It’s a fool’s errand to criticize Quentin Tarantino for historical inaccuracy or chronic amorality. Everybody knows his movies are inspired by and respond to other movies, not real life.
So there’s no percentage in railing against Inglourious Basterds as blathering, self-indulgent drivel that (among many examples of its creator’s hubris) leaves uneducated moviegoers with an erroneous perception of where and how Adolf Hitler met his end.
Nor is there much value in pointing out that the thorny practical and philosophical question of Jewish revenge — powerfully addressed in Ed Zwick’s recent fact-based World War II film Defiance and debated at length in Munich, Steven Spielberg’s portrayal of the Mossad’s retaliation for the massacre at the 1972 Olympics — is played here strictly for comic-book grins and groans.
Inglourious Basterds is only entertainment, after all, and the only responsibility of entertainment is to entertain. Or so some would argue.
In fact, Tarantino’s simple-minded fantasy runs embarrassingly counter to the prevailing international direction of World War II and Holocaust films. The further we get from “the good war” and the evil genocide, the more ambiguous and nuanced the movies become.
Contrast the teenage heroine of The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) — the most innocent victim imaginable — with the unscrupulous Jewish criminal deported to the camps in The Counterfeiters (2007). The compromised and conflicted Resistance operatives in the Dutch film Black Book (2006) and the new Danish film Flame & Citron, meanwhile, are light years away from the noble freedom fighter Victor Laszlo in Casablanca (1942).
Ah, but here comes Tarantino, who previously turned hard-boiled armed robbers and ice-cold hit men into charming, smooth-talking icons. He employs the same alchemy with a ruthless Gestapo officer using his patented approach: Pages and pages and pages of amusingly pointless dialogue.
Inglourious Basterds, which opens everywhere Friday, August 21, runs on two slender tracks. Col. Hans Landa (nicely played by Christoph Waltz), a cunning Nazi charged with finding and eliminating the Jews of France, spends the movie’s first 20 minutes politely interviewing a dairy farmer about an unaccounted-for Jewish family, and drinking the man’s milk.
Meanwhile, Lt. Aldo Raine (an homage to war-film standby Aldo Ray, and played by a drawling Brad Pitt) assembles a group of Jewish GIs whose mission is to spread terror through the Nazi ranks. They do such a good job that frightened rumors spread all the way to the Führer that the American platoon includes a Golem.
Raine and Landa will eventually, inevitably, meet at a Parisian cinema owned by a Jewish woman whose family was murdered by Landa’s men. There’s a bit more to the plot, but not 152 minutes’ worth (including the credits), which is what Tarantino arrogantly asks of his audience. (Prospective ticket buyers may also want to be advised of the underlying streak of sadism that includes, but is not limited to, violence against women.)
To give Tarantino his due, he is a sufficiently talented writer to make us care what happens to characters that are one-dimensional cardboard cutouts. That’s no mean feat, but at the same time nobody grows or changes in a Tarantino movie — they just play out their destiny, which sometimes involves catching a few unexpected bullets.
Tarantino’s riff on Nazis and Jews may amuse and satisfy less mature audiences. For those with a deeper and fuller understanding of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, particularly one gleaned from sources other than action movies, it is shockingly superficial.
(Almost) based on a true story
