Arts & Entertainment

Acting Out A Long-Held Fantasy

In new movie, Jews exact revenge on Nazis.

Simcha Weinstein
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

A

dd acclaimed director Quentin Tarantino to the
long list of filmmakers who can't resist making
their own World War II fantasy-action flick.
Tarantino's latest release is Inglourious Basterds — and
yes, the misspelling is intentional.
Inspired by a schlocky 1970s Italian "macaroni combat"
action picture of the same name, the movie is Tarantino's
homage to the "misfits on a mission in movies of old, like
The Dirty Dozen."
His heroes are a Jewish-American revenge squad wreak-
ing havoc throughout German-occupied France who not
only kill but also scalp their Nazi targets.
In a parallel storyline, a beautiful young Jewish woman
whose family was slaughtered by the SS somehow takes

over the Paris cinema where Goebbel's latest propaganda
film will debut, with Hitler in attendance. She plans to
trap the audience of high-ranking Nazis inside and burn
the building to the ground.
"My name is Shoshanna Dreyfus," she announces, "and
this is the face of Jewish vengeance?'
At the news conference following the film's debut,
one journalist asked if Inglourious Basterds is a "Jewish
revenge fantasy?'
Eli Roth, one of Tarantino's "basterds" and also director
of the Hostel horror movies, said the notion of Jews get-
ting even with Hitler was "kosher porn?'
"It's something I dreamed since I was a kid," Roth said.
In the movie, Roth gets to live out his childhood
fantasy: He plays the baseball bat-swinging "Bear
Jew?' who some of the film's Nazis believe is really a
vengeful golem.

Donny Donnowitz (Eli Roth) and Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad

Pitt) in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds, rated R, opens Friday,

Aug. 21, in area theaters.

❑

Inglourious Basterds

Tarantino's latest film turns World War II into child's play.

Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News

I

t's a fool's errand to criticize Quentin
Tarantino for historical inaccuracy or
chronic amorality. Everybody knows
his movies are inspired by and respond to
other movies, not real life.
So there's no percentage in railing
against Inglourious Basterds as blathering,
self-indulgent drivel that (among many
examples of its creator's hubris) leaves
uneducated moviegoers with an errone-
ous perception of where and how Adolf
Hitler met his end.
Nor is there much value in pointing out
that the thorny practical and philosophi-
cal question of Jewish revenge — pow-
erfully addressed in Ed Zwick's recent
fact-based World War II film Defiance
and debated at length in Munich, Steven
Speilberg's portrayal of the Mossad's
retaliation for the massacre at the 1972
Olympics — is played here strictly for
comic-book grins and groans.
Inglourious Basterds is only entertain-
ment, after all, and the only responsibility
of entertainment is to entertain. Or so
some would argue.
In fact, Tarantino's simple-minded
fantasy runs embarrassingly counter to
the prevailing international direction of
World War II and Holocaust films. The
further we get from "the good war" and

Quentin Tarantino on the set of Inglourious Basterds

the evil genocide, the more ambiguous
and nuanced the movies become.
Contrast the teenage heroine of The
Diary of Anne Frank (1959) — the most
innocent victim imaginable — with the
unscrupulous Jewish criminal deported
to the camps in The Counterfeiters
(2007). The compromised and conflicted
Resistance operatives in the Dutch film
Black Book (2006) and the new Danish
film Flame 6 Citron, meanwhile, are light
years from the noble freedom fighter
Victor Laszlo in Casablanca (1942).
And here comes Tarantino, who previous-

ly turned hard-boiled armed robbers and
ice-cold hit men into charming, smooth-
talking icons. He employs the same alchemy
with a ruthless Gestapo officer using his
patented approach: pages and pages and
pages of amusingly pointless dialogue.
Inglourious Basterds runs on two slen-
der tracks. Col. Hans Landa (nicely played
by Christoph Waltz), a cunning Nazi
charged with finding and eliminating the
Jews of France, spends the first 20 min-
utes politely interviewing a dairy farmer
about an unaccounted-for Jewish family
and drinking the man's milk.

Meanwhile, Lt. Aldo Raine (an homage
to war-film standby Aldo Ray and played
by a drawling Brad Pitt) assembles a group
of Jewish GIs whose mission is to spread
terror through the Nazi ranks. They do
such a good job that frightened rumors
spread all the way to the Fuhrer that the
American platoon includes a Golem.
Raine and Landa will eventually, inevi-
tably, meet at a Parisian cinema owned by
a Jewish woman whose family was mur-
dered by Landa's men. There's a bit more
to the plot, but not 152 minutes' worth
(including the credits), which is what
Tarantino arrogantly asks of his audience.
(Prospective ticket buyers may also want
to be advised of the underlying streak of
sadism that includes, but is not limited to,
violence against women.)
To give Tarantino his due, he is a suffi-
ciently talented writer to make us care what
happens to characters that are one-dimen-
sional cardboard cutouts. That's no mean
feat, but at the same time nobody grows or
changes in a Tarantino movie — they just
play out their destiny, which sometimes
involves catching a few unexpected bullets.
Tarantino's riff on Nazis and Jews may
amuse and satisfy less-mature audi-
ences. For those with a deeper and fuller
understanding of the Third Reich and the
Holocaust, particularly one gleaned from
sources other than action movies, it is
shockingly superficial. ❑

August 20 2009

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