Review: Inglorious Basterds (2009)

* * * 1/2
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Mélanie Laurent

Tarantino’s latest is a glorious mess of a movie that plays entirely by its own rules. It isn’t a film of any great depth, but as glossy summer entertainment goes, I don’t know that you can do much better than this one. It’s a violent, darkly comic, beautiful looking film that occasionally goes off the rails but ultimately makes for a great time at the movies.

The film begins like a western, immediately evoking early scenes from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West (it begins, in fact, with the words “Once upon a time... in Nazi occupied France”). In the distance a dairy farmer sees the SS coming down the long dirt road. He sends one of his daughters to get water so that he can wash up. They wait anxiously as the Germans take their time and eventually the farmer finds himself sitting at his table with Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz in a disarmingly and sinisterly joyful performance), who coaxes him into revealing the whereabouts of the Drefyus family, whom he has been hiding. The family is slaughtered save for Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), whom Landa allows to escape and who lives for years by hiding in plain sight in Paris.

Elsewhere a group of Jewish soldiers, mostly American, have been assembled under the command of Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) for the purpose of killing Nazis. Dropped into occupied France in 1941, the group quickly gains a reputation for brutality and the Nazi high command becomes increasingly desperate to catch them. By 1944 the group is in league with British film critic turned soldier Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and German film star/spy Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) in a plot to take out some of the major Nazis at a Paris film premiere. The premiere, as it happens, will take place at a theatre which Shosanna has inherited and she has a plan of her own to kill some Nazis.

The film boasts a wealth of characters with the typical Tarantino flair. One of the things I love about Tarantino’s films in general is that you never walk away from one thinking about that one really memorable character because there are always about a dozen really memorable characters and the casting is always perfect. I went into the film with a bit of trepidation regarding Pitt because the trailers made it look like he was really hamming it up. As it turns out he is hamming it up, but it works well with the overall, over the top feel of the film and I really can’t imagine the character being played any other way or by any other actor. However, as good as Pitt is and as extraordinary as Waltz – whose performance has been garnering the most attention – is, the real standout for me was Laurent, whose Shosanna is the heart of the story. Her performance, which is very understated and grounded, is on the other end of the spectrum from Pitt’s, giving the film a nice feeling of balance.

The film has been accused by some of trivializing World War II in general and the Holocaust specifically because there is nary a mention of The Final Solution. I don’t really think this accusation is fair because, as anyone who has seen the movie can tell you, the war as we know it isn’t really the war being dealt with in this film. Inglorious Basterds exists outside of history and in an alternate reality. Besides which, any direct dealing with the Holocaust wouldn’t fit with the film’s overall tone, which is darkly comedic. One of my favourite shots occurs during a scene when Hitler (Martin Wuttke) rails at his officers to find the Basterds. In the background there's painter creating a giant Hitler painting who keeps turning to study him and capture some nuance of his person. As with all Tarantino’s films, the beauty is in the smaller details.

If there is an underlying socio-political meaning to the film, I would argue that it doesn’t have to do with the darkness of the human soul but rather with the power of film itself. Film was an invaluable medium for Hitler and the Nazis, particularly the propaganda films directed by Leni Riefenstahl, who gets a few mentions here. The plot conceived by Shosanna involves locking the top Nazi brass in the theatre and then setting her stock of nitrate film prints on fire. Film, which helped give birth to the Nazi movement, is now tasked with being an agent of its destruction and thus Inglorious Basterds might be read as working to reclaim the medium from some of its worst abusers.

By and large, the film really worked for me, although there are two things that didn’t. First is the film’s use of David Bowie’s song “Cat People,” which I found jarring and really took me out of the movie, although this anachronism perhaps eases the way for the grand inaccuracy of the film’s finale. The second thing has to do with the film within the film. Much of Basterds is subtitled because the German characters speak German and the French characters speak French rather than falling back on the old movie standard of having characters speak accented English. Yet, in spite of this, the German propaganda film within the film is in English. That really bugged me. That being said, however, these are very small quibbles with a film that is overall incredibly entertaining.

Canadian Film Review: Days of Darkness (2007)

* * * *
Director: Denys Arcand
Starring: Marc Lebreche, Diane Kruger

It would be easy to call Days of Darkness an American Beauty retread, as Denys Arcand’s film centers on an unhappy suburbanite who is disrespected by his children and married to a woman (a realtor, no less) who has no interest in him sexually or otherwise, and who has a terrifically active fantasy life which threatens to usurp his real life in importance. The comparisons come easily and criticism based on those comparisons are, to an extent, valid. However, to dismiss the film so easily would mean missing the absolute charm of this very intelligent and very funny film.

Jean-Marc (Marc Labreche) is a middle-aged civil servant who hates his job, is unhappily married and ignored by his two daughters, helpless in the face of his mother’s terminal illness, and spends most of his day escaping into fantasies, most of which involve a revolving cast of women in various states of undress. However, his fantasies aren’t solely about scantily clad women who find him irresistible; he also fantasizes about becoming somebody, writing a book or being elected into office – anything different from his actual job. Jean-Marc uses his fantasies just to get through his days, but soon these aren’t enough: His wife (Sylvie Leonard) leaves him to run off with her boss to Toronto, his mother dies, he walks out of his job and crashes his car. It’s time for him to make a change, to start living life outside his head, and set himself on a path towards happiness.

The world in which Jean-Marc lives is like our own but slightly exaggerated, making for situations and problems which can seem both far fetched and frighteningly feasible at the same time. He works for the government, sitting behind a desk as various people come to him seeking help for problems that he has no ability to solve. One man lost his legs when a street lamp fell on him and now the government expects him to pay half the cost of putting up a new one. A woman’s husband is taken away by the police, suspected of being a terrorist simply because he’s Arab. There’s nothing Jean-Marc can do; his best suggestion is that she try to become friends with a celebrity and thereby bring enough publicity to the situation to embarrass the government into letting her husband go. Despite the fact that no one is ever actually helped by the ministry, there’s always a long line-up downstairs, one which often becomes unmovable due to the fact that the employees are constantly being taken away from their work to attend meetings to boost morale or find ways to achieve greater harmony between yin and yang in the office set-up.

There are a lot of really great sequences in the film, but I think my favourite involves Jean-Marc’s attempt at speed dating. After meeting with several women who dismiss him immediately for various reasons including the fact that he’s had a vasectomy, doesn’t work out, and drives a Hyundai, he finally meets a woman who has as rich a fantasy life as his own (two words: medieval festival). However, she turns out to be a little too into her fantasy world, reaffirming for him that a little bit of reality can go a long way.

The central performance by Labreche is engaging and, to various degrees, relatable and there are fine supporting performances by the actresses playing the myriad women in his life, including Diane Kruger, who appears as his go-to fantasy woman. Comparisons to American Beauty are inescapable but, for me, this is the more resonant film. I've always been a little put off by the casual misogyny of Sam Mendes' film, while this one is self-aware enough to be able to diffuse those "iffy" elements by consigning them to the realm of fantasy and making it clear that these fantasies, rather than empowering Jean-Marc, simply act as crutches and hold him back.