Inglourious Basterds

Lots of people love INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. They say that it’s one of Tarantino’s best films. They say it’s one of the best movies of the year.

It’s the first Tarantino film to really bother me.

The inconsistent tone, bouncing between excruciating suspense and neo-‘70s hip, kept me from settling into its groove. The performances, particularly Pitt’s painfully false Appalachian accent, Christoph Waltz’s affected silliness, and Eli Roth’s jarring presence, never felt organic. And most importantly, Tarantino’s imagining of a unit of Ike’s Army as being more despicable than Al Qaeda in Iraq, coupled with his invitation to root for this unit’s tactics as though being “on our side” made them excusable, felt like a betrayal of the American ideal. I got the feeling that Dick Cheney would have loved this movie.

The International Red Cross, the Geneva Conventions, the Law of Armed Conflict, they all exist for good reasons. They exist because of the all too human tendency to see outrages committed by “Team Us” as permissible and even commendable, particularly because “Team Them” has it coming. The reality, of course, is that combatants aren’t masterminds. Often, they’re just guys who got drafted, or who thought that signing up would be a good idea, or who were faced with the choice of putting on a uniform and maybe getting shot or refusing to wear one and definitely getting shot. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDSes ignorance of or contempt for these laws and traditions, its glorification of brutality, was just too much for me to stomach.

Now, there are some great things about this movie. Tarantino crafts an image with smoke and light that may be one of the great shots of movie history. There’s some wonderful misdirection and a refreshing willingness to defy some rules of storytelling economy.

But I just couldn’t get past the film’s ideology. It felt deeply, profoundly wrong. It felt un-American. It really bothered me.