Killing Them Softly

Don’t let the historical gloss on Killing Them Softly fool you. The setting may occasionally resemble New Orleans circa 2008, but Andrew Dominik’s latest—an unholy merging of Goodfellas and The Wealth of Nations—is a truly dystopian nightmare. Opening with images of a desiccated slum and eddies of garbage dancing in the wind, the film cuts between an Obama speech and clanging music, dismembering the soaring rhetoric and offering a hint of the grisly horror show to come. In this fanciful kingdom of dirt and sorrow, every television in every dive bar is tuned to an endless loop of political speeches, subjecting the film’s cast of dim-witted, low-level thugs to a tag-team civics lecture conducted by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. This feels less like a real city and more like someone’s particularly obscure and specific idea of hell. Instead of the lake of fire these shiftless crooks will apparently endure an eternity of past and future presidents scolding them for their lack of community spirit.

So America is a gangster nation with a gangster economy—point well taken, Mr. Dominik. This subtext blares out over every scene, but the best moments come when the director drops the megaphone and whispers his wrathful visions straight into the viewer’s ear. The brutality of the film finds its peak in the slow-motion collapse of Scoot McNairy’s hapless hood, who, given the choice between false hope and open despair, settles on the former simply because it allows him the merciful illusion that there isn’t a bullet somewhere with his name on it. Such moments capture the disillusionment of the past four years in the United States far better than Brad Pitt’s Big Speech, which helpfully reminds us that America is a business, in case anyone napped through the past two hours (perhaps all this soft killing lulled you to sleep, who knows). But the greatest horror of all awaits viewers like myself with the good fortune to watch the film in a multiplex where the exits just happen to pass by a major department store’s fragrance counter. The dead-eyed model in the Chanel No. 5 poster is the film’s weary killer, and both say the same thing: Pay up.

The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life is pompous, self-indulgent, much too fond of its own flakey bullshit mysticism, not fond enough of coherent thought, and quite possibly the best film to be released this year. Terrence Malick gets full marks for ambition, even if he has to take a few deductions for the windy ending and bloated beginning of his cosmic memoir. But the film’s middle section, a tour de force that recounts the childhood of Jack, the eldest of three brothers, is one of the most lyrical evocations of adolescence yet to make it onto the screen. Just look at the montage of Jack’s earliest years, which turns the years to minutes and exemplifies the potent mix of nostalgia and dread that makes this film so hard to shake. Seen largely from the child’s perspective, images rush by: two sets of hands floating in a mirror, a man collapsing into seizure on the front lawn, light refracted through a mobile forming a dancing ghost on the wall. The whole world seems mysterious, terrifying and deeply wonderful. Malick, as ever, makes one very grateful for the simple pleasures of seeing.

Equally true to form, Malick also makes one much more ambivalent about the act of hearing. While the use of classical music is well suited to the material, the voiceovers remain ponderously poetic, pricking holes in the corner of scenes and slowly sucking the air out. Let the moments breathe, please. They’re so fragile they need all the oxygen they can get. Then, when the film finally screams out for some sort of context, the voiceovers fail us, and we are left drifting through Malick's subconscious doodlings with nary a whispered epigram for guidance. Suddenly, this humble family drama is tied to all history, including the birth of the universe, the creation of life, and two dinosaurs attempting to reenact “The Insult that Made a Man out of Mac” on a riverbed in the Mesozoic.

The juxtaposition of the grandness of all time with the smallness of our memories, the unity of all life into one great tapestry of pain and forgiveness: well, that’s just got to be more fun than Green Lantern, but does it actually hold together? Not quite, which makes this film as frustrating as it is pleasurable. Malick has set out to do nothing less than make a film capable of holding the entire universe. Unsurprisingly, he comes up a little short (I think he missed Pluto, understandably considering how tiny it is, all tucked away back there). Still, in these dire movie-going months, when so many big-budget beasts are too bloated and lazy to leap even the lowest hurdle to achieve mere mediocrity, there’s something noble in a film that sets the bar so high it can’t help but fail to ever jump over it. May we all fail so splendidly in our endeavours.

Inglourious Basterds

Glib yet deeply felt, absurd yet surprisingly reasoned, Inglourious Basterds might be the most confounding movie Quentin Tarantino has made yet. Through the sheer power of cinema, Tarantino attempts to overthrow the Third Reich. And regardless of whether or not he succeeds in this mad endeavor, we can be certain of one thing: insanity on that level can’t help but be entertaining to watch.

Brad Pitt plays Lt. Aldo Raine, a jocose Tennessee soldier who leads the titular Basterds, a Jewish squad engaging in guerrilla warfare against the Germans, their sole purpose being to instill terror in Nazi hearts. Raine is nicknamed Aldo the Apache due to his demand that each of his soldiers bring him one hundred Nazi scalps—and if you think that line merely a joke brace yourself for a bit of gruesome corpse mutilation. But lest you cringe at the thought of two and a half hours of gore porn, note that the action in this film is actually scarcer than you would think. Tarantino builds the story around a series of tense life-or-death conversations as characters attempt to call the bluffs of their opponents, but when the violence comes it is in sudden bursts of lavish grisliness.

Even though he gets top billing—and the movie trailers get a lot of mileage out of his Nazi killing speeches—Pitt is really more comic relief than lead player in this tale (a typical highlight of this role comes when he pretends to be an Italian stuntman in order to sneak into a Nazi film premiere, wearing a look of dyspeptic agony while speaking bad Italian with an undisguised Appalachian accent). More central to Tarantino’s intentions is Shoshanna Dreyfus (played by French actress Melanie Laurent), a young Jewish woman who narrowly escapes when the Nazis gun down her family in a farmhouse. Four years after her escape, she hides in plain sight in Vichy France as the proprietress of a Parisian film theatre passed on to her by her deceased aunt and uncle.

A German war hero becomes infatuated with Shoshanna and convinces Joseph Goebbels to premiere an important propaganda film at her theatre, unwittingly offering Shoshanna an opportunity for revenge on the Nazis. She schemes to lock all the officials in the Third Reich in her theatre—even Hitler will be in attendance—and set fire to the highly flammable nitrate film stock, using the power of film quite literally to end Nazi tyranny. At the same time, the Basterds are involved in something called “Operation Kino”—led by a handsome, swashbuckling film critic, which is how you know this is fiction, ha-ha—where they intend to sneak explosives into the movie premiere and assassinate the attendant Nazi officials.

But stealing the show from Laurent and Pitt is Christoph Waltz’s performance as Colonel Landa, or “the Jew Hunter,” as he is otherwise known. For a film riddled with farcically over-the-top Nazis—Hitler is a red-faced, ranting loon, more clownish than fearsome—Landa is a surprisingly chilling character, performed with grace and intelligent by Waltz. Eerily calm even in the middle of murder, he is more frightening than all the other Nazis combined because he is actually portrayed as a sensible man aware of his actions, as opposed to a delirious, hate-filled lunatic. As he observes at one point, he is simply a detective, and given the nature of his society, this means he looks for Jews. He is not only devoid of morality, but conscious of this lack and unapologetic for his self-serving cruelty.

Despite the occasional Landa-induced shudder of dread, Inglourious Basterds is quite obviously a comical, often absurd film, engaged in an act of creative hubris that begs for scolding. What are you thinking, Tarantino, by trying to rewrite history using nothing more than your own all-consuming love of cinema? But I can’t really deny this film. It sticks in the gut. It refuses to go away. Tarantino’s films tend to offer ephemeral pleasures at best, his plot digressions and convolutions easily reduced to a series of slick, ain’t-it-cool moments that rarely linger in the mind after the film is finished. Everything dissipates under the harsh light of the theatre lobby, and Tarantino’s precariously constructed movie-mad fantasies are blasted apart once the real world begins to barge its way back in to our lives.

By contrast, this knowingly ridiculous and cartoonish assault on the very idea of the Second World War is too outrageous to ignore or dismiss. Hitler doesn’t die in the bunker here, you see—he is gunned down by two Jewish soldiers while the leaders of the Third Reich burn to death in a movie theatre. Understandably, the film’s replacement of historical fact with revenge fantasies can provoke some agonized audience responses, particularly among some Jewish critics who are rightly queasy about the risks inherent in Tarantino’s approach. Do we really need images of Jews carving swastikas into Nazi foreheads, just as Nazis would have carved the Star of David onto their Jewish victims? By pursuing this revenge fantasy to such extreme limits, doesn’t Tarantino risk turning the victim into another victimizer?

Valid concerns, I believe, and ones that should not be taken lightly, even though some people will simply sigh wearily at the prospect of such moralizing ruining our good and bloody fun. It’s just a movie, they cry out, pouting at the prospect of someone questioning their right to enjoy watching a person having his face smashed in with a baseball bat. And yet, in this case, I think the “it’s just a movie” defense might actually be correctly applied.

Tarantino really doesn’t care about World War Two as historical fact. Let’s be clear on that. But note that many of the more genteel, respectable war films—just roll that combination of terms on your tongue and see how you like the taste—are equally capable of pulling their own dodgy alterations to history, all of which can be forgiven as long as the film maintains an aura of self-serious piety. In other words, both Saving Private Ryan and Inglourious Basterds are bullshit, but at least Tarantino’s film is funny.

This may well prove to be the future of World War Two movies. As that era recedes further into history, the war becomes less a lived memory and more a cultural commodity. It’s a genre, complete with its own tropes and themes (and as Tarantino proves with his various allusions, it can be easily conflated with other genres like the western, which also referred to real history before becoming fodder for modern mythology). Tarantino’s primary experience with Nazis probably lies in the video store, not the library, and so it isn’t surprising that he does not treat them as a complex convergence of various social, political, and economic factors in German society. No, Nazis are just what you shoot when playing Call of Duty. Inglourious Basterds is really a World War Two movie for this generation.

Knowing the Second World War primarily through the cinema, Tarantino has quite naturally made a film that is more about war movies than the actual war itself. Inglourious Basterds is about the image of the Second World War in our imaginations, and images are something Tarantino sees no reason to tremble before. In his world, cinema is everything and vice versa, which allows him to pose this guileless, naïve, yet difficult question: if we are truly free in our imaginations, why persist in envisioning persecution?