once upon a time in hollywood (w&d tarantino)

For a while it feels as though Tarantino is back where he belongs. In Hollywood, poking fun at the bear, as only he’s allowed to. The film feels less ‘talky’ than some of his more recent endeavours. There’s a flow to the edit. The design, as ever, is impeccable. You know you’re in for a long ride but it’s going to be a good one. Then, gradually, the ride starts to fizzle out. Perhaps it’s when Pitt’s lop-sided grinning stuntman visits the Manson ranch and nothing happens. Perhaps it’s when the director decides to interrupt the action approximately two thirds of the way through and skip six months. Whenever it is, there’s a gradual realisation that this film isn’t really going anywhere. It’s just driving around the Hollywood hills, looking at itself in the mirror, saying “you’re looking mighty fine”. A friend of mine said it was a bit like a slacker movie, which it is. A low-key buddy movie, where Brad and Leo hang out and chill. Nowhere does the film feel more like itself than the scene where the two of them watch an old ep of DiCaprio as a villain in the series “FBI’. Right there you feel you could almost be hanging with Quentin, chuckling at the hammy acting and the melodrama and plotting how you’re going to find a way to fit this into a movie some day. 

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with any of this, but nevertheless it all feels mighty smug. Perhaps Tarantino has always been smug but when he kicked off he succeeded in recalibrating the use of dialogue in US movies, employing a Mametian use of subtext. His early movies (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown) also seemed as though they were saying something about race, even if that something was nebulous. Always a stylist, the style started to completely overwhelm any real attempt at content. Extreme semiotic gestures replaced any need for plot. A candy-coated wish-fulfilment ethos began to dominate. Tarantino discovered he, like Shakespeare, could rewrite history. Once Upon a Time is the culmination of this. A real-life tragedy becomes a grotesque comedy. Flame-throwers are cool. Sharon lives. Polanski’s a harmless sixties pixie. The question is whether this means anything, apart from the fact that Quentin gets to do whatever he wants with his mates? In a Trumpian dystopia, the notion that Hollywood can make everything doozy feels even more of a cop-out than ever. Politics is irrelevant because it will all work out well in the end. Some might say there’s some high-end Zizek intellectual irony at play, but I don’t really buy it. A generation of US moviegoers get to see their favourite stars larking around and come away with the adrenaline high of justified violence. At the end of the day, one suspects people will look back on Tarantino as the high priest of American imperialism, the greatest spinner of fake news in the greatest fake news factory on earth. 

inglorious basterds (w&d tarantino)

Tarantino's latest has received mixed reviews. A lot of critics have suggested that the film is some kind of nadir. I haven't seen Death Proof, nor the second part of Kill Bill, so I can't claim to have been following his career that closely. However I recently watched Reservoir Dogs again, and it's immediately evident from the film's opening scene what all the fuss was about; a fuss which was provoked primarily by one thing, which was dialogue, and another, which was the juxtaposition of dialogue with context.

Which might be another way of saying theatricality. Inglorious Basterds reminds us that Tarantino is the director who put theatre back into film. Even more than committing acts of seemingly gratuituous violence, a Tarantino character loves to talk. None more so than Pitt's Aldo Raine, who, in spite of talking about his love of Nazi killing, only finally does something violent in the very final scene of the film. The rest of the time he pouts and talks about the violence he intends or has intended to perpetrate. He's not much of a character, and Pitt seems a little lost in his skin, perhaps realising that a funny accent doesn't give him much to work with.

Instead, a couple of characters from the plot's secondary strand, Christoph Waltz and Melanie Laurent, steal the acting honours. Waltz, in particular, is given three stagey scenes in which he demonstrates his mastery of the Tarantino argot. Not many Hollywood directors can get away with a fifteen minute dialogue scene wherein nothing happens, but seeing as this is how the maestro's career was kick started, in the Reservoir diner, he's given leeway. What this produces is a very old fashioned kind of drama, of nuance, expression, and theatrical menace. It has its weaknesses, but probably because this sort of thing is so rare in Hollywood, its the strengths that shine through, and for people who've never seen a play, it's like he's inventing the wheel.

If the dialogue is as sharp as ever, the violence in Basterds feels even more laborious than usual. Like a signature the director is cursed to append to his work, ever since the ear went missing. The contrast between the verbosity of his scripts and viscerality of their violence has served him well, but in this instance it doesn't really feel like his heart's in it. The baseball bat scene, and Pitt's closing knife-wielding moment lack bravura or wit. Tarantino has always understood that violence is part of the language of drama, just as much as words, but the moments where it's employed in Basterds have little dramatic impact, and perhaps that's why they feel so hollow, bringing the film down rather than heightening it's effectiveness.

Most of these moments are reserved for the Pitt strands of the narrative. The other Shosanna strand has more weight, and it would appear that in the doomed relationship with Marcel, the director is hoping for some kind of pathos. It doesn't quite come off. Just as the two storylines never integrate effectively. Nevertheless, Tarantino's dialogue, and flair for a dramatic scenario, ensure that, even if it's only stuttering from set piece to set piece, the film is never dull, and is always ready to engage with its audience's intelligence. It also feels like, in the film within a film, there's an inherent critique of a crasser, action based cinema, the one the Nazi high command lap up as they watch the priggish Zoller pick off enemy after enemy in the film of his own deeds.

So, for my money, the film didn't deserve the brickbats of the critics. Nevertheless, in spite of its moments, it still left me with a slightly empty feeling. In particular the neurotically tacked on violence, which lends the overall project, with its hubristic reworking of history, the feel of being created by a child that just can't help showing off. One whose talent can seduce you for a while, but later leaves you wanting to send it to bed. Thinking that when it grows it up it might achieve remarkable things, but first it needs to get over the need to constantly remind its audience of its cleverness.