Last week, my family and I arrived home from our Christmas travels and
were soon greeted with a large box of goodies from my brother Benjamin
in Japan. Among the items specifically addressed to me were some
Japanese chocolate, Pocky (long cracker sticks dipped in chocolate or,
my favorite, strawberry icing), a kimono and Quentin Tarantino’s latest
flick. Though I claim to be a movie buff, my exposure to Tarantino thus
far has been pretty much limited to his guest appearances on American Idol; I suspect that Benjamin wanted to help me close a rather glaring gap in my cinematic experience.
My other brother, Nathan, had caught the movie in the theater and given
it a glowing recommendation, as well as a genteel pseudonym: Inglourious Fellows.
Not being one to indulge in vulgarities myself, even of the curiously
misspelled kind, I’ve followed his lead; you need only glance up at the
product listing to see the word I’m replacing. Considering the rather
startling title, I must say I expected more pervasive profanity; to be
sure, there’s enough of it to merit an R rating purely on the grounds of
language, but most of it comes from one character - the same character
responsible for a majority of the violence we see on-screen.
That would be Lt. Aldo Raine, played with a hefty helping of John Wayne-style swagger by Brad Pitt.
A Tennessee-raised vigilante, he has gathered an elite team of
Jewish-American soldiers, along with a German who had taken to killing
his fellow soldiers on his own before being recruited. Their task?
Killing Nazis. And, in a nod to Aldo’s Apache heritage, scalping them.
They descend upon Nazi encampments with swift brutality, leaving behind a
horrific trail of carnage, as well as a scarred survivor to spread news
of their exploits. There were about half a dozen scenes in the film
that inspired in me a sudden desire to sneak out to the kitchen for a
snack; just the audio was enough to tell me how violent those sequences
became.
Pitt plays a larger-than-life character whose bravado
and outrageous twang serve to make him a comical figure, even as he
leads bloodthirsty offenses against his targets. Most of his dialogue
renders his scenes parodies of the old spaghetti westerns, an impression
amplified by the terrific score and Robert Richardson’s sun-drenched
cinematography. This is a movie that is often beautiful to behold, when
somebody isn’t getting bashed with a baseball bat or riddled with
bullets. And at times, it’s goofily idiosyncratic, as when Samuel L.
Jackson randomly provides expository narration in two scenes. The
over-the-top quality extends to Adolf Hitler (Martin Wuttke), who spends
most of his scenes in some degree of panicked hysterics over the
Fellows’ grisly accomplishments, and each of the British officials who
appears in a scene featuring Mike Myers as a general.
Elsewhere in the film, however, the tone is much more dramatic. A
parallel storyline involves a lovely young woman named Emmanuelle
(Melanie Laurent), who we know to be Shosanna, the sole survivor of a
vicious attack on her Jewish family, who had been in hiding. Now the
proprietress of a Parisian cinema, she attracts the affections of Pvt.
Fredrick Zoller, a young hero of the Third Reich who, in a three-day
span, killed nearly three hundred Allies from his vantage point in a
bell tower and now is the star of a movie chronicling the event. In
everyday life, he doesn’t seem much like a killing machine, just a kid
with a powerful crush. Despite the dangers of failing to comply with
Nazi desires, Shosanna makes little secret of her contempt for this man.
Nonetheless, when he entreats his boss - Hitler’s right-hand man,
Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) - to hold the film premiere at her
theater, she plays along, sensing a rare opportunity. Laurent brings the
character to life with poise, spirit and her own brand of bitterness
brewed into revenge.
The most impressive performance of the
film, however, belongs to Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa, the
Nazi official known as “the Jew Hunter”. While probably ninety percent
of his dialogue throughout the film is courteous, soft-spoken and
altogether charming, it’s evident from the instant we meet him that this
is a very dangerous man. Tension fills any room the moment he enters,
and I wouldn’t be surprised if his riveting screen presence earned him a
spot among the Best Supporting Actor nominees this year. I compare him
to LOST‘s
Michael Emerson, and anyone who has read my reviews of the past four
seasons will know what a high compliment I’m paying to Waltz. He is
truly terrifying. I was also extremely impressed with Denis Menochet as
the French farmer with whom he shares the beautifully shot opening
scene, which is as intense as it is lengthy. With a sparseness of
dialogue comparable to what Jude Law had to work with in Cold Mountain, Menochet conveys volumes about his situation and the nature of the man who has come to pay him a visit.
Tarantino seems to have carved out a niche for himself when it comes to
graphic movie violence. There are those who get a charge out of that
sort of thing; I am not among them. Nonetheless, while I bemoan the
brutality on both sides, I can’t deny that this is a film that is
exceptionally well-produced, with outstanding acting and a plot that is
strangely compelling despite the total departure from historical
accuracy. I probably won’t go out of my way to seek out Tarantino’s
other movies, but Inglourious Fellows can join Hot Fuzz, No Country For Old Men and In Bruges on the list of Movies Erin Probably Shouldn’t Have Liked But Mostly Did. Not a bad way to kick off another movie-watching year.
No comments:
Post a Comment