Tarantino film delivers taboo humor

Something interesting happened when I watched Quentin Tarantino’s new film “Inglourious Basterds.” Without giving too much away, there is a scene where the entire Nazi high command is watching a film in which a German sniper shoots more than one hundred American soldiers.

Each time a bullet lands, the Nazi crowd goes wild. A little later, two of the Basterds unload clip after clip into that same Nazi high command. Cheers from the audience accompanied this scene at Movieland. The parallel is obvious: We all have the ability to be as heartless as Nazis.

Aside from the moral dilemma posed by relating the audience to Nazis, “Inglourious Basterds” is flawed but thoroughly entertaining thanks primarily to two performances. The first is Brad Pitt, who plays Lt. Aldo “The Apache” Raine; the leader of the Basterds and swastika carver extraordinaire.

Pitt gives Aldo a Tennessee drawl and a down-home attitude complete with bootlegging references. Every line he delivers is a hoot. The other performance is Col. Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa, played by Christoph Waltz. Landa is a caricature of the charming evil that was national socialism.

His actions are exaggerated and comic, but behind the buffoonish large pipe and enthusiasm for strudel with cream there lurks the devious cunning of a sociopath.

Another performance of note is Michael Fassnender as Lt. Archie Hicox, the embodiment of all that is British class and resilience. And Mélanie Laurent also delivers as Shoshanna Dreyfus, the escaped Jewish dairy farmer turned cinema owner.

But the problem with Laurent’s Dreyfus, and this representative of most characters in the film, is you don’t really become attached to her as a character. There is an emotional distance separating the audience from the actors. This is best illustrated by the basterds themselves.

In “The Dirty Dozen,” one of the many films referenced in “Inglorious Basterds,” the varying personalities of the cons are developed. So when Telly Savalas goes postal, you’re screaming at the screen that they should have never trusted him to begin with.

“Inglourious Basterds” fails to do this. We get a brief aside about Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz’s past, narrated by the smooth voice of none other than Samuel L. Jackson, but you don’t know why. The characters lack depth. The most depth we get is from Sgt. Donny “The Bear Jew” Donowitz, played by Eli Roth, who can’t act but swings a baseball bat like David Ortiz.

As for Tarantino, this is not his magnum opus. Compared to his other films, I’d say it’s better than everything after 2000, but worse than his work in the ’90s. Apparently, it was partly intended as an homage to the French new wave movement. The most obvious example of this is his rejection of continuity editing.

He also includes the western theme he used in the second part of “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” but he abandons the score after the first 40 minutes. Tarantino has always been a referential director, but “Inglourious Basterds” is a pastiche of various distinct genres that just don’t mesh. This explains why, as a viewer, you watch the film, but you aren’t absorbed by it.

Watching “Inglourious Basterds” is fun. Tarantino has always been a good director and the film is crafted well. And let’s be honest, it feels good to watch Nazi’s get scalped. But this returns us to that moral dilemma. The great thing about Nazis is that they make great villains, as fictional characters there is nothing good about the ideologies of national socialism.

What they did was so reprehensible, so unjustifiable, that there is no reason for us to feel sympathy for them. As Brad Pitt declares, “Members of the nationalist social party conquered Europe through murder, torture, intimidation and terror. And that’s exactly what we’re gonna do to them!”

But not every German soldier was a cold-blooded Schutzstaffel anti-Semite. Deep down you’re cheering as a Nazi gets smashed upside the head with a baseball bat, but that Nazi wasn’t Hitler, Joseph Goebbles or Josef Mengele. He was a soldier fighting in a war who refused to give away the position of his fellow countrymen.

What I mean is: Yeah, the Nazis represent the worst of humanity, but does lowering ourselves to their level really need to be celebrated? After the moral ambiguity of our last president, should we really encourage a complete disregard of the Geneva Conventions?

An eye for an eye does not make the world go round. But that must have been Tarantino’s point. Why else would he turn Jews into suicide bombers?