Say what you will about Quentin Tarantino, but the motormouthed filmmaker loves him some cinema. All of it, his monomaniacal obsession extends to movies, films, popcorn flicks, art films, chop-socky, exploitation, low-art, high-art, the dude is a genre fetishist and he absorbs and imbibes all of it (warning, there will be small spoilers throughout).
So the good thing about “Inglorious Bastards” (“Inglourious Basterds” sic) for us and the people who generally enjoy the same kinds of films we do, is that it kind of (or could if done right) leaves behind his love for B-movies and trash cinema, which we never really cared for. But there’s still a movieness to Quentin’s director, execution and tone that could ruin a lot of this, partly brilliant script. And that’s the bad part. Another loveletter to movies, sometimes QT’s homagistic desires are his defeasance. There might be no grindhouse B-movie shlock, but there’s still a lot of corny WWII movies to draw from (like the one it gets its title from), so the potential for reverential fromage and now-tired referential artifice is everywhere.
Broken up into five segments (but not really five acts) the film is part “Hogan’s Heroes” meets “The Great Escape,” meets “The Guns of Navarone,” with some potential “Saving Pvt. Ryan” realism if he can tone down some of his heightened self-aware touch. And then as many have noted, there’s a large nod to “Cinema Paradiso” in of itself a paean to movies and the joys they bring (it’s all shot in “French New Wave Black And White; the potential nods to lush and regal German Cinema ala Visconti’s “The Damned,” Lubitsch and Max Ophüls could be a nice touch if they actually pan out).
While a little over-the-top and unrealistic at times (it is a Quentin Tarantino script after all), much of the script is extremely canny, delicious and masterfully mapped out; at best it recalls some of the humor and multi-layered luminosity of “Pulp Fiction” without having to resort to to the nonlinear cut and paste technique. Essentially, it’s three stories on a collision course with one another in a small French cinematheque – the American Army platoon of eight Jewish soldiers out for bloody revenge, the conniving and cunning Nazi soldiers and the cinema curating couple that run the theater planning their own retribution. Marion Cotillard must be cast in this thing as the cinema loving, Jewess escapee Shoshanna, but we might be giving QT too much credit here (a big casting piece is coming in a moment).
As per usual, the script takes its damn time and it’s only after a seemingly excessively long opening, do we understand the ingenuity of what’s unfolding. The flashbacks – and there are many – are a little excessive and gratuitous, but some of them are too fun and delectable to dislike (especially the Donny Donowitz backstory).
The problem with ‘Basterds’ is that it tends to shit the bed in the third act. The story has been three lit wicks burning down to their explosive conclusion, but near the end it’s like someone hit a jarring fast-forward and things start to unravel. While it’s been semi-implausible throughout, it’s never quite ridiculous (give or take a few skin carving moments), but it’s the last 20 pages that threw our suspension of disbelief out the window. Characters start behaving unlike themselves (especially the smitten German actor Fredrick Zoller’s whose antithetical and desperate last measures seem like a device for last-minute plot obstacles rather than genuine character behavior), a fire is lit (figuratively and literally and the script jumps forward two gears and the moviesness of it all starts to take over (we also don’t buy a last minute defection). It’s as if Quentin tried to restrain himself throughout bringing the pot to a simmering boil, but when the meal started to burn the only way to salvage it was to serve it in gigantic dollops.
There’s genius throughout to be sure, but it remains to be seen if QT can carry it through to the troublesome last few pages (if he can, one will surely be able to forgive some of it regardless). Let’s not too hard here. Much of “Inglorious Bastards” is masterful and the framework is fantastic. It’s thrilling and an immensely enjoyable to read, but it’s not without the aforementioned flaws. Anyone who doubted the authenticity of the script is off their rocker though. Not because it’s QT’s voice so much as it is because not just any joe on the street has this much of a proficient command of plot act structure (he might be his own worst enemy, but Tarantino knows the vernacular and architecture of a screenplay forwards and backwards).
The exciting prospect of this film – if it indeed comes to fruition as planned – is the casting potentials (which are coming in a second). Outside of Brad Pitt and the Basterds, much of the film should and must (in order to execute it correctly) be played by genuine German and French actors who can speak the language which gives us the exciting opportunity to see many modern, European actors in the film and not name brand Americans.
This is non-negotiable. Every German Nazi in the film speaks fluent German and decent to excellent French (and a large percentage of the film plays out in English subtitles, foreign film antagonists take note). Every French character in the film obviously speaks immaculate francais, there will be no room here to cast the Cate Blanchett’s in roles as stentorian dominatrix’s with a bad accent (at least, their really shouldn’t be). This element of the film could save it and is what made it feel much more realistic to us than say, the affected “Kill Bill” series.
Overall, we’re hoping this sticks to the more realistic side of WWII films rather than the campiness of “Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS,” but QT’s growing predilection for shlock these days worries us they’ll be more wink-wink mawkishness than true grit bravado.