Inglourious Basterds
dir. Quentin Tarantino
2009

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."
- Karl Marx

"So?"
- Dick Cheney

"Crazy mixed up kid, that Werner."
- Flight Lt. Hendley ("The Scrounger")


Quentin Tarantino has never been justly accused of an excess of insight into the human condition.

In Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, and even the more soulful Jackie Brown and Kill Bill (well, part II anyway), the characters breeze from vignette to nostalgic vignette with the kind of glib wit we all wish we had in the moment.

They live a screenwriter's fantasy, commanding rapt attention for finely tuned and memorized monologues and producing the kind of pitch-perfect putdowns that most real people only think of days after the moment has passed.

Lest any of us think it's easy, Mr. Tarantino takes pains to show that the process can be tedious, repetitive and ultimately rewarding as Reservoir Dog Mr. Orange memorizes his "commode speech," gradually making it his own. Or in the way Jules has clearly enhanced and enhanced Ezekial 25:17 over years of recital to his unique, and almost wholly extra-Biblical, rendition. These characters own their stories, even if the stories aren't true.

In this way, Quentin Tarantino is the opposite part of the other great macho dialogue writer of our time, David Mamet. But where Mamet meticulously sterilizes his films of any hint of ownership on the part of (yech) mere actors, Tarantino constructs elaborate set pieces to highlight and compliment his actors.

He flatters them. He's been called the greatest fan fictionalist of our time. By me. The fun we have watching them is the fun they have being a part of our lives while being apart from our lives.

They are his band, apart.

In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has achieved something I frankly didn't think he had in him (certainly not after the undirected self-indulgence of Death Proof): he has used his fanaticism to say something truly profound about war and narrative.

Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine is a southern-fried Bugs Bunny who lays down the rules of Nazi Hunt Club. And the first rule of Nazi Hunt Club is that you do talk about Nazi Hunt Club. More importantly, you make sure that the Nazis talk about Nazi Hunt Club.

Aldo knows what his weapon is: storytelling. And all good stories start with a premise. In this case, that the Nazis have no humanity.

It is fundamentally permissible to treat Nazi's brutally. And not just the high command or concentration camp guards, but grunts in the field. We revel along with the Basterds at the thought of the permissible, the cathartic violence against these universal villains.

And Tarantino makes it clear that he knows how this appetite for destruction is fed: by movies. By narrative. We know Rick and Ilsa better than we know Goebbels, and not without good reason.

Tarantino has, not surprisingly, made a war movie about war movies. About the power of the war narrative, more than the war itself, to shape our understanding of the world.

He will scalp a Nazi one moment and then invite us into the reverie of a German soldier's fresh fatherhood the next, deftly moving our frame from a cartoon narrative to a universal human story, without skipping tracks or missing a beat.

One can easily imagine Aldo Raine claiming that the Basterds love death more than the Nazis love life, and then queasily imagine the narratives our current enemies rock their children to bed with at night.

This confidence in his subject is what justifies his changing of history.

WWII had a great plot, but it needed a better ending. Hitler is Jaws. Hitler is the shark. The shark doesn't kill himself quietly in a basement. Roy Scheider kills the shark. Everyone knows that.

If Preston Sturges can credit American GIs with an escape perpetrated solely by British officers, then Tarantino can have Eli Roth avenge the holocaust with a blood-chilling thousand yard stare that has as much unflinching truth in it as real history.

Inglourious Basterds depicts history as we frame it, not as it literally was.

We didn't (just) kill Hitler on the field of battle. We killed him in the movies. We killed him in our stories. Even more, we killed his stories. We destroyed his fantasy of the ideal German standing tall astride a defeated world. We didn't just kill a man, we killed an idea.

And we're going to keep on killing it. Sooooooooound good?!?

Three and a half stars. Jason Raine says, when you get home, are you going to take off that uniform?