I've seen two war movies recently. Actually, scratch that. I've seen two movies that were ostensibly about wars, but actually used that backdrop to tell other kinds of stories. Spoilers are ahead for both films.
Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds takes place in World War II, and features real people -- Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels -- as characters. But it's no more about the real World War II than Star Wars is about the U.S. space program. It's also a complete joy to watch.
Start with Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine, who's leading a squad of soldiers in France -- years before D-Day, mind you -- to kill as many Nazis as possible. Pitt is clearly having a ball with this role, and he's just as fun to watch, even if we never really get to know what his character is about.
Remember how in Saving Private Ryan -- and countless WWII movies before it -- the squad had an Italian Guy, a Brooklyn Guy, a Southern Guy, a Nerdy Guy and a Jewish Guy?
Well, in Basterds, there's a Jewish Guy, a Jewish Guy, a Jewish Guy, a Jewish Guy, a Jewish Guy, a Jewish Guy, a Jewish Guy and a Jewish Guy. We barely learn any of their names. One of them is Pvt. Uvitch, and he's played by B.J. Novak of The Office. (Years of his character absorbing Michael Scott's creepy comments have given him a good thousand yard stare). Another is Sgt. Donowitz, played by the director Eli Roth. Roth has made those Hostel movies, so it seems fitting that he's at the center for one of the movie's more violent sequences.
But the Basterds are only a small part of the movie. Its real stars are Melanie Laurent (pictured above) as Shosanna, a Jewish girl hiding out in Paris and plotting a fiery revenge on the Germans, and the excellent Christoph Waltz as Col. Landa, an SS officer nicknamed the "Jew Hunter."
Watching the movie, I got the sense -- I'm not alone in thinking this -- that Tarantino had written the part of Shoshanna for Uma Thurman. I'm glad it worked out the way it did. As played by Laurent, Shoshanna has all the toughness Thurman might have brought to the part, but was unknown (to me anyway) enough that I was able to completely buy her in this role. She's great: tough, smart and even more vengeful than "The Bride."
Still, it's Waltz who owns the movie. His Landa is the best villain Tarantino has created (sorry, Mr. Blonde...really, really sorry), funny and scary all at once. Check out the scene toward the end, when the German spy tells him how she hurt her foot -- it's a lie, one to protect her cover -- and he just laughs. And laughs. And laughs. He's like the Riddler on the old Batman show, just giddy. And it's funny, because here's this Nazi acting silly. But it's scary, because at that moment, we know he knows.
He's the officer responsible for killing Shoshanna's family, and you expect the movie to be about a showdown between those two characters.
But it's really Raine who's Waltz's opposite number. They're both men who appear to have fun, doing what they're doing. Neither seems that loyal to his cause. (Raine acts like "killin Nat-zees" is just another thing he could be doing between bootlegging, and Waltz sells out the German high command at the end of the movie for amnsesty and a house on Cape Cod.)
And he brings out the best in Tarantino as writer and a director. There's a genius moment in the opening scene. Waltz is talking to a French farmer who's hiding Shoshanna and her family. Waltz and the farmer talk in French, and then Waltz suggests that, since they both speak English.
At first, you think, "OK, this is a goofy trick to get rid of the subtitles." But then the conversation winds down, and the farmer gives up the family, and Waltz points out, "They don't speak English, so they have no idea you've given them away." Genius. This may not be as quotable as Tarantino's earlier work, but it's no less well-written.
It also feels like an everything and the kitchen sink movie, maybe one Tarantino wanted to make for a long time. Thus we have Hitler dying a bullet-riddled death, an even more bloodthirsty climax than The Dirty Dozen, David Bowie on the soundtrack (and not over the end credits, but during a montage scene), and Mike Myers in a non-annoying cameo as a British officer.
As WWII movies go, it's a joke. As Tarantino's movies go, it's gold.
***
Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker takes place in a more familiar reality, Iraq in 2004, and follows a month in the lives of three soldiers in charge of disarming bombs. But the movie isn't really about the war. Anyone going in expecting their views on our involvement in Iraq to be vindicated or challenged will come away disappointed.
Rather, The Hurt Locker is really the story of one soldier's addiction to the rush he gets every time he's called to action. The war here is sort of a Macgufffin; you get a sense the soldier, whose name is Sgt. William James, would be just as happy as an Alaskan crab fisherman, an ice road trucker, or any of the other dangerous, manly jobs on the TLC/History Channel Lineup.
The soldier here is played by Jeremy Renner, an actor I've seen in other things (28 Weeks Later, the short lived TV series The Unusuals), and have always found a pretty likable presence.
Here, you're not sure what to think of him. James shows up as a replacement for Sgt. Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce, one of maybe four "big name" cameos here), who has been killed in an explosion. Thompson and his team -- Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldrige (Brian Geraghty) had prided themselves on close communication and careful work.
James is a different story: he doesn't communicate, works quickly and flashily, and seems to enjoy the job way too much. He's good at it -- he tells a senior officer that he's disarmed close to 900 bombs -- but so unnerving that his team members talk about killing him to save themselves.
Ultimately, the men bond together, but not so much that James is able to resist his addiction to the job. If this sounds like wonky character study, put on the brakes. The Hurt Locker is as tense as movie I've seen all year. It has some brilliant action sequences, even better performances -- mainly Renner and Mackie -- and is directed by Bigelow in such a way that we're not confused by what's going on, which is more than I can say for a lot of action directors these days. It also never talks down to us. It's not the miracle a lot of critics have proclaimed it, but it's solid and smart. In an era when loud, clanky toy commercials pass for summer fun, that means a lot.
Tom Coombe
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