One of the most remarkable things in Quentin Tarantino’s remarkable career is that he doesn’t appear to realise just how bad his most recent films are. ‘I have sibling rivalry with Orson Welles,’ he said recently on CBS Sunday Morning. ‘I don’t think he’s that good… all right? I have sibling rivalry with him and Stanley Kubrick.’
I can understand him saying this after picking up the Palme d’Or for Pulp Fiction in 1994, but does he really think that Inglourious Basterds, his latest offering about a group of irregulars operating behind enemy lines during World War Two, is up there with Citizen Kane? As someone who has sat through the film — all 153 minutes of it — I find this incomprehensible.
Take the opening scene in which a German SS officer enters a French farmhouse looking for a family of Jews. To be fair, it starts off quite promisingly. The Nazi, played by Christoph Waltz, is full of oleaginous menace and the farmer clearly has something to hide. But just when Tarantino has ratcheted up the tension to boiling point, the Nazi launches into a natural history lecture. I’m not making this up. One minute he’s Eric Porter, the next he’s David Attenborough. And it seems to go on forever. Had Tarantino kept the scene to a crisp five minutes, it might have worked. But after 15 minutes of this waffle you want to scream: ‘Enough already. They’re under the floorboards.’
Tarantino appears to have lost all sense of what an audience wants to see. According to him, Inglourious Basterds is an attempt to make a ‘guys on a mission’ movie but it doesn’t contain any of the scenes that make pictures like Where Eagles Dare and The Guns of Navarone so much fun.
For instance, he introduces a colourful cast of ne’er-do-wells in an apparent homage to The Dirty Dozen, but instead of being given a chance to redeem themselves they are simply killed off. In one scene, a beautiful double agent (Diane Kruger in the Ingrid Pitt role) falls into the hands of the SS and you brace yourself for the inevitable rescue. But it never happens. Indeed, there’s scarcely a single act of heroism or derring-do in the entire film. I realise that Inglourious Basterds is supposed to be a pastiche, but you get the sense that Tarantino has omitted all the guilty pleasures of the genre out of ignorance rather than design.
Perhaps a better word would be ‘amnesia’ because Tarantino certainly used to know how to give audiences pleasure. My favourite moment in Pulp Fiction is when Bruce Willis decides to rescue Ving Rhames from his sado-masochistic captors. Even when rewatching it for the hundredth time, my whole body fizzes with anticipation as Willis descends the steps of the dungeon clutching the Samurai sword. Once a director pulls off a trick like that — has given you such pleasure — you’re prepared to cut him a lot of slack in the expectation that, one day, he’ll do it again. But Tarantino has failed to deliver over and over again and Inglourious Basterds, which I was desperately hoping would be a return to form, is no exception. Tarantino used to be able to make genre pictures that deconstructed a particular genre while simultaneously retaining its appeal. Not any more.
So many of the scenes in Inglourious Basterds fall flat — and could have been fixed so easily — that you begin to wonder what the producers were doing. On the Internet Movie Database, 16 different people are credited with ‘producing’ Inglourious Basterds but not one of them appears to have had the balls to take Tarantino aside and give him a decent set of notes. Where’s Harvey Scissorhands when you need him?
Perhaps he’s frightened of him. At the London premier, I watched Tarantino unveil the film in a suitably nutty, over-the-top way, screaming into the microphone and then hurling it to the floor like a missile. I can only imagine the kind of tirade he’s capable of if anyone dares to contradict him. One of the striking things about Inglourious Basterds is that Tarantino still seems like such a confident director — he clearly believes all his hair-brained choices are 100 per cent correct. As his ludicrous claim on CBS Sunday Morning revealed, he’s lost the talent but retained the swagger. A better name for his latest movie would be The Ego Has Landed.
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