Review of the film Inglorious Basterds

The Quentin Tarantino film Inglorious Basterds deserves to be seen multiple times. The first instance it is witnessed, there isn’t much that can be made of what has transpired, other than it was highly entertaining. This is a piece that people will talk about, and it will be brought up again and again in the future. After watching Basterds, there is certainly no forgetting it was experienced.

It won’t be surprising in a Tarantino film but the level of graphic violence can be disturbing, even nauseating. This is the director unrestrained, not that he’s ever been very restrained in the first place. Now, though, he is creating historical fiction of the ultimate entertaining nature. Genres are mixed, and there is an undercurrent of significance with this one:  People may take the violent manner of the crime underworld—the one Tarantino has shown us before—lightly, but very few would take lightly in the same way the horror of World War II.

            Be assured, however, this is a rousing revenge story with strong and vivid characters, larger than life, bordering on satirical. Beginning in Nazi-occupied France, viewers meet those who hunt the Jews and their leader, Col. Hanz Landa played with finesse and gravitas by Christoph Waltz. He is at once at terrifying character—intensely dubious, mannered, witty and intelligent—and he is almost besmirched by what he does and at those who hide from him in vain. Under the floorboards of the idyllic country house that his patrol visits is his quarry, and, though for a time they remain hidden, it is obvious to all that they will be revealed and captured. Their heads already belong to him. Col. Landa is only toying with them and the sincere and frightened homeowner he slowly questions with increasing tension. Upon the eventual unveiling of the Jewish family, there are many shots fired, but through the doorway viewers glimpse a young woman escaping, sprinting in her skirts towards the horizon. Col Landa allows her to disappear over the hill.

Then there are the Nazi hunters, the Basterds, led by Brad Pitt’s American Southern-style Lt. Aldo Raine. These men strive to each bring in 100 Nazi scalps. It is with relish that they commit their acts and their visages are notorious among the population that they terrorize. Even if a Nazi under their capture isn’t immediately recollecting of these men, he will be so soon enough. The weapons of death the band of hunters use become the red letter for their captives—there is a flicker of recognition, just before their demise.

Last, there is Shosanna played by Melanie Laurent. She is a beautiful proprietress of a movie theater in Nazi-occupied France. She works feverishly to secure the premiere screening of the newest Nazi propaganda film and the attendance of the highest-ranking members of the party. Moving towards this goal, she strides cautiously but diligently through danger and suspicion. Using her wiles and personal strength to navigate this war-ravaged landscape, at moments of great peril she is nearly trembling with her fear and her desire.

In Basterds, these three characters build the story Tarantino wishes to tell. They inhabit a universe at once similar but then again, much grander and artful than our own. The ensuing events are fictional and not meant to be understood as otherwise. Despite the realization that this experience is meant to be so, this movie produces in me a strange reaction. It’s highly engaging and well done, well acted and produced. But there is a problem in my conscience. The Nazis were horrible; I know this—the majority is in agreement. The violence they committed against the Jewish people and the rest of the world was unspeakable and beyond comprehension. And there is something to be said for bloody revenge—there is something so satisfying in seeing Tarantino’s Nazi hunters dispensing with their targets, especially in the artful manner in which these executions are carried out. The notion that many of the hunters are Jews only makes the deserved carnage more pleasingly entertaining.

            However, this is where I begin to question my and so many others’ satisfaction. Perhaps I want to be too much of a pacifist. Is it wrong to wish that atrocities are not visited upon those who commit atrocious acts as well? It seems like this film’s premise is falling into the notion that violence in revenge is excusable. But my bleeding heart says that this seems like a cycle—that violence begets violence, and killing one, no matter what acts that one has perpetrated, will not stop the killing of others. There should have been no atrocity in the first place. What the Nazis did was wrong; what they did should never have been done. Can’t we go back to that—the first acts should have been prevented, stopped by those people who had the power to do so, right? I guess I must simply remind myself of the fictional nature of the story.

In the meantime, Tarantino makes the ultimate coup of history, doing that on film what has only been discussed infinitely by so many. His is a lingering achievement of verve and sly intent. I only wish I weren’t so troubled by my enjoyment in the carnage of the affair. This is one I will revisit.

Review of the film Winter's Bone

 A rural sheriff arrives. He explains the situation slowly and does not elaborate. A 17 year old girl listens; she already knows what she has to do. Behind her is the backwoods cabin she lives in with her two younger siblings and catatonic mother. She takes care of them, makes sure they are provided for and healthy, and the weight of that responsibility leans on her shoulders as she faces the sheriff. “I’ll find him,” she says in a quiet but certain manner.

This scene begins the Debra Granik directed film Winter’s Bone. The person that the 17 year old girl, Ree, must find is her father. He has disappeared and, having put the house up as collateral for bond, he must be found. If he is not, Ree and her family will be turned out of their home and surely separated. Her father was a meth cooker; his whereabouts have been unknown to the family for quite some time. There have been rumors that he is dead; Ree must then prove this if it is indeed true.

So a young woman sets out with unnerving persistence to find her father—whether it be a man alive or his body to substitute. Ree moves through a treacherous landscape among the meth-ravaged Ozarks territory.  This is land that is harsh in many respects—the unkind weather, the poor economy, the mistrustful and secretive nature of the people. Immediately she is marked with suspicion by those she pushes with questions. It is clear that there is a trail to follow, but it is one that all wish to keep secret. Ree continues with daring aptitude to interrogate those she suspects know her father’s present or final location. The threat of violence is overwhelming and imminent as she navigates through this mystery. It looms in the space between people’s words and right in front of their stares. It lurks in the angle at which a woman turns in the doorway or the way a man cocks the bend of his elbow. The culture of the drug trade touches everyone around, even those who want nothing to do with it.

This film gives viewers a glimpse of a world that some among us inhabit—steering aggressively around the law is the everyday nature of surviving. This reality of the drug trade has surrounded this place, but Ree strides through it with the unmovable faith that people will do the right thing if one appeals to their humanity. Director Granik is able to focus on this humanity and thus avoid the clichés that could be so easily depicted in this kind of story. The film does not look down on these characters but inhabits the landscape with them. Most importantly, it gives us an unflinching and intelligent look at a young woman who is capable and brave, a woman of integrity we are unlikely to forget.

Review of the film Walkabout

Australia has a dirty history, much like every country on this earth, but it is just as true and filthy as those. The clean and beautiful lines of the buildings and roadways that snake around the perimeter of that island continent were not always present; their history is new and built on the soil of an older culture. Move inland from these glittering cities on the cusp of the sea and one will find traces of that older culture—one of the oldest on the planet. One sees the outback, an immense stretch of landscape that has shaped that culture and will continue to shape it beyond the time that those gleaming structures of the cities possess. Director Nicholas Roeg places us in this landscape, along with its sordid history, as simply as opening a beautiful picture book.           

The film opens on a brick wall, ordinary and weathered. The camera pans to the side and reveals a vast expanse of desert. Walkabout is a dream—events happen out of order, connect but do not to one another, people speak but others cannot hear the words, moments of great beauty are intercut with grotesquerie, things which have never been expressed are understood and then forgotten, great swaths of time lapse but then circle back on themselves. Somewhere there is a story, somewhere there is a message—we seem to always have faith in that no matter what—but it is muddled by the illusive nature of the telling.

            Like that brick wall, it begins as a simple story—two white children of middle class background and nature lost in the wild outback desert. They are found and saved from exposure by a young Aboriginal boy who is on a “walkabout.” This is a custom of many of the Aboriginal tribes where male youths must go out into the wilderness and survive for six months on their own before being declared men. He offers them water and food, and they follow him through the landscape and a series of adventures until finally coming to something that they recognize as civilization. It is, at first, like a children’s adventure tale with the animals of the land watching them serenely as they pass by on their journey.
            However, there is an intense undercurrent of sentiments and ideas that go much deeper than that simple story. This sense of deeper significance continues as the Aboriginal boy leads the two white children through the outback, foraging for what they need to survive. As he stalks and kills animals for food, there are flashes of a butcher chopping at a carcass, filleting the meat for sale and consumption. Traveling through a rocky outcropping near the base of some foothills, the three children pass by so closely to a house that it is just a ridge that blocks their view and knowledge of it, though we find that the Aboriginal boy is aware of its existence. It is never made truly clear why he did not show them that small outcropping of civilization.
            There is an absence of clear communication between the girl and the Aboriginal boy. He speaks to her in his language, rattling off words in her direction, following her around the cabin they come to near the end of the story. He seems infinitely interested in her, but this interest does not appear to be reciprocated. As she looks through an old collection of photos belonging to those who once lived in the house, she cries quietly. It looks as if she is only interested in the life that she inhabited before and not in this new landscape that she has been led through. This is an adventure that she has experienced; it was not all unpleasant, but now she is ready to return to the city. The Aboriginal boy’s courtly advances fall to her backside as she continually turns from him. There will be no communion between the two.
            What made the Aboriginal boy think that this was a possibility? Perhaps something she did made him believe it, a smile or posture, perhaps he dreamed it, imagined it as they wandered through the outback together. The concluding lines of the story seem deeply pessimistic. But one must understand that time in the Aboriginal world is not viewed in the same straight linear manner as in the world of the cities.  And the film honors this in many of its scenes. Viewers are not sure if they every truly occurred, but there are images that linger from the film which give the impression of that possibility the Aboriginal boy may have felt. They are indelible, and when we last see the girl as a young woman later in her life, we are certain that she cannot forget them either, whether dreamed or realized.