Inglourious Basterds (2009)

 

USA/Germany, 153 minutes

Director/writer: Quentin Tarantino

Photography: Robert Richardson

Cast: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, Gedeon Burkhard

I hear that Quentin Tarantino recently took to the lectern—one would like to imagine him pounding it with passion, red-faced and perspiring, but God probably doesn't love us that much—to make the case for himself as an official Auteur of the Cinema, as of approximately exactly the release of this outlandish World War II fantasy. OK, whatever. To me, that was obvious enough from Pulp Fiction (and fairly probable even with Reservoir Dogs), and I was ready to toss him up into the canon then and certainly am now. Maybe I have a lower bar. Or maybe the whole thing is a joke. But the point is that, at bottom, Tarantino operates at far more serious levels than just surface-gliding referential cinematics. Ironically, cynically, irreverently—yes, obviously. Even overbearingly. But undeniably tackling them. Consider, as just one example, the varying fates of the believer and non-believer characters in Pulp Fiction. Tarantino's movies are rich with narrative and character and human interaction, and always steeped (arguably too much, as with this one) in an encyclopedic embrace of film traditions. I was prepared for my first disappointment here, dubious about a translation of Sergio Leone's spaghetti-western revenge syntax for the Holocaust story that willfully, even merrily, sets itself to trampling widely agreed-on sacred territory, basically making shit up as it goes along even as it attempts to co-opt sympathies via blatant manipulation. He just about pulls off the whole thing too—his only mistake is almost an incidental one, which unfortunately compounds itself: casting the overly smug Brad Pitt, who steps all over himself and the story and everybody else too in a crassly hambone performance. I could also do without the elaborate plot points and heavy-handed referents of the narrative climax, which take up the last hour or so. But watching Tarantino's movies is so monumentally entertaining and satisfying that I found myself (as usual) forgiving even his ridiculous excesses. This is overall not one of his best, it may even be his least, but when it's good it's very, very good. And, yes, he's an auteur. Let's close the book on that one now.