Rating of
4/4
And the Best Picture is...
Wizard_of_Oz - wrote on 02/08/10
Not Avatar, the Hurt Locker or Precious. Hands down, the Best Picture of 2009 was Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds. While a movie about World War II being nominated for Best Picture is like the San Diego Chargers making the playoffs (always there, but never winning), Inglorious Basterds speaks volumes about the film medium as a form of art and commercial entity. It also casts a new light on the historical film genre, how stories are told and the cinematic joys we can look forward to as long as filmmakers try to make water-cooler talkers actually say something.
Inglorious Basterds is a period piece set during WWII that contains as much historical accuracy as this sentence. But within that freedom, the film tells a story that is more cinematic than history. While many historical movies aim for accuracy, they inevitably falter in some fashion--to then be criticized, or torn-apart, by historians (professional and amateur, alike). Conversely, other period pieces keep their stories so small that they don't dare ripple the waters of time. These films (ex. "Titanic") hide behind the possibility that "this story could have happened." Inglorious Basterds enters a realm that is not only unapologetically fictional, but that it changes what you think to be fact. This provides contextual knowledge, yet throws the audience into a barrage of surprises.
But more than separating what we know and what we want from history-based movies, Inglorious Basterds also separates what we know and what we want from movies themselves. The film within the film is a highly violent and historically inaccurate depiction of a WWII battle (while WWII is still raging). And like the Basterds' audience, the audience in the film is entertained by war fantasies. In fact, while the audience on screen is cheering on their heroes, the audience (you!) is cheering for Taratino's heroes. Movies in both cases provide an escape for audiences until, go figure, the fictional audience can not escape their theater--forcing the real audience (you, again) to remain in their seats also. Inglorious Basterds isn't a self-serving blood-fest; it's a very serious--though quite funny--dissection on why we watch movies and the effects they have on us.
But the movie isn't a parody or critique on films because it purposefully branches away from audience expectations. Unlike most films, Inglorious Basterds can't be broke up into 40 separate 3-minute scenes (or in Michael Bay's case, 120 1-minute scenes). Inglorious Bastereds is an unusual yet undeniable string of 5 separate segments. This may make every scene seem "long" to the untrained eye, but it's really quite more than that. Script scribes are taught at every film school and seminar to start a scene as late as possible and end it as soon as possible--the overly-practiced theory being that the movie's momentum will stay fast and increase drama. Tarantino, here, goes the exact opposite direction and treats each scene like a rubber band. He stretches and stretches each scene and conversation until every aspect has been covered, and then some. In every case, this works beautiful, especially when the audience knows on some level how the scene is going to end and goes nuts waiting to get there.
They say the best directors can control the emotions of the audience. But I only half-agree with that. I say, the best directors control the emotions of the audience in a way they haven't seen before (thus in a more invisible way). If a bad guy burns down innocent people's home, yet again, it's too easy to hate him (I'm looking at you, Avatar!); but if a bad guy is just really good at a card game, you may end up fearing him in a very new way. It's about trusting your audience. If you see the bad guy do the most evil thing imaginable, then you know how dangerous he is--he's as dangerous as the previous character that did that. If you see the bad guy do something uniquely impressive, your imagination runs wild with what he is capable of in any larger sense. The best directors manipulate their audiences AND trust their audiences.
Photographically speaking, Inglorious Basterds paints a beautiful portray of French landscape and city life that would be more expected in a...well, French film. The deliberate framing often allows as much action to happen on screen as possible, not unlike staging a play and just putting a camera in the fifth row center. But while this is refreshingly tame, it also draws even more attention to the camera movements that do occur. All of a sudden, how the camera move sells a joke or stirs a new thought in the audience's collective mind. This isn't about cramming two thousand CG jungle warriors into a shot, it's about making the real world beautiful.
But perhaps most subtly, audiences can tell when a movie is personal to the creator(s). The movie contains within it learning experiences of the creator. The evolution of an artist is a fun thing to see because it inspires hope for what they are capable of in the future. Similarly, witnessing growth in others inspires us to look for grow within ourselves. Nobody can just sit down and write the script for Inglorious Basterds. Even Tarantino couldn't--and didn't. It took him nearly ten years and half-a-dozen previous films before he was capable of what he did. And he knows it! Brad Pitt is little more than a tongue-in-cheek mouthpiece for Tarantino when he ends the movie with, "You know, this just might be my masterpiece." Smash cut to: "written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.
Tarantino, like fellow writer-director Judd Apatow, has evolved past his imitators and his former self. Cinematic habits and stagnation are criminally rampant in this year's crop of Best Picture nominees. More damning though, this year more than any other year in recent memory, proved such artistic ambivalence is widely profitable. Why doesn't Wal-Mart just make a movie and be done with this world?
