Quentin Tarantino is having what Martin Amis readers might call a Yellow Dog moment — something that happens when, following a worrying, mid-to-late period of creative uncertainty, a once dazz-lingly exciting artist suddenly and catastrophically belly-flops.
His new film, Inglourious Basterds, is a World War II adventure about a Jewish-American revenge squad sent into occupied France to spread terror among the Nazis. Brad Pitt plays their leader and Eli Roth, the director of Hostel, is his ferocious second-in-command. Mélanie Laurent plays a beautiful young Jewish woman who owns the Parisian cinema at which the Nazi top brass, including the Führer himself, will assemble for one of Goebbels’s propaganda movies.
Opposing them is a chilling SS colonel nicely played by Tarantino’s discovery Christoph Waltz, who won the best-actor award at Cannes.
Having seen it once in Cannes earlier this year, and again for its British release, I was struck afresh by how exasperatingly awful and disappointing Inglourious Basterds is: a colossal, complacent, long-winded dud, a gigantic two-and-a-half-hour anticlimax.
Overstretched scene follows overstretched scene in plonkingly conventional narrative order and each is stuffed with dull dialogue, which made it feel as though Mogadon was somehow being pumped into the cinema’s air conditioning.
There’s no doubt that the 52-year-old Waltz — an Austrian-born actor who had been plying his trade on TV until Tarantino plucked him from the ranks — is a real find, and Laurent also deserves this leg-up to stardom. But they can’t make any real difference. Pitt gives the most wooden and charmless performance of his life; he acts and speaks as though the lower half of his face is set in concrete.
It is misleading to complain about boredom, when we all know how Tarantino can alchemise this into something special. In Pulp Fiction two hitmen famously put the exciting business of murder on hold while they discussed dull things such as what Europeans call a quarter-pounder.
But there the ostensible banality was sexy, funny and, above all, intentional. The director could turn the action into something thrilling or horrifying whenever and wherever he felt like it. But here the boringness is just boring and the violence doesn’t get gasps of shock, just winces of bafflement and distaste — and boredom. Tarantino just seems to have lost his cool, lost his mojo.
When I saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, my traumatised complaint was that it fails as a conventional war movie, as genre spoof, as trash and as pulp. Tarantino’s genius always lay in his audacious and provocative adventures in style, making generic textures bubble and react. His great riffs were sublime, similar to what Jean-Luc Godard saw in Nicholas Ray: pure cinema. What happens when these surfaces fail to fizz? You get what you have here — great heavy lumps of nothing.
I have always deprecated the growing and rather supercilious critical consensus that Tarantino’s best film is Jackie Brown — a good film, yes, but uncharacteristic and without the brash inspiration of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction or the late-flowering delirium of Kill Bill.
Yet maybe that is the sort of thing Tarantino should now work on: solid adaptations to steady and resettle his greatness. That could be a way to put his mojo loss into remission and return to the glory days. —