That's a Bingo!: Thoughts on Evil, Fame, and Badass Women in Inglourious Basterds

It took about forty-eight hours for me to tumble to the fact that Quentin Tarantino's superb Nazi-stomping fantasy, Inglourious Basterds would occupy a niche similar to Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York and the Coens' No County for Old Men did in 2008 and 2007, respectively. That is, while it may not be the best film of the year, it has prompted me to a greater quantity and deeper quality of reflection than any other cinematic offering of recent vintage. Happily, it took only a week or so for me to discover that Basterds has also provoked a comparable level of deliberation from just about every American film writer and blogger worth a damn (not that I count myself among that number.) The poobahs of my favored haunts—GlennKenny, Tim Brayton, Jim Emerson, Kevin J. Olson, Charles Bowen Jr., Sam Juliano—and their commenters are all in fine form, whether their assessment is positive or negative. However, a particular shout-out needs to go to Dennis Cozzalio of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule and Bill R. of The Kind of Face You Hate, who have offered up a meticulous, marathon exchange about the film (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). The tone of their back-and-forth has been unabashedly gushing (as it should be), but the conversation has nonetheless been vigorous, enlightening, and often pointed, especially where the film's lonely detractors are concerned.

In that spirit, I want to expand on some thoughts that have been rattling around in my cranium since I authored my review, particularly since I've now had a chance to view Basterds for a second time and also to peruse a fraction of the excellent commentary that's been pouring forth from the Internet's tubes. [SPOILERS BELOW]

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Many pixels are being expended on the topic of Inglourious Basterds' morality, or lack thereof. Interestingly enough, the furor seems to be as much about the response of some critics (*cough* Jeffrey Wells *cough*) to the film's violence as it is about Tarantino's own notorious inscrutability on the matter. I find myself mostly sharing Dennis Cozzalio's stance on this, which is to say that my own feelings about Basterds' violence are comprised of a heaping helping of giddy enthusiasm with a twinge of nagging discomfort. However, while I can't say that I share Bill R.'s full-throated enthusiasm for the film's violence, his commentary on the topic has prompted me to examine my own reactions to Basterds more carefully. I still stand by my assessment that the gleeful bloodthirstiness of the Basterds' "work" (and Shosanna's revenge scheme, to a lesser degree) has an undercurrent of moral ambiguity. I can't deny that I feel some uneasiness at the prospect of reveling in the execution and mutilation of German enlisted men and civilians. Is it telling that I never had so much as a twinge of remorse for the eighty-eight (or so) ninja bodyguards that The Bride mercilessly hacked her way through in Kill Bill, Volume 1, even though many of them were guilty of nothing more than fervent loyalty to their mistress? Perhaps this distinction depends on the particular cartoonish quality to Kill Bill's violence in the House of Blue Leaves sequence, but I think there's something else going on.

Nazi stories seem to have a particular capacity for evoking considerations of violence, culpability, and racism. I suspect that when confronted with the swastika in either a historical or fictional context, any person will dwell, however briefly, on their own morality, and how easily human beings set aside decency in the name of tribalism, jingoism, and pure sadism. Of course, in a film like Inglourious Basterds, this has the effect of prompting second thoughts about wishing violence on the very monsters that prompted those second thoughts in the first place. Tarantino equivocates quite a bit about this in the film. He coaxes us to whoop with delight as Nazis are machine-gunned and roasted alive, even as he presents us with a Nazi audience cheering as on-screen Allied soldiers are picked off like rabbits at the Nation's Pride premiere. It's hard not to feel a little sting at the comparison. On the other hand, there's Shosanna's fate, wherein her momentary pity for Zoller gets her brutally murdered. This suggests that whatever hesitation we feel for dishing out punishment to the deserving is softhearted folly, and likely to have nasty consequences for us. No doubt some authoritarian-minded Neanderthal will latch onto this as a validation for contemporary American warmongering and torture, but Tarantino has never been so overtly political. His provocations are far deeper, striking at the intersection of pop culture and unexamined social values. Bottom line, I don't think that Tarantino is offering any easy messaging in Basterds, certainly nothing in the vein of Death Proof's rather uncluttered (yet still misconstrued) indictment of misogyny and male entitlement.

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One thing that struck me square between the eyes on a second viewing is how much Inglourious Basterds is interested in celebrity, as a plot point, motif, and theme. Consider that nearly every major character in the film—with the conspicuous exception of Shosanna—is well-known in certain circles. Aldo Raine, Donny Donowitz, Hugo Stiglitz, Hans Landa, Fredrick Zoller, Bridget von Hammersmark, and even Smithson "The Little Man" Utivich are all celebrities in one way or another, and much of the film's intrigues are related to their identities and reputations. And, of course, the film also includes the real-world figures of the Third Reich. This current of celebrity is consistent with Tarantino's filmography, which has often been concerned with identity, and especially with its capacity to bestow power on the one hand and to confine and suffocate on the other. Tarantino's exploration of identify achieved its pinnacle in Kill Bill, wherein a wronged woman's road to vengeance becomes an exploration of the self, but it can also be observed as a major component of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

While Tarantino's characters have always been larger than life, he's never before trafficked in a cast of characters that is consistently renowned within their own universe. This is more than appropriate, given Inglourious Basterds' conspicuous fixation on cinema. Andrew Dominik's casting of Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was a self-consciously clever feat that paid significant dramatic dividends, and Tarantino seems to be playing a related game here by tapping the tabloid darling to portray Aldo Raine. Yet, consistent with his prankster spirit, the director casts Pitt not as the steely man of war, but as a broadly comical good ol' boy, and not even in the lead at that!

Few commentators have observed that the Basterds' questioning of their Nazi captives in Chapter 2 is a callback to Hans Landa's interrogation of LaPadite in Chapter 1, and moreover that both confrontations hinge on the characters' reputations and infamy. Landa seems genuinely interested in whether LePadite knows of him, and specifically whether his moniker, "the Jew-Hunter," is known to the dairy farmer. Likewise Aldo Raine asks his Nazi prisoner if he has heard of Donny, Hugo, and Aldo himself. Both scenes also hinge on the subject giving up some vital piece of information, although the threat of violence is much more explicit for the Nazis the Basterds have under their thumbs. It's a bold twinning, as it overtly links the menace that Landa cultivates about himself with the fear that the Basterds aim to inspire among the Germans ranks. While Tarantino is drawing a line of connection between Landa and Raine, and therefore critiquing his own (and our own) glee at the Basterds' brutal methods, he's not really posing the comparison as a moral equivalency. This is made clear late in the film, when Landa expresses a kind of professional respect for Raine, and seems crestfallen when the American lieutenant fails to exhibit a reciprocal admiration. Raine won't, of course, because he's a practical sort, and not preoccupied with abstractions like honor. More significantly, Raine regards Landa as a moral monster, and therefore he is undeserving of any respect at all.

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Mélanie Laurent has received a lot of attention—and deservedly so—but can we talk for a moment about the luminous Diane Kruger and her portrayal of Bridget von Hammersmark? Kruger was colorless eye candy as Helen of Troy in Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 swords-and-sandals epic, and apparently she's been a recurring character in those National Treasure films, which I've studiously avoided. Certainly, I had seen nothing that prepared me for her deliriously captivating performance in Basterds. Tarantino deserves credit for scripting Bridget as one of the most fascinating and most precisely drawn characters in the film, and also for his well-established ability to bring out the best in his performers. Let's not short-change Kruger, however. She slips effortlessly into the role of a 1940s screen diva, right down to the poised yet relaxed way she perches on her chair with cigarette and coquettish smirk. Kruger is the picture of Teutonic sparkle, but the allure of Bridget isn't simply due to the actress' appropriation of the Marlene Dietrich look. Watch the whirl of emotions that Kruger permits to peek from beneath Bridget's mask of droll, eager-to-please sweetness. Listen to her carefully during the now-notorious tavern scene, and you'll see how cunning and fearless Bridget is, and also how apparent it is that Archie Hicox and the Basterds, not her, are the ones who let their anxiety get the better of them. Every step of the way through that scene, Bridget attempts in vain to keep the Allied spies from panicking, to maintain a sense of calm and even warmth. It's not so much that Bridget is a good liar (she isn't), but that she knows how to use her looks, her charisma, her fame, and her audience's expectations to her advantage, to smooth out things that might otherwise look suspicious. And, good Lord, what a death scene! If any viewer harbored a speck of sympathy for Landa, surely his unusually graphic strangulation of Bridget banished it? (The slaughter of the Dreyfus family should have, but no matter...) Forget the film's later re-writing of history: Tarantino exhibits epic chutzpah in presenting an act so violent and overtly misogynistic without flinching from it. Only the brutal daylight stabbings in Fincher's Zodiac have come close in recent memory to banishing the sex appeal of fictional violence.

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Wandering outside the film blogging world for commentary on recent releases is always an enterprise fraught with peril, but Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has long been providing consistently enlightening insights into pop culture from a feminist perspective amid her postings on reproductive rights and other issues. It was Amanda's take on Death Proof that got me to appreciate its sexual politics, and has had a strong influence on the way I approach the film. Her assessment of Inglourious Basterds is no less enlightening, and while her writing at Pandagon is in the conversational style of political blogging, she uses the mode she's familiar with to raise some interesting points. Most fascinating in my mind is Zoller's embodiment of the Nice Guy archetype that has long been an object of discussion among socially-minded Third Wave feminists. Tarantino addressed the Nice Guy phenomenon with a gentler hand in Death Proof, but Zoller represents a much more frank repudiation of the obsequious, resentful sexist. The Shosanna-Zoller subplot seems designed to resonate with any woman who has ever had to parry a sycophant who refused to take "No" for an answer. The rather unfair characterization of Tarantino as a purveyor of a hyper-masculine sensibility has also been a stubborn one, to the point where four (or five) consecutive films featuring assertive female protagonists have been insufficient to dispel it. Although not all of these films pass the Bechdel Test, I suspect it's Tarantino's obsession with genre and his awestruck attitude toward female sexuality that ultimately hinder him being taking seriously as a male ally of feminism. That said, notice how sympathetic Basterds is to Shosanna's utterly no-nonsense stance towards Zoller. She never gives him an inch, and Zoller's frustration builds until his underlying entitlement boils over into violent rage. The viewer never really trusts Zoller either, and not just because he's a Nazi and a Goebbels protege. It's the false modesty during his early scenes that made my Spidey-Sense tingle, if only because it's so unusual to see a character take such a stance in a Tarantino film. The trait that seems to hold for almost all of Tarantino's characters is their swagger, whether warranted or not. Who was the last modest Tarantino character? Poor Marvin from Pulp Fiction? This more than anything signaled to me that Zoller's initial humility about his fame was a disingenuous strategy to impress Shosanna. And, again, what does Shosanna's momentary softening for the schmuck get her? A brutal, agonizing death. As much as Shossana's ugly demise seems an affirmation of the film's merciless Nazi-snuffing, it equally represents a warning never to let your guard down around your creepy wannabe-boyfriend.

District 9

2009 // USA - New Zealand // Neill Blomkamp // August 27, 2009 // Theatrical Print

C+ - The lusciously realized science fiction setting of District 9 almost compensates for the film's slack qualities. Eschewing deep space wonders, director Neill Blomkamp brings his extraterrestrials into the dusty, militarized locale of modern South Africa. The first twenty minutes of District 9 constitute its most lively and gratifying stretch, as Blomkamp lithely blends faux footage from news programs, documentaries, security cameras, and other sources to set up his tale. However, what starts out as a gripping, blackly comic work evolves into a wearying slog, with the film reverting to the obnoxious chase-escape-chase rhythm of countless action films. (It's telling that a COPS-style ride-along early in the film is its best sequence.) The film's visual flourishes are arresting and often witty, from the swirl of flickering symbols within an alien cockpit, to the sight of giant insects in castoff human clothing. Such pleasures, however, aren't worth the surrounding ballast. The attempts to analogize the alien "prawns" with real-world refugees are clumsy and illogical. The story depends on a protagonist who acts head-slappingly stupid with irksome consistency, and doesn't evoke the sympathy that Blomkamp imagines he does. Most disappointingly, District 9 eventually succumbs to unfortunately typical scifi tedium.

Inglourious Basterds

Now We Are All Sons of Bitches

2009 // USA - Germany - France // Quentin Tarantino // August 21, 2009 // Theatrical Print

A - I really should know better at this point. My reaction upon hearing of an upcoming Quentin Tarantino film is reliably a mixture of excitement and trepidation. When I think about it for more than a moment, however, this response seems disgracefully childish, if completely understandable. I was one of countless thirty-somethings whose early appreciation of independent American film was driven primarily by Tarantino's first two films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Consequently, my responses to his subsequent films are tinted by an unfortunate reactionary urge, whispering at me to contrast his latest feature with the Real Tarantino on bombastic display in Dogs and Fiction. Of course, this is monstrously unfair. Tarantino has grown significantly as a director in the past fifteen years, parlaying his success as the American wunderkind of thrilling, densely referential cinema into ever more ambitious works. Even as he refined the familiar stylistic trappings that are comfortable for him (the "how," if you will), he has tackled increasingly challenging stories and themes (the "what"). With a little effort, I've shaken off my blinkered way of looking at Tarantino's post-Fiction output. What's more, I've come to regard Kill Bill Volume II and Death Proof as among most vital works of American cinema in the past five years. And so here we are with Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino's answer to the World War II film. And damn if it doesn't exhibit every sign of continuing the director's recent arc of daring, socially aware films that triumph as both giddy entertainments and bracing studies of desperately held cultural values.

The eponymous Basterds are a squad of eight Jewish-American soldiers who, under the command of Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt with mustache and comical Tennessee drawl), are recruited to conduct a campaign of terror against Nazis in German-occupied France. Among their number are Donny Donowitz, the "Jewish Bear" (an overwrought Eli Roth), who spatters Hun brains with a baseball bat, and Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), an officer-fragging anti-Nazi German solider whom the unit rescues and recruits. Tarantino presents the Basterds as avenging angels, vessels of Jewish and American wish fulfillment and a fantastical "What If" correction to history. They take no prisoners, just scalps. Most captives are summarily executed, but a few are released... after Raine carves a swastika in their forehead with his enormous Bowie knife. (Already thinking ahead to the assimilation of former National Socialists into post-war Germany, the lieutenant explains, "I'm gonna give you somethin' you can't take off.") Tarantino doesn't shy away from the grisly, brutal quality of the Basterds' mission, which at bottom is nothing more than behind-enemy-lines terrorism, all with the intent of demoralizing the Reich's war machine.

Consistent with Tarantino's approach to violence in his previous films, Basterds takes a conflicted stance towards its gruesome, often stomach-churning bloodshed. In the main, the film glories in its violence, drinking deeply from it in a kind of adolescent crimson haze. Nazis are, of course, the last group on which it is socially acceptable to visit atrocious violence in fiction, but rarely has a film so thoroughly and unashamedly exploited this principle. There is a theory that Raiders of the Lost Ark might have begun as George Lucas' homage to the pulp serials of the early twentieth century, but Steven Spielberg lent it the tone of a childhood revenge fantasy against the Third Reich. Basterds embraces this function much more explicitly than Raiders ever did, reveling in vicarious vengeance with a giddiness that invokes the exploitation tradition that Tarantino adores. (Basterds' subtitle might as well be Die Screaming, Adolf!) However, as with Kill Bill's bloodbaths and Death Proof's manglings, Basterds' violence is tightly enmeshed with the film's thematic explorations.

Ah, but I need to back up a bit and clarify that Inglourious Basterds regards the righteous killers of its title as mere secondary characters. The film's marketing, as is typical for Tarantino's features, is amusingly deceptive, in that the film is not principally focused on Raine's unit. In fact, the protagonist of Basterds is Shosanna, a French Jewess played to wary, smoldering perfection by Mélanie Laurent. If one were inclined to affix a label to a Tarantino film (a questionable enterprise), Basterds is not so much a "war film" as it is a thriller about survival and revenge. Tarantino divides his film into five acts, and, Pitt's top billing notwithstanding, the Basterds don't even appear until the second. The first act, which tells the story of Shosanna's terrifying encounter with the SS while hiding in rural France, is a slow-burn genre slice of heaven all on its own. Tarantino is rarely credited for his phenomenal skill as a writer-director of thriller sequences, for which he has few equals among American filmmakers. Every aspect of the first act ratchets the tension up another notch: the texture and arrangement of furnishings within a cramped farmhouse, the pauses and glances of the characters, and a script that tightens with the inevitability of a noose. (Another tense standoff, set in a basement bar, is the film's other high point.) Christoph Waltz, as the malevolent "Jew-Hunter" Colonel Hans Landa, provides oily slatherings of menace to these scenes, helped along by Tarantino's customary doting regard for his performers. None of it is remotely authentic, but, as with the director's previous films, Basterds seduces you and sweeps you along, rather than coldly manipulating you. Tarantino's features are always compelling entertainments in their bones, and Basterds is no exception.

However, Tarantino has also striven to wed pure cinematic delight to more sophisticated concerns, albeit in a manner that is always exceedingly slippery. Thus, like a stage magician, Tarantino draws the eye with badass gangsters, ninja clans, and car chases, while with his other hand he tackles our unexamined notions swirling around aging (Jackie Brown), identity (Kill Bill), and the intersection of gender, sex, and violence (Death Proof). With Basterds, it's not until after we've been introduced to Shosanna and to Raine's Nazi-hunters that Tarantino begins to reveal his deeper purpose: to explore the role of film in providing a shared history, cultural identity, and cathartic reconciliation of our desires with reality. Four years after she slipped through Landa's grasp, Shosanna is living incognito in Paris, where she owns and manages a movie house. Joseph Goebbels' newest propaganda star, a German soldier (Daniel Brühl) who plays himself in a jingoist war picture, becomes smitten with Shosanna. He uses his newfound clout to move the film's premiere to her theater, where she will be expected to roll out the red carpet for the luminaries of the Reich. This brings the Basterds into the picture, as they have a scheme for the premiere that involves a German starlet (Diane Kruger) and a lot of dynamite. However, Shosanna and her projectionist lover (Jacky Ido) have a plan of their own, one so joyfully, deliciously murderous that it might give even the Basterds pause. Appropriately, Shosanna intends to use both physical film prints and the projected image itself to deliver her overdue message of vengeance, with the result quite intentionally evoking The Wizard of Oz.

Tarantino puts all of these events in motion without any regard for historical accuracy, but that, as they say, is the whole point. Basterds doesn't just twist the facts; it stomps all over them with a stormtrooper's boot. It then remolds the resulting pulp of fact and fiction—a blob of The Diary of Anne Frank here, a chunk of The Dirty Dozen there—into an alternate history that concludes with sweet justice, although not exactly the way we might wish. Basterds' milieu is one where the world didn't turn a blind eye to the Holocaust, where former Nazis didn't vanish into civilian life, and where the righteous wrath of a few tough-as-nails Americans literally brought the war to an end. Yet while Tarantino recognizes the allure of this fantasy and indulges it, he doesn't want us to swallow it uncritically. Basterds is certainly the most "meta" film that the director has ever made, balancing its reverence for the emotional and purgative power of cinema with a palpable trepidation about the sinister potential of that power. It's not a coincidence that Shosanna uses a film to obtain her revenge against the Nazis, just as Tarantino is doing, just as, indeed, nearly every World War II film does. Basterds suggests that the enduring popularity of WWII as a film subject points to our fundamental need to eradicate, again and again, the twentieth century's personification of human evil. Far from exorcising the fascistic currents within our own society, however, this ritual Nazi-slaying only ensures the survival of the Reich in the public consciousness, and runs the risk of establishing nationalistic myths, just as Goebbels' propaganda film does.

Tarantino is deliberately vauge when it comes to how exactly we should feel about his film, which is emblematic of the director's customary tapdance between his love of visceral thrills and his bold, deconstructive urges. He clearly wants the audience to have as much fun as he is having, but he also asks that we examine how that enjoyment implicates us. Certainly, the punishment that the Basterds mete out is more tribal than the personal justice visited on Death Proof's Stuntman Mike. Should we feel remorse for enjoying the sight of humans being mutilated and executed for what they are rather than what they have done (even if what they are is racial supremacists and vicious authoritarians)? Despite all of Pitt's droll wisecracks, plainly intended to elicit cheers from the audience, Tarantino asks what exactly we achieve by visiting these places again and again. In the cineplex, it is always Berlin, 1944. While Inglourious Basterds quenches our longing to annihilate the swastika-adorned boogeyman, it also offers a frantic, sarcastic hope. If we riddle the Nazi elite with a blizzard of bullets, if we burn their corpses to cinders, if we rewrite history so that our victory is complete, what then? Will Hitler finally die for the last time? What, one wonders, would we make films about?

In the Loop

If I Don't Know the Answer, I'll Just Respond, Cleverly

2009 // UK // Armando Iannucci // August 18, 2009 // Theatrical Print

A- - The Hurt Locker seems to be getting some significant accolades as the first truly commendable film about the Iraq War, but as my review from earlier this week contends, this misstates the film's strengths. Kathryn Bigelow's film uses its setting to cannily, viscerally evoke its plainly stated themes. The Hurt Locker is interested in war as an irresistible personal force; the Iraq War itself is a merely a convenient vessel for that exploration. Like Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir, The Hurt Locker is as much "about" its milieu as The Iliad is "about" the Trojan War.

It is Armando Iannucci's bracing, sublimely profane farce In the Loop that strikes me as the best film to date to wrestle with the Iraq War as a phenomenon of a specific time and place. Granted, the film's "action" takes place in the corridors of British and American power, rather than on the battlefield. In the Loop operates foremost as a deliriously hideous farce in the squirming comedic form of The Office. (The film, incidentally, is a spin-off of Iannucci's British television series, The Thick of It, which is shot in a vérité style that has become a hallmark of such humor.) However, as magnificent as In the Loop is as a story about horrible people doing horrible things, it is also a devastating snapshot of the utterly dispiriting nature of politics in the twenty-first century. Not to put too fine a point on it, Iannucci has given us a treatise on bullshit, as philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt has succinctly characterized the defining feature of modern society. And what is the Iraq War--never actually name-checked in Iannucci's film--but the blood-soaked progeny of a truly epic accretion of bullshit?

The film's cast of characters is vast and filled to bursting with clowns of every stripe. On the Old World side of the pond, we are introduced to Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), a twerp of a minister with his foot perpetually in his mouth. Terrorizing Simon is Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), a ruthless monster who is Number 10 Downings eyes and ears in the ministry. Rounding things out is Toby (Chris Addison), Simon's new assistant, who is even more gutless than his boss. The setting is deliberately ambiguous, but it becomes clear that the film takes place in a fictional corollary of 2003, as the drumbeat for war with an unnamed Mideast nation reaches deafening levels. Simon has made the apparently grievous mistake of saying on a radio program that war is "unforeseeable," a gaffe that sends Malcolm into apoplectic rage. Then again, apoplectic rage seems to be Malcolm's resting state. Simon's misstep unfortunately intersects with the visit of an American delegation, which includes State Department dove Karen Clarke and her hapless assistant, Liza Weld (Anna Chlumsky). Clarke and her Pentagon ally, Lieutenant General George Milller (James Gandolfini) suspect that State hawk Linton Barwick (David Rasche) is convening a secret "war committee," suggesting that negotiation with the Mideast nation is question is a sham.

There are, of course, many, many more characters, and the relationships between them all are politically and emotionally convoluted in a manner befitting any farce of more than passing quality. Suffice to say that the doves' sanctimonious tenacity, the hawks' diabolical maneuvers, and Simon's endless succession of blunders collide in a kind of slow-motion geopolitical clusterfuck. The film builds towards a crucial United Nations vote, with Iannucci and his writers loosely cribbing from the events of February 2003 in particular, when Colin Powell gave his notorious speech before the world body.

While In the Loop is sprinkled with on-the-nose criticism of British and American political realities of the era--one British character, referring to the fresh-faced, no-nothing ideologues that have taken over Washington D.C., notes that "it's like Bugsy Malone, but with real guns"--these are actually less cutting than the film's overall tone of stunned, lightly chuckling despair. Iannucci has crafted a porthole through which the audience may view an environment governed entirely by bullshit. While the motivations that drive the individual players in this tragedy are multitude--vanity, territoriality, sadism, lust, laziness, fear--the currency is pure bullshit, and there's a kind of awful majesty to it. Burn After Reading ventured into similar coal-black territory last year, but the crudity of its message and the slightness of its story lent it a thematic flimsiness. In the Loop is more successful because it ties its central observations about the preeminence of bullshit to a specific, demonstrably horrible real-world outcome.

It's enough to make you weep in anguish, were it not so funny. Not the knee-slapping, belly-laughing kind of funny, really, but the sort that leaves you sitting with your mouth open, barely able to keep up with what you're hearing. Iannucci and his cabal of writers--Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche, and Ian Martin--ensure that every character is thoroughly crapped upon and revealed for the craven twits they truly are. The script is breathless, whirring along on a current of acid observations, discomfiting tension, and breathtaking insults. Irannucci's direction is crisp, dexterous, and deferential to his characters. Far from serving as a stylistic distraction, his handheld, pseudo-documentary method provides an unobtrusive framework that permits the focus to rest on the physicality of his actors, especially their faces.

The performances are all memorable, from Hollander's clueless flailing to Chlumsky's exasperated anxiousness to Rasche's squinting, affable malevolence. Zach Woods is absolutely repugnant (in the best possible way) as a disarmingly creepy State Department dork who takes delight in others' misery. The hands-down show-stealer, however, is Capaldi, whose positively satanic Malcolm Tucker is one of the few characters to migrate directly from The Thick of It. Seemingly perpetually on the verge on an aneurysm, Tucker devours everyone he encounters--allies, subordinates, rivals, passing strangers--with epic torrents of profanity, to rival even high-water marks such as The Big Lebowski and In Bruges. With a Scottish brogue that seems made for vulgarity, Capaldi tears a fearsome path through his every scene, leaving the other characters (and the actors, I suspect) blinking in stunned silence. It's like watching the Tiger Woods of hate. Within a story that brims with so much spin and truthiness, there's something pure about Malcolm's absolute misanthropy. Here at last, he seems to suggest, is something we can count on: the reliability of a colossal asshole.

The Hurt Locker

Let's Be Careful Out There

2008 // USA // Kathryn Bigelow // August 11, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B+ - The Hurt Locker telegraphs its thematic thrust with its opening epigraph, a quotation from Chris Hedges' (somewhat overrated) War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning: "War is a drug." The essential cunning of Kathryn Bigelow's gripping Iraq war feature—an "anti-action" action film in the vein of Munich—is its choice of protagonist. In order to establish the fundamentally addictive character of danger in a theater of war, Bigelow chooses not a Working Joe soldier or a Special Forces superman, but an unusual stripe of cowboy: a bomb disposal specialist, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner). James is a technician first and foremost, but a damn good one. He dodges when an officer asks how many bombs he has disarmed, but under pressure he confidently replies "873." James is not a straight-arrow professional, however. He is fearless, reckless, and utterly addicted to the thrill of stopping explosions before they happen, the sort of soldier who elicits awe, but not confidence. The man who is supposed to have James' back, Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), lays out his dilemma bluntly: he won't stand by while a hot-shit redneck with a death wish gets him and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) killed.

James is rotated into the bomb disposal unit of Bravo Company with Sanborn and Eldridge after their previous technician (Guy Pearce) is killed during a disarmament mission. The other two men are ticking off the days until their rotation is finished. Sanborn yearns to start a family back home even as he questions the wisdom of doing so, while Eldridge is increasingly bedeviled by existential panic. Bigelow presents the story of the last month and a half of the unit's rotation as a series of linked set pieces depicting isolated missions. Each one starts out more or less the same. The three-man unit receives a call, loads up James' specialized equipment, and rolls out in an armored Humvee to deal with an explosive device. The hazards faced by a civilian bomb squad seem like child's play compared to the working conditions these soldiers face: unholy heat, choking dust, unfamiliar surroundings, and a hostile population. Every minute that James spends trying to disarm a bomb is a minute for locals to gather and gawk, any one of whom could hold a cell phone that will detonate the device.

Bigelow adds texture to the story by varying the events and demands of the missions. Each one is fundamentally the same, yet each possesses unique perils. James and his fellow soldiers must contend with snipers, fires, runaway cars, private contractors, flat tires, goat herds, dehydration, dirty ammunition, poor intelligence, and a reluctant suicide bomber. Compared to a normal infantry unit, James' squad has a routine characterized by discrete tasks and simple goals: disarm the bomb. This lends their work a tone probably familiar to civilian police officers or even utility repairmen, albeit with exponentially higher risks. You get the call, you go to the job, you finish the job, you head back. Sanborn and Eldridge want to keep their heads down, focus on each mission as it comes, and make it out alive on the other end. Try as they might, however, they can't resist mulling over why they do what they do, what it all means, and how the world got so fucked up. James, for all his nonchalant machismo, seems to be searching for something, perhaps a connection to his lethal profession that runs deeper than the titillation of risk. He tries to strike up a jovial friendship with an Iraqi kid who hawks DVDs on the base, but the consequences of this outreach only intensify his doubts.

Bigelow and novice screenwriter Mark Boal don't approach their material with an overtly political tone, at least as one might ordinarily understand it. There are no voices for or against the Iraq war as a political or military action. The Hurt Locker's characters are simply too close to the ground, and if they have any opinions, they keep them close to the chest. Bigelow aligns our sympathies with the soldiers, even as she makes it clear that these are macho blockheads with hefty reserves of racism, rage, and cynicism. While acknowledging these aspects of her characters, Bigelow doesn't sit in judgment. The film's sociological dimensions are broader, more in line with Hedges' thesis about the role of war in structuring the human experience. While Bigelow's exploration of this theme isn't especially intricate—she is directing an action-thriller at bottom, after all—but it is decisively, cleanly, and brilliantly mated to her storytelling. What she presents in The Hurt Locker is a neat little arc about James' emergent awareness that war fulfills him in way that is exclusionary, terrifying, and unsolvable.

What sets The Hurt Locker apart from its fellow travelers in the genre is Bigelow's masterful direction, which really is a revelation. The film's central scenario is designed to elicit tension: James tries desperately to deactivate bombs while Sanborn and Eldridge anxiously stand guard. And indeed, the film is unbearably, thrillingly tense. This is, of course, absolutely necessary for the film's thematic aims, as the viewer must share the illicit rush of dancing on that metaphorical ledge with James. Given the handheld, grainy 16 mm format and rapid cutting that Bigelow and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd employ, the clarity of the action is stunning. Here is a film that is marvelously articulate in its use of space, never engaging in confused cinematic language in the service of questionable stylistic whims. The Hurt Locker is a devastating rejoinder to the notion that a handheld, naturalistic technique necessarily dooms a film to a muddled, disorienting, seizure-inducing hell.

What emerges from Bigelow's efforts is a stellar action film, almost as vital as The Dark Knight, but its formal antithesis: gritty, straightforward, and uncluttered. It's an achievement, to be sure, and if it seems a touch underwhelming, perhaps that's because war films are expected to be grandiose, as though flabbiness were a cinematic virtue. When a toned, harrowing little marvel like The Hurt Locker comes along, it unbalances and electrifies.

Humpday

Bros on Film

2009 // USA // Lynn Shelton // July 29, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - The aesthetic markers of the mumblecore current in independent film—handheld digital video, scruffy lighting and sound, improvised dialog, nonprofessional actors—have always seemed less essential than its scorched earth approach to the fertile comedy ground of socially awkward interpersonal situations. Mumblecore's acolytes seem to accept, as an uncontroversial given, that everything will not turn out for the best, contra Hollywood's usual comedic offerings. There's no gleefulness or operatic lustiness to this claim, as in the Coens. Rather, what emerges is a kind of woeful acquiescence to the fact that human beings will screw up everything good in their lives, usually out of narcissism. It's a bleak sentiment to be sure, but the better filmmakers can hew to this worldview while rendering the painful amusing and the amusing painful. Lynn Shelton's deliciously discomfiting Humpday, the latest offering that might reasonably be tagged with the mumblecore descriptor, is a fine example of a comedy that follows every jot of human unpleasantness while maintaining the spirited tone of an outrageous, notorious anecdote. Its Motel 6 production values are a perfect fit, but Humpday's comedy is genuine, and not dependent on indie scuzziness for its street cred.

The high concept that underlies the film would inevitably have been squandered in studio hands: two straight male friends agree to create and star in a gay porn film together. One can almost see the joyless, ugly thing that might have been born from such a story seed. Thankfully, Humpday is nothing of the sort, nor could it have been, for within its chosen stylistic parameters, anal sex wisecracks and nasty stereotypes just don't function properly. In truth, the film isn't really about homosexuality at all, except as a means examine hetero male intimacy, machismo, and anxiety. It doesn't hurt that Shelton's protagonists, Ben (Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Joshua Leonard), are a couple of liberal Seattle natives, permitting the film to dispense with the Ick Factor and dive into nastier stuff, like doubt, hypocrisy, and selfishness.

Ben and his wife Anne (Alicia Delmore) are middle-class latte-sipping types, but they gladly offer sleeping space when Ben's college buddy Andrew, a manically affable bearded vagabond, shows up at their door at 3 a.m. Twenty-four hours later, after a wild party and a bit of pot, Ben and Andrew have somehow dared themselves to have sex on camera and submit the result to the HUMP! film festival. How they got themselves into this situation—and why they just can't back down from such a ludicrous challenge—is a part of Humpday's cunning. In a sitcom, it would all be the result of a grand misunderstanding, but Shelton arrives there incrementally, by escalating the situation in small, authentic ways. Her wit is aimed squarely at the impulse among people (straight men in this context) to define themselves according to absurd criteria: sexual "victories," unfulfilled ambitions and whims, and constructed personas that are fundamentally unsatisfying.

Most of Humpday's comedy is of the cringing variety, as Ben and Andrew—generally likable fellows, but self-absorbed and simmering with indefinite angst—fumble their way through one awful conversation and confrontation after another. Duplass and Leonard in particular are fearless performers, capable of smoothing away the traces of awareness and presenting their characters are graceless Average Joes ripe for mockery. It's downright painful to watch them, but only because it's so easy to forget that one is watching a fictional feature rather than a humiliating home video. Shelton breaks up the tone of sustained social agony with cathartic quarrels and the occasional bit of slapstick, such as a scuffle over a basketball or the downright uproarious sight of Ben and Andrew's first kiss, which requires a running start. Even these elements, however, touch upon Humpday's central concerns: discontent and the fear that expression of that discontent will stray outside of acceptable boundaries.

Shelton permits her characters to wander through the uncanny events of roughly forty-eight hours at a kind of goofy, anxious amble. The pacing never really works, perhaps because there's some wheel-spinning as the film draws out the revelations, prompting the viewer to wince and long for it to end. (Is it just me, or has The Office solidified the "more-is-more" principle for squirm-worthy comedic monologues?) The absence of any epilogue, when the story practically begs for one, is also disappointing. Still, Humpday's stumbles are primarily ones of rhythm, only mildly detracting from the essential funniness of the script and performances, which possess a faux-vérité tragicomic charm. What elevates the film beyond a forgettable farce is its generous exploration of human foibles within an essentially silly situation. It's hardly a masterpiece of coal-black comedy, but it is honest and genuinely interested in scratching at everything idiotic about relationships, particularly straight male ones: the inane rituals, the selfishness, the emotional secrecy, the posturing, the defensiveness. Thankfully, Ben and Andrew are amusing in their disheveled stupidity, and Shelton's approach is never mean-spirited or snide, ensuring the film's value as both a damn funny diversion and a gentle and emotionally thoughtful tragedy.