Monday, Aug. 24, 2009

Taratino's writing, not violence, carries 'Basterds'

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

If cutting movie trailers is an art, whoever put together the one for Inglourious Basterds must have ordered his training off the back of a matchbook cover.

-- Times, trailer, theaters.

The trailer promises so much Nazi killing that if you tried to list all the Nazis they killed it would take longer than World War II itself, which is actually only half as long as the average Quentin Tarantino film. Those ads suggest so much murder, mayhem, and ultra-grisly torture that after the Nazis died their ghosts would still be so scared the shipping industry would never run out of packing peanuts again.

Not quite how Tarantino's latest plays out. Brad Pitt bellowing about wearing bracelets of shapely ubermensch ears takes a chunk of the run time, yeah, but I'm afraid the reality doesn't match up with the expectations (this is why I tell every girl I date that my last relationship was with a plastic Chewbacca doll). Fortunately, the vast portions of Inglourious Basterds the trailers pretend don't exist are as good, if different, than the wholesale slaughter of history's greatest villains.

In Nazi-occupied Paris, German war hero Daniel Bruhl is the star and subject of an upcoming propaganda film. His exploits aren't enough to impress cinema owner Melanie Laurent, so he shoots for a more dramatic gesture: getting his premiere shifted to her theater.

Many of Germany's highest leaders will attend the premiere, drawing the attention of Brad Pitt, leader of an elite Nazi-stomping Jewish commando squad. But Laurent's no friend of the invaders herself — three years ago, Nazi soldiers slaughtered her family — and with so many of them under her roof, she may be able to take revenge for herself.

Is that revenge violent? C'mon, Tarantino couldn't retell the Nativity without the Three Wise Men parachuting through the ceiling with knives in their teeth bearing gifts of grenades, fully automatic rifles, and murder. If Inglourious Basterds' scalpings don't get you, the baseball bat beating or the dizzying kinetic gunfire just might.

Yet that violence is much rarer than the trailers would have you believe. Instead, it's the threat of violence that takes center stage. The characters are either infiltrating enemy lines or, in the case of brilliant SS investigator Christoph Waltz, actively trying to ferret those infiltrators out, resulting in slow-burning games of cat and mouse that build the tension until it almost aches. Right around the point it gets to be too much — sometimes, maybe, a couple minutes too long — the scene combusts in a few seconds of hideous and disturbingly funny brutality. When it finally arrives, this is violence with a capital violent.

Between those moments (i.e. the ones we came to see), it works because the dialogue is so damn good. Tarantino's always been a master of that: his writing is so cool it's almost lame. I say that because he's inspired so many crappy filmmakers to make so many crappy heist movies that if our ape-man descendants some day try to learn about us through our cinema, then they'll think we spent our entire society shooting each other and having arguments with our partner about which pop songs changed our lives.

This is a WWII movie, not a crime caper, so Tarantino can't lean on his cool here. Doesn't matter. This time, his dialogue loses the breezy swagger in favor of a cunning logic brimming with malice and weird humor.

It's good to see the dude get out of his comfort zone, because although here, as always, he takes his time getting to the point, once he does, it always pays off. Once those threads all tie together, they flame up in an explosive ending so anarchic and audacious and insane it's like it's reaching right down into your guts and giving them a stir. The moods and images of Inglourious Basterds are the kind to stick to your memory like melted candy in your purse.

Grade: A-