea for a night's entertainment? No?), I attempted to understand their strong position against it. Apparently, I had neglected to consider the strong, implicit sociopolitical implications of the film: The fact that was set during WWII, that it was not factual but could be misread as such, that it was openly described as being a "Jewish Revenge" fantasy ("Kosher-Porn," according to one notable review), raised a host of problematic issues for those concerned about the present state of Jews, Anti-Semitism, Israel, Palestinians, The Middle East and all other related hotbeds of real-life controversy, to say nothing of the historical legacy of WWII, Nazism and the Holocaust.

"But Tarantino's not concerned with those things," I protested. "Look, you're reading too much into it." I.e. superimposing too many of your own intellectual preoccupations onto the film. "The movie isn't about World War Two, it's a spaghetti-western that happens to be set in World War Two, it uses World War Two as the backdrop." This proved to be an unsatisfactory defense, as the very fact that the writer/director would have the audacity to trivialize the memory of World War II with a fanciful, farcical story was evidence of the film's irresponsibility and lack of taste. I tried in vein to bring up the fact that many other directors and popular entertainment had done just this, creating fictional, humorous plots out of a real tragedy, but to no avail. We agreed to disagree, and that was that.

But I will say I was wrong about one of my latter, pre-viewing assertions: WWII is NOT just a backdrop for the film. Indeed, by the end of the movie, our titular protagonists are thrust into the absolutely most vital position in the Allied offense. The course of an alternate war history is irrevocably altered because of the deliberate machinations of characters and resulting events. This is the simultaneously the most bold and ridiculous aspect of the movie, but it is unabashedly so, as we would expect from Tarantino. Furthermore, I would argue that by not compromising his vision, by deliberately warping historical narrative, with all of the negative connotations that may have on a particular segment of the audience wedded to Saving Private Ryan-style historical reenactment, the filmmaker actually succeeds in making this the most raw, powerful and emotive part of the show.

Meanwhile, devotees of Tarantino-signature dialogue have more than enough to chew on with this screenplay, which employs the various languages of the European front so often that the subtitles become a source of self-reflective comedy. Two of my favorite lines form the title of this review, but it is the second, "The shoe is on the other foot," that really gets at the heart of what is going on in and with this film.

All but the most deliberately disengaged know what it's ostensibly about going in: A squad of Jewish-American soldiers are assigned to massacre, to brutalize, some would say terrorize, as many Nazis as they possibly can in Occupied France. In trailers we hear Brad Pitt's character, the commanding officer, Lt. Aldo Raine, saying he wants every one of the men under his command to be scalping the Nazi soldiers they take down, with each man responsible for producing no less than 100 Nazi scalps. A grim (if you're like me, darkly-comedic, but grim nonetheless) directive to be certain, but the trailers do not evidence how successful, if at all, the men are in this enterprise. But watching the film, we quickly learn that they are stunningly so, enough to rattle Hitler himself. Thus, the shoe is indeed on the other foot- with the overwhelming numbers of Hitler's "master race" irrationally fearing the wrath of a very small number of the very group they systematically objectified, subjugated and exterminated.

I recently claimed, in conversation, that Inglorious Basterds was Tarantino's most mainstream film, and I still stand by this assertion. What is more universally agreed upon than the evil of the Nazis and the righteousness of the Allied forces in taking them down?

But that's just an excuse for Tarantino to mess with us: By inverting the role of the pursuer, making the Nazis the victim of a group of sadistic and yet still undeniably charismatic and "good" American soldiers, the film becomes much more interesting and emotionally complex. The same goes for another hero, the French Jew Shosanna, whose early, horrific escape from the film's principle Nazi villain drives her to plan an epic, cold-bolded massacre of her own. Time and time again, as the plot unfolds, Tarantino reverses the relative roles of the characters in the film- moving them between polarizing positions of dominance and subjugation, of moral superiority and compromise, of power and powerlessness. This is, for me, the chief accomplishment of the film, and the reason it is so satisfying on so many levels, the fact that it is ultimately all predicated on the continuous shifting of power-dynamics. To be certain, it is not very faithful to historical reality at all, but at the same time, I cannot help but think, from my perspective some 60+ years later, that Tarantino is actually being quite faithful to the essence of WWII, with all of its untold moral ambiguity and then-uncertain outcome.

In Sum: A masterful film that is an undeniable, exceptional, rollicking good time, in spite of its sociopolitical baggage. Undoubtedly the best of '09, thus far.