After Roger Ebert first saw “Pulp Fiction”, Quentin Tarantino asked him what he thought of it.
“It’s either the best film of the year or the worst film,” Ebert said, later admitting to his readers that, “I hardly knew what the hell had happened to me.”
That’s about it. Tarantino flicks are soggy with audacity and wit but not quite, or essentially, funny. They have the attention to human detail of character study, but he’s just not interested in real, whole people. They pay homage to “genre”, but have none of the conventional payoff of mystery or horror or suspense or (God knows) romance. He’s as good at raw action as anybody but, come on… we’re not talking about “Die Hard,” here.
Which brings us to “Inglourious Basterds,” which I saw Friday, with my kids (and oddly, a surprising number of older people), at our local multi-screen facility. It’s a World War II fantasy that’s imperfect, too long (although so’s everything else) and often amazing.
The TV ads lead you to believe it’s a “Dirty Dozen,” style adventure. Not even close. The 12 Basterds as a group are actually tangential. There’s not a single battle scene. There’s no attempt at historical context or even accuracy. Calling it a fantasy is almost understatement.
A lot of critics have mentioned how gorgeous-looking it us and they’re right, but what amazed me is the faces, pockmarked or blood-stained or lantern-jawed or pottery-smooth and red-lipped. Melanie Laurent, the French actor-director who plays Shosanna Dreyfus, may have replaced Uma Thurman as QT’s cinema-babe obsession, from the way he lets the camera study her face and mouth and frame her in color-drenched, almost still-life shots that look like Edward Hopper paintings.
Yes, that 12-levels-beyond-ruddy British military functionary is Mike Myers. Austin Powers. And that’s Rod Taylor of ”The Birds”, unrecognizable as a jowly, puffy, cigar-wielding Winston Churchill. Tarantino apparently flew those two to Germany, made them up until they were practically abstract sculptures of themselves, and then gave them just one scene, purely expository, maybe five minutes long. A low-budget indie this isn’t.
Brad Pitt gets the most cartoonish face, and he creates it himself, seemingly jutting his jaw and puffing his cheeks further and further as the story wears on. Odd, that the Prettiest Man Alive seems more at home and effective in goofball/ironic roles.
The lanternest jaw belongs to Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), whose critical raves are more than deserved. He holds the thing together, and not only because his character has to, with reasonably fluency, speak German, French, Italian and English. Waltz is creepy when pretending to be nice, funny when he’s trying to be scary, obnoxious and suave and too witty and eccentric in his manner to be thoroughly Nazi (which, it turns out, he isn’t) and an absolutely riveting pain in the ass every second he’s visible. Phenomenal.
The story is ridiculous, of course. That’s not a bad thing, even though the two elaborate set-pieces critics have raved about - in the French farmhouse to open the film and in the cellar bar where the pivotal plot is supposed to be hatched - I found overlong and not especially suspenseful; the necessity of multiple languages and subtitles, in both cases, for me undercut Tarantino’s dialogue-writing talent. The one in the bar, though, culminates in an amazingly choreographed five-second explosion of violence that’s like fireworks and literally takes your breath away.
That’s what Tarantino ultimately does best- draw hard visceral reactions out of you. You laugh and gasp and recoil and get nauseous. I suspect Pauline Kael would have loved him, and he’ll never get more profound praise than that.
The climactic scene is as audacious, spectacular and (I imagine) logistically complex as anything I’ve ever seen in a movie. That’s a real fire, folks. Not sure the preceeding two hours-plus completely earned that payoff, but it was, to employ an over- and misused word correctly for once, awesome.
My kids had no qualms. They were stoked to the point of smoldering as we walked out, the younger one practically squeaking and vibrating. They want to move to California now and worship Tarantino.
Me? Like Ebert, I hardly knew what the hell had happened. I’d take the ride again, though.
