Cannes. "Inglourious Basterds"

By David Hudson on 05/20/2009

[Updated through 5/29]

"Quentin Tarantino's self-styled spaghetti-western war movie sends Hitler to the movies where, by God, he gets what's coming to him," writes the Guardian's Xan Brooks.

And we'll get back to him in a moment. First, let's let the BBC's Emma Jones run through the story: "Brad Pitt plays Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the leader of a gang of Jewish-American soldiers operating in occupied France whose self-proclaimed mission is 'to kill as many Nazis as possible.' They succeed in Tarantino's usual grisly-comic fashion, carving swastikas into the foreheads of any German soldier they do not scalp. The plot culminates with an attempt to incinerate the Nazi high command - including Hitler, Goebbels and Goering - at a film premiere in Paris."

Now, then, Xan Brooks: "For all that, 'Inglourious Basterds' [site] remains a mess: an obese, pampered adolescent of a film that somehow manages to be both indolent and overexcited at the same time. Oh sure, this adolescent is talented and has ambition and moxy to burn. But he's so bumptious, brattish and full of himself that it becomes a little wearing. And what was with all those movie references? Michael Fassbender plays a heroic film critic, while Tarantino's script pays extended, obsequious tribute to French cinema and the auteur theory. It all struck me as special pleading; the smarm-tactics of a schoolboy who has rushed through his homework and decides that his best hope is to butter up the teacher."

"'Basterds' is one of the most boring movies at Cannes, and one of the most fascinating, totally impersonal as it's totally personal." David Phelps in The Auteurs' Notebook: "There are almost no conceptual ideas, even if there's a few WWII glam shots of girls in red smoking cigarettes and watching movies, edge of hair lit by the projector's flicker. There's not even pastiche beyond retreads of 'Once Upon a Time in the West' and 'Sabotage'; whenever the action starts and the Stax songs come on as they're supposed to in Tarantino movies, Tarantino's camera retreats, the music cuts, and Tarantino moves to more exposition. But out of this dead object a phoenix rises - in flames - with a scene worthy of the German Expressionism the characters spend so much of the film stating their opinions on. It's the image of an actress burning up on a movie screen that's sadder than any of the deaths in the movie; everyone's just a talking image - and a pawn to history one long night that never happened."

"You get the feeling with 'Inglourious Basterds' that Quentin Tarantino desperately wants to put away childish things," writes Dave Calhoun in Time Out London. "Nor is he hiding the fact. Not only is Brad Pitt's closing line of the movie 'This may well be my masterpiece,' but 'Inglourious Basterds' is, a lot of the time, a little more restrained, a little quieter than we've come to expect from films like 'Death Proof' and 'Kill Bill.'... For all its shallow pleasures, there's no getting away from the troubling theme of sadistic revenge at the heart of 'Inglourious Basterds', a theme that's hard to take seriously in such a movie, about such a period of history. Watching Hitler having his head pumped full of bullets might sound like divine justice on paper, but in a film it looks tacky and crude."

"The ratio of talk to action - not gun fights or explosions, but just people doing stuff - in 'Inglourious Basterds' is, generously, nine to one," writes Alison Willmore. "Again and again, characters sit down over drinks (whiskey, champagne, milk), and the stakes may be high, but the conversations are meandering and lengthy, and no matter how clever they may get, they end up defeated by their own pace and their writer's inability to let anything go."

Noting that the film is "composed of a series of long-running vignettes strung together by a slender story thread," Screen's Mike Goodridge finds that the "problem is that no one character or set of characters runs through the entire two-and-a-half hour running time, and, with some of the scenes running up to half an hour each, the thread of the drama is left disjointed and the focus ever-changing."

"Given what the world expects from Quentin Tarantino - the man, the myth, the pastiche-driven movie machine - his latest feature, 'Inglorious Basterds,' stands out for its seemingly low ambition," writes Eric Kohn for indieWIRE. "'Basterds' lacks the crackly excitement of Tarantino's other efforts, mainly because he can't seem to tie the whole package together."

"The film is by no means terrible," the Hollywood Reporter assures us, "but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing."

Kristin Hohenadel talks with Tarantino for the Scotsman. Movie City News picks out this snippet, and little wonder: "Once the Basterds get through with Europe, they could go to the South and do it to the Kluxers in the 50s. I have a half-written prequel ready to go if this movie's a smash." The Hollywood Reporter and Michael Fleming (Variety) interview Tarantino, too.

Anne Thompson's been talking industry folk, critics and others who caught the morning screening and gathering first takes. She was also at the press conference, where Tarantino said, "There's no place like Cannes for filmmakers on the face of the earth. It's Cinema Nirvana during this time here on the Riviera. Cinema matters. It's important. Even when people boo - out of passion - it's not just images glazing over you. All the world film press on the planet earth, America, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, even Canada - that's a country - something about them all being here, you drop the movie - bam! - at once everyone weighs in at the same time... I'm not an American filmmaker, I make movies for the planet earth and Cannes represents that."

"So, Geek to Basterd. Was that a tough transition?" Julian Sancton talks with Samm Levine for Vanity Fair.

"Like the soldiers portrayed on screen, the men of 3 Troop, 10 Commando, a crack unit of the British Army that was almost entirely composed of German-speaking Jewish refugees, were motivated by a hatred of Nazism and were sent on secret missions, often behind enemy lines. But any similarities end there." Jonathan Owen reports for the Independent.

Updates: "Like the loyal German bourgeoisie in 1945, trying to keep patriotically cheerful despite the distant ominous rumblings of Russian tanks, we Tarantino fans have kept loyally optimistic on the Croisette this week," sighs Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian. "We ignored the rumourmongers, the alarmists and defeatists, and insisted that the Master would at the last moment fire a devastating V1 rocket of a movie which would lay waste to his, and our, detractors. But today the full catastrophe of his new film arrived like some colossal armour-plated turkey from hell. The city of our hopes is in flames."

"'Inglourious Basterds' is a violent fairy tale, an increasingly entertaining fantasia in which the history of World War II is wildly reimagined so that the cinema can play the decisive role in destroying the Third Reich," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Quentin Tarantino's long-gestating war saga invests a long-simmering revenge plot with reworkings of innumerable genre conventions, but only fully finds its tonal footing about halfway through, after which it's off to the races. By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that's new for the director."

"It's not Tarantino's ultimate masterpiece, but it's a fantastic film and delivers on the promise of a literate (if not historically accurate) and exciting (if not briskly paced) WWII action drama," writes Matt Dentler at AICN.

"[T]he movie is divided into five energetic chapters that fail to produce a superb book," blogs the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. "It's as talky as the talkiest films in the competition, but Tarantino composes great comedic dialogue that lasts the entire film. His sense of tone is as good as ever.... Not many directors can keep intact a story with as many parenthetical digressions, footnotes, and curlicues as Tarantino does. But the element of surprise never overtook me - despite the finale's being something of a shock.... What the movie doesn't have is Tarantino's usual joyful transcendence. He's working with a large canvas here, and I think the scope of a war film doesn't entirely jibe with the kind of intimate violence he's so good at staging but never bothers with here. It's odd to say, but blood baths and mass slaughter don't become him."

"Unfortunately, it's all downhill after the promising opening scene," writes David Bourgeois for Movieline. "'Inglourious Basterds' felt slight. More time fleshing out characters and less time showcasing stylistic flourishes might have helped make it glorious indeed."

"Casting Mike Myers and pal Eli Roth (director of 'Hostel') is self-indulgent," finds the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "Christoph Waltz though, as a cackling and multi-lingual German colonel, makes for a terrific villain. Long-time fans will enjoy the Morricone-slathered soundtrack, and the allusions to Kubrick and Henri-Georges Clouzot. Cannes normally adores Tarantino (he won the Palme d'Or for 'Pulp Fiction'), but this time? It's not so much inglorious as undistinguished."

8.5 out of 10 from FirstShowing's Alex Billington.

Online viewing tip. More from Xan Brooks.

"Conceptually, this is easily the strangest film he's ever made, as well as the least commercially viable," writes Mike D'Angelo at the AV Club. "In terms of its tone, its rhythms, its (sorry, I have to) mise-en-scène, its moment-to-moment creativity and imagination and inventiveness, this is far and away the most ordinary film Tarantino has ever made.... I was never bored by 'Inglourious Basterds,' I was never terribly excited by it, either. It was just kind of... there, stuck in second gear, functioning like the longest decent B-movie programmer of all time."

"'Inglourious Basterds' might well be QT's [masterpiece] - if by that we mean the fullest expression of a particular artist's worldview," blogs J Hoberman for the Voice. "Perhaps one should call 'Inglourious Basterds' - a sort of World War II spaghetti western, even more drenched in film references than blood - quintessential Tarantino. A little long, a bit too pleased with itself, it's a movie of enthusiastic performances, terrific dialogue, amoral, surprisingly crude, mayhem, and mind-boggling juvenile fantasy." It "proves once again that Quentin Tarantino really knows movies - and that movies may be all he really knows."

"[T]his slice of self-reflexivity feels more like homework than entertainment, preferring hermetic in-jokes over good, tightly crafted fun," writes Stephen Garrett for Time Out New York. "'Inglorious Basterds' is a war epic without any battle scenes, a men-on-a-mission movie without a compellingly executed goal, and a Holocaust film in which all of the Semitic characters wreak far more onscreen mayhem than their persecutors. Unless Tarantino is being deliberately subversive to an extreme, the director just seems blithely neglectful of basic storytelling tropes in order to indulge his auteurist peccadillos."

"[T]his is a fairytale of unusual and thoughtful daring," finds the London Times' James Christopher. "A return at last by Tarantino to his combustible and operatic best."

"When I first heard that Tarantino was moving heaven and earth to get his long-brewed World War Two epicready for this year's Cannes, I didn't realize that was because the cinema-soaked attendees were the movie's only surefire target audience," blogs Tom Carson for GQ. "While I can't imagine what Weinstein and Universal thought they'd be getting for their megabucks, I'm pretty sure 'Inglourious Basterds' isn't it.... My hunch is that 'Inglourious Basterds' is best understood as Tarantino's love letter to Europe - or 'Europe,' a place he learned about from movies as well as one he's grateful to for honoring his own. Beyond that, you might as well know that I a) loved every delirious minute of it and b) can't honestly argue that I think you should feel the same. Its relation to the real World War II is Oz's relationship to Kansas, yet that's just why - c'mon, tell me you didn't see this one coming - it may say more about our jumbled cultural memories of that now distant, endlessly Hollywoodized conflict than Steven Spielberg's high-minded adulation ever will."

Updates, 5/21: "Ultimately, 'Basterds' is just tedious to watch, not necessarily because it's so talky, but because the talkiness is supremely vacant," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "The pleasure you get from the talkiness in 'Pulp Fiction' comes from feeling as though you're spending time in the company of fantastic storytellers. In 'Basterds,' much of the conversation, if you can call it that, is given over to the discussion of language, with the story itself rendered across huge swaths of talk on and around the subject of English as a guise and/or weapon and/or liability on the Third Reich's battlefield for European identity. The rest is expository to an insane degree, with entire sequences devoted to verbal explanation/confirmation of each character's reputation and relation to the Nazis or the Basterds. We're told a lot, and shown very little."

But for Geoffrey Macnab, writing in the Independent, "What really propels the movie, though, isn't the gun-toting but Tarantino's wise-cracking, brilliantly inventive dialogue. It is a film shot in Germany and made in many different languages: everyone speaks in their own tongue. Usually, this would be the surest route to Euro-pudding flatulence. However, Tarantino makes a virtue of what must have appeared an enormous hindrance, moving lithely between languages and generating humour from cultural and linguistic differences between Brits, Germans, Yanks, Italians and the French."

"There are two great scenes in it," writes James Rocchi at MSN, "with one being where what feels like a half-hour-long conversation builds to three seconds of bloody, final violence and the second being the lunatic, operatic finale. In between, there's a lot of digression and chat where you can feel Tarantino's promiscuous love for all his supporting characters pull the film in too many different directions."

Melissa Anderson reports on the "sweaty scrum outside the press-conference room" for Artforum.

"The reason 'Basterds' feels so conventional by his standards is that he keeps telling you what he's about to show you and then showing you precisely that," writes Mike D'Angelo, who's still thinking about this one at the AV Club. "It's as if Mr White had said to Mr Pink, 'Could you believe Mr Blonde? Why the fuck would Joe hire somebody like that? I hear that dude hates cops so much he cuts off their ears with a straight razor while dancing around to 70s bubblegum classics.' Imagine the anticlimactic feeling that would inevitably result when Madsen turns up the radio and reaches into his boot, and you'll have a good sense of why 'Basterds' doesn't quite work."

"'Inglourious Basterds' is larky and fun, but it is rarely thrilling or exciting and it is marred by long stretches of dead space," writes Patrick Z McGavin for Stop Smiling.

Update, 5/22: "More than any of his previous films, this one underscores that while [Tarantino] can be a great writer and sometimes director of individual scenes, it can be difficult for him to assemble those parts into a coherent whole," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Of course 'Inglourious Basterds' is as much an artificial construct as any of Mr Tarantino's other films, what he's called a movie movie. But the Holocaust, which he invokes in the very unfortunate final blowout - complete with the image of shrieking people engulfed in flames in a sealed room - is finally too big for Mr Tarantino's movie-geek enthusiasms."

Updates, 5/23: "First and foremost, 'Inglourious Basterds' is better than 'Death Proof' - but then it would be some feat if it had actually been worse." Tim Hayes in the Critic's Notebook: "This time, Quentin Tarantino's self-indulgence is relatively corralled, thanks to a bunch of voluntary narrative restraints that pretty much force the director to calm down. In 'Death Proof,' Mr Tarantino was in your ear constantly, fidgeting and giggling and nudging you in the ribs. There are whole stretches of 'Basterds' where he shuts up. It must have been an almighty effort."

Anne Thompson talks with Tarantino for the Daily Beast.

"It is a bit oddly shaped - here the 'too long' critique might be right - but the film is boldly conceived and audaciously executed." Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker: "I liked it a lot and am still digesting its heady riffs on 30s and 40s cinema; two friends I was with thought it was Tarantino's best movie."

Update, 5/27: James Rocchi at the Redblog: "Tarantino made a splash because 'Reservoir Dogs' and 'Pulp Fiction' were serious films that looked and felt like movies; 'Inglourious Basterds' is a fun movie, a strange sort of summertime action film that plays out with plenty of talk talk bang bang, but it never tries to be a real film. Tarantino used to feel like a great artist wrapped in a bratty, brash kid; watching 'Inglourious Basterds,' it feels like that wrapping's gotten chokingly, painfully tight."

Update, 5/28: "To these eyes, it seems absurd to condemn Tarantino on the grounds of political incorrectness, given that his film so obviously holds no serious political convictions," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly:

At the same time, this smashingly entertaining movie isn't nearly as superficial as some have claimed. Throughout, Tarantino makes direct and indirect references to the canon of wartime propaganda cinema and the ways in which movies attempt to influence or rewrite the course of history, from German propanda director Leni Riefenstahl and actor Emil Jannings are name-checked, as is French director Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1943 Occupation parable 'Le Corbeau,' while the comically over-the-top Adolph Hitler from the 1949 Stalinist propaganda film 'The Fall of Berlin' seems as much of a model for Tarantino's own Führer as the more obvious influence of Chaplin's Adenoid Hynkel in 'The Great Dictator.' By the end, it's clear that Tarantino is manufacturing his own brand of propaganda movie - one in which Jews and Nazis may battle it out to a fiery finish, but it is cinema that emerges triumphant.

Update, 5/29: "'Basterds' is not a bad film," writes Travis Stevens at Twitch. "But it certainly isn't the film I wanted to see."

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 2009.

[Photo: "Inglourious Basterds," The Weinstein Company, 2009]

Tags: Brad Pitt, Cannes 2009, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino