Shutup Nerd!
Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino returns to the silver screen this time with a World War II film. It’s only been two years since his last film ‘Death Proof.’ That’s a record for shortest hiatus for this notoriously unprolific director. He has only directed six films in a span of eighteen years. Headlining the advertising campaign of this film is Brad Pitt as a the non-Jewish leader of a band of renegade Jewish American soldiers called the ‘Inglourious Basterds’ who specialize in killing Nazis behind enemy lines. The ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is the German high command gave them. Apparently the correct spelling was lost in translation. In truth though the Basterds only comprise a third of the movie’s screen time. The other storylines feature an evil Nazi (redundant isn’t it?) officer known as the ‘Jew Hunter,’ played deliciously by Christopher Waltz, a Jewish girl named Shosanna who has escaped the ‘Jew Hunter’ and is now the owner of a cinema in Paris, and a British spy that goes on a mission to blow up the movie premiere of Goebbels newest cinematic propaganda masterpiece ‘A Nation’s Pride” at the same movie theater. These storylines are each successfully started off in their own separate chapters in the first half of the movie. Then they hang about too long, go off in weird directions, and ultimately fail to intertwine themselves into one effective overall story. Does this movie deserve three stars? Technically no, it’s got a lot of good stuff in it, more than some four star movies. But I feel inclined to give it such a bad rating because I feel it could have been a masterpiece had the Director not been arrogant enough to think that he could break basic rules of pace, suspense, and logic without suspecting that it would hurt the overall picture and confuse and bore the audience. (In other words, it annoyed me on a gut level). Why didn’t he think that? Well I bet it’s because Tarantino thinks that every line of dialogue he writes (typos included) is gold and that people will have an infinite tolerance for self-referential ‘aint I cool’ speech. They don’t. That’s why nobody went to see ‘Death Proof.’ You think the guy would have gotten an ounce of humility from that colossal failure. Now there is nothing wrong with long extended scenes of dialogue itself, Tarantino himself proved that in previous movies and in this one. But they are delicate things and must be cared for in a certain way or else they belong in the deleted scenes menu of a Special Edition DVD set. To fully explain what I mean, I will compare and contrast Tarantino, the masterful movie writer/director, and Tarantino, the stubborn, indulgent prick that has sabotaged every good idea he has had since he made ‘Pulp Fiction.’ Conveniently I can use examples of both of these Tarantinos in this movie alone, although I will also use some examples from what unfortunately looks like will be his one and only masterpiece, ‘Pulp Fiction.’
Let’s take a look at the first chapter in this movie: Once upon a time in Nazi-Occupied France. It opens on a farmhouse in the French countryside. A man is chopping wood when he sees a Nazi car driving up. The Nazis arrive; the officer played by Christopher Waltz gets out. He asks to talk to the man. They are talking in French. Both are very polite. The man invites the officer into the house. Therein he introduces his daughters and offers the officer a glass of wine. The officer noticing that this is a dairy farm asks for a glass of milk instead. One of the daughters pours him a glass. We watch him drink the whole thing. Then the officer suggests the man ask his daughters to leave for the conversation they will have. The man does so and the daughters leave. After they have left the officer asks the man if he knows who he is. The man tells him. The officer asks the man if he knows his nickname. The man says he does. The officer’s nickname is “Jew Hunter.” The officer inquires as to the whereabouts of one of the Jewish families in the county that is unaccounted for. The man says he has heard a rumor that they are in Spain and that the previous Nazi officer assigned to the county had already searched his house. The officer smiles and is very amiable. Then he asks the man if they can switch the conversation from French to English as he is not so good at the latter. They do so. Then the officer goes into the reason why he is called the “Jew Hunter.” He gives a very Anti-Semitic explanation of the difference between the Germans, who are like Hawks, and the Jews, who are like Rats. The man asks if he can smoke his pipe. It is a small corncob pipe. The officer explains that he got his nickname because he was especially good at thinking like a rat and mentions that he thinks the qualities of a rat are quite admirable in some ways. At this moment, after it seems like they have been talking for quite awhile, the camera moves and it is revealed that the man has been hiding the Jewish family under his floorboards the entire time. The officer than remarks that he finds it amazing what the Jews will do when they have abandoned any sense of decency. The man is starting to look nervous. Then the officer asks if he can smoke and takes out a comically large pipe. Not missing a beat the officer tells the man that a person who tells him what he needs to know will not suffer a whit whereas a man who has to make him search will suffer dire consequences to not only himself but his family. At this point the man seems very perturbed. Then the officer asks the man flatly whether he has Jews underneath his floorboards. The man, with a single tear running down his face, quietly admits it. The officer than remarks that since he has not heard any sounds underneath it is quite evident that the Jews do not understand English and asks the man not to give away the fact that three Nazi soldiers are entering the house instead of his three daughters. As the officer, in very polite and charming French, tells the man that he won’t search the house and says goodbye, he motions to his soldiers to shoot at the floor. They do so. All the Jews are shot and killed except one girl who escapes. We are then treated to a very iconic shot of a beautiful girl running for her life across the fields of the French countryside. We are told her name is Shosanna. The chapter ends.
Okay, this scene is a bit of a masterpiece. But why? It’s all about momentum and payoff. We start out very small, just two guys talking. One affable and evil, the other is good and unmoving. We don’t entirely know what there are talking about. The audience is confused on several levels. We don’t know why the officer is talking to this particular person, we aren’t used to cheerful Nazis, we don’t get why all the attention is being paid to milk and pipes, we don’t know quite what the officer is getting about when he’s talking about rats and hawks, and we don’t understand why he’s taking his sweet ass time. Every one of these questions is answered in a dramatic and satisfying way. The officer is talking to the man because he is hiding Jews, he’s talking about rats because he knows the Jews are in the floorboards and he’s an anti-semitic basterd, he’s being affable and charming in French and then switches to English because he gets a kick out of not only killing Jews but playing one last psychological trick on them before doing so (my favorite part. I have never seen language used as a dramatic twist in a movie before, caught me completely by surprise), the milk and pipe is meant to intimidate the man, and he’s taking his sweet ass time because he gets a sociopathic kick out of wearing down the man to the point where he betrays himself. Tarantino could have just written that the Nazi goes into the house, searches the floorboards and kills the Jews. He did it this way because 1) It gives the audience an idea of just how smart and cunning the main bad guy in the story is and 2) the purely evil and sociopathic way he goes about doing it reminds us of how much we really really hate Nazis. Plus this gives us great empathy for the girl who escapes. So now the story has set up the really bad guy and the damsel in distress. And now the audience is chomping at the bit to be introduced to the heroes of our story, which is what the next chapter is all about.
My main point is that extended scenes of dialogue need to add up to something, and that something needs to be a sufficient climax to make the extended dialogue worth listening to. When the scene is exceptionally long, there needs to payoff to the early dialogue and the climax needs to be really big. ‘Pulp Fiction’ is rife with these exceptional scenes. In the first story we treated to carpool talk between two hit men about quarter pounders in Paris. This dialogue pays off in the big climax of that story when one of the hit men brings it back up again before he executes a man in incredibly dramatic fashion as he quotes the bible. In the second story we are treated to extended dialogue about an unseen character, which supposedly gave the boss’s wife a foot massage and was thrown out of a three-story window. The payoff comes after the wife overdoses on one of the hitman’s heroin and the hitman has to somehow save her life or risk being killed by his boss. The story ends with an unforgettable scene in which John Travolta has to pierce her heart with the largest needle you’ve ever seen, which itself is a payoff for a prior discussion about a woman’s fetish with piercing. That woman happens to be in the room and her reaction to it is ‘cool.’ Why? because she and the audience has just witnessed the ultimate piercing. I could go on but suffice to say that every long period of just talking in ‘Pulp Fiction’ is punctuated with an unforgettable scene in which things are revealed, logical choices are made, and incredible shit happens. The two parts are inseparable. They justify each other. You cannot have one without the other, especially if jokes aren’t being told. For example of a movie which is all payoff and no build up I give you Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’ which features a lot of shit happening but lacks the sense of realism that gives the characters any logical motivation. In the end you can admire how Bill gets Killed but you don’t really care whether Bill gets Killed or not. For an example of a movie which is all build up and no payoff I give you Tarantino’s ‘Death Proof’ which features a group of girls talking for so long about completely irrelevant things that when the climatic car chase finally does happen it is underwhelming and quite forgettable.
The first three chapters of ‘Inglourious Basterds’ follows the ‘Pulp Fiction’ model in which a great deal of dialogue is capped off with a satisfying ending whether it’s Brad Pitt carving a Nazi insignia into a Nazi’s head or Shosanna encountering the Nazi who killed her family and is now in charge of security for the movie premiere. Then the movie veers off into a scene a la ‘Death Proof’ about a British spies mission. This is the first mistake because we are treated to yet another substantial chunk of time introducing another character when Tarantino had already done this three times before. The hour mark is not the time for another ten-minute introduction. Anyway the spy is briefed by Mike Myers for a long time (they go into some depth about German cinema) and then sent to rendevous with the Basterds and a German Actress who will give him a briefing about his mission to blow up the cinema. The Actress agrees to meet them in a basement bar in some French city. The scene opens with her playing a card game with a bunch of German soldiers where a person writes a famous person on the card, puts it up to their head, and asks questions to figure out who he is. We see them play out a game of this and are given the background of one of the Nazi soldier’s family. Then the basterds walk in and the Actress excuses herself. Before she can brief them though one of the soldiers asks for her autograph. She does so but the guy hangs around longer. The British spy finally tells him to piss off because, you know, he wants the info for the plan and the soldier is stopping the actress (and the movie!) from doing so. You think that would be the end of it, but the soldier is disturbed by the spy’s accent. This is followed by a lengthy discussion about where the spy would get that particular accent. A German officer joins the discussion after a bit and more words about it are batted around. Finally after some discussion the German actress convinces the officer that the spy is from a German town no one has ever heard from. The officer seemingly satisfied, sits down with them and makes them play another round of the previously mentioned game. At this moment I groaned with boredom because the momentum of the story had effectively killed itself. Not only had the movie gone for I don’t know how long with any payoff or climatic scene, but it had completely forgotten about the several interesting characters it had introduced beforehand. The scene ends with a very forgettable shootout in which basically everyone in the room dies, including the British spy, which the movie had just painstakingly introduced for the last half hour. A great deal of time has passed and very little of what we just sat through was paid off.
The movie ends at the movie premiere with a spectacle al a ‘Kill Bill’ in which we are treated to some very pretty death and destruction that has very little logical buildup to it. What happens is that the ‘Basterds’ go ahead with the British spy’s mission without him even though they speak no German and they’ve apparently lost half of their band (no explanation is given for the absence of about half of the basterds from the second half of the movie). They get into the premiere as the Italian escorts of the German Actress. They’re plan is laughably shallow. None of the basterds know Italian and Brad Pitt doesn’t even bother to change his thick hillbilly accent. Alongside their plot to blow up the theater is Shosanna’s plan to burn the entire place down. Christopher Waltz happens to be the Nazi in charge of security, an especially important job since the German high command is present at the premiere. You would think with a set up like that we would see a great battle of strategy or some suspense as to how the entire thing would play out. Too bad, the Nazis lose so easily it’s like watching a Chuck Norris movie. Now mind you I don’t give a damn about historical accuracy and take a good deal of pleasure out of watching Nazis die horrible deaths. but to me, watching battles in movies is like watching sports on TV. I would rather see my favorite football team win it in overtime than to see them trounce the opposing team by 50-0. It is just far more enjoyable.
The thing is, Tarantino didn’t have any time to put much thought into the climatic scene because he had already wasted so much time with the previous storyline about the British spy that didn’t go anywhere. What he should have done is cut the British spy out all together and focused in depth on a Dirty Dozen style plan that would have put to use the entire squad of basterds (he only uses four in the movie). He also could have connected the basterds and the Shossana storylines somehow, something that didn’t happen in the movie. Shossana doesn’t even get a revenge scene with Waltz at the end that pays off her two previous very suspenseful encounters with him. And wouldn’t it have been cool if Tarantino had Hitler pick a fight with Brad Pitt and had them duel it out with swords and fists. I’m just saying.
Another thing I have to mention is that Tarantino’s nerdy love for movies is creeping into his films in disturbing ways. He even stops the plot at one point to have an unseen narrator explain to us how some type of film stock is especially flammable. Also the idea that Jewish Vengeance would take place in a movie theater (Because you know there’s a lot of Jews in Hollywood) only makes sense if you don’t notice the more obvious motivation, namely that Tarantino probably had an orgasm when he found a way to put a movie theater into his film. That way he could have the characters drop names from antiquated and long forgotten movies! The movie ends with a line that would only work if you agreed with it. I don’t and I think it’s perhaps the most arrogant ‘look at me,’ line I’ve ever witnessed in a movie.
Roger Ebert has declared this the best movie of the year and has said that a person needs to watch it several times to get its greatness. I will see it again because I admire and respect Roger Ebert. But I reserve the right to think of movies that need to be seen twice the same way I think of jokes that need to be explained. Badly told.
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