Inglourious Basterds.

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds won widespread accolades, including eight Oscar nominations, for its portrayal of an alternate ending to World War II that involves Jews killing Nazis while working in enough allusions to other movies to fill a film studies major’s thesis. As someone insufficiently schooled in the genres Tarantino reveres, however, I didn’t get the full value of the work and found the movie, judged mainly on plot and character, a little less than fulfilling.

The movie interlaces two plots to assassinate members of the Nazi high command in a Paris theater during the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film called Nation’s Pride. The Basterds of the film’s title are a ragtag group of soldiers, mostly American Jews, led by Appalachian-born Lieutenant Aldo Raine, who informs the crew that their mission is to kill “Natsies” (rhymes with “patsies”) and scalp them. The second plot involves the sole survivor of the massacre of a French Jewish family in the opening scene, a young girl named Shoshana who ends up (improbably) as the owner of a small theater in Paris that is chosen for said premiere. Seeing her opportunity for revenge, she hatches a plot to burn down the theater full of Nazi officers and soldiers, unaware that the Basterds are planning to blow the place up during the same event.

By far the star of the movie is Christoph Waltz, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa, an effete Nazi “detective” who prides himself on a particular talent for finding Jews and, as it turns out, traitors. Humanizing the inhuman has become something of a cliché, but Tarantino/Waltz don’t humanize this central Nazi character so much as smear him with a veener of normality, beneath which lies a venal, selfish soldier who takes orders without question until it is in his own personal interests to do otherwise. He bears a superficial charm with his upper-class manners, speaks several languages fluently (always with a proper, urbane accent), and moves seamlessly from one to the next, and engages in small talk even though he knows he is about to commit or order a murder. It takes multiple scenes to reveal the depths of his personality and how that surface layer is merely a cover for a man who will make good for himself any way he can. His pleasure in identifying a situation where he holds all the cards (the “Bingo!” scene) shows how willingly he will change his strategy to suit his own needs while also revealing how much he revels in something as trivial as correctly utilizing an English-American colloquialism. One small flaw in Landa’s design, however, is that we are given only the slightest glimpse of what makes him a good detective, and that comes from his own soliloquy about how he thinks as the fugitive might think – nothing terribly clever or enlightening.

The film’s best scene doesn’t involve Waltz, however, and only resorts to Tarantino’s cartoonish violence at its very end, once the story within the scene has played out. Three of the Basterds are meeting with a German actress/double agent in the basement* of a tavern in a small town outside of Paris, but their rendezvous is compromised by a group of low-ranked German soldiers getting plastered because one just became a father, which leads to the intrusion of a much higher-ranking officer who eavesdropped on the conversation and believes, based on one of the Basterds’ accents when speaking German, that they are frauds. We know it’s not likely to end well, and that any chance of the Basterds’ escape would mean extermination of everyone else in the room, but instead of racing to the obvious conclusion, Tarantino draws it out with natural dialogue, long pauses, and shots of the most volatile of the three Basterds slowly coming to a boil as the conversation with the German officer drags on. It’s tightly shot with no wasted words or unnecessary delays, leaving you as the frog in the pot of cold water as someone gradually turns up the heat.

*Which leads to Brad Pitt’s character warning about fighting in basements. Pretty clever, Q.

Unfortunately, a few minutes later, Tarantino draws out the worst scene in the film to excruciating result, trying to extract comedy from the blindingly obvious as Lt. Raine and two of his Basterds attempt to infiltrate the theater in the guise of Eye-talians, with comically bad accents to match. You know they have no shot to pass any inspection, but where drawing out the scene in the tavern created tension, drawing out the scene in the theater lobby made me want to reach for the fast-forward button.

I’ve also read some criticism of the film for turning its Jewish heroes into sadistic killers along the lines of the Nazis they’re fighting. It’s an interesting point, one I raise here (even though it is not my own – it didn’t really occur to me as I watched the film) for discussion purposes. My immediate reaction to the argument is that the film is so obviously fantasy that the heroes’ bloodlust is merely a physical manifestation of the deep desire for revenge that would be difficult, if not impossible, to display without having the characters channel it into outright violence.

Overall, however, there’s a restraint here I don’t associate with Tarantino, and in this case I think it detracted from the movie as a whole. Of course, there’s no restraint from violence – we see scalpings, stabbings, shootings, and even a strangulation up close – but the story itself is small despite the seemingly grand ambitions of the plot. The commercials for the film indicated a grossly comic romp of daring American misfit soldiers wreaking havoc behind enemy lines, killing Nazis in a glossy revenge fantasy that mixes highbrow dialogue with lowbrow humor and graphic violence. Inglourious Basterds is nothing of the sort, which made it much less funny than I expected while leaving most of the revenge for a single extended scene at the end of the film. It’s an homage to spaghetti westerns and World War II films with references to art films and even fine arts, nearly all of which went right over my head. If you follow the allusions, it is probably a far more enjoyable film. As a devourer of plot and a philistine in all of the fields to which Tarantino alludes, however, I was disappointed and even a little confused.