Why didn't I love Inglourious Basterds?

I saw Quentin Tarantino's newest movie last week. I enjoyed the hell out of it. Really. But it was kind of like junk food, wasn't it?

I got in a bit of an argument with the guy at my comic book store about this. I told him that after we saw Inglourious Basterds, I couldn't figure out what the point was. He told me it didn't need a point. But I disagree! Yes, this is America! Disagreement is the spice of life!

Let me start by saying that I really enjoyed it. I just wrote it above, didn't I? Tarantino certainly knows how to put a movie together, and he's dynamite with actors. He often gets career-best performances out of actors. Brad Pitt is fantastic and funny, Mélanie Laurent is hard-ass and steely, Diane Kruger is wonderfully glamorous, and the Basterds themselves are excellent. Christoph Waltz is getting all the Oscar talk, and he's astonishing as Colonel Hans Landa, the "Jew Hunter." He's amazingly evil and refreshingly civil, except when, stunningly, he's not. The opening scene, when he shows up at a Frenchman's farm looking for a Jewish family, is one of the tensest scenes Tarantino has come up with in years. Waltz does a wonderful job with this utter opportunist, who does his job well but isn't above getting something for himself. Tarantino, naturally, comes up with some excellent action (a Mexican stand-off? in a Tarantino film? you don't say!) and sudden and shocking violence, and he reaches into his usual bag of tricks to twist the narrative around a bit - not as well as he's done in the past, but he's still a very good filmmaker. The grand finale is a wonderful orgy of violence and sly humor, and the final scene is a nice touch. Plus, Mike Myers is hilarious in his brief scene.

So what's my problem? Why can't I love this movie? Well, as I wrote, it's junk food. I couldn't quite figure out why Tarantino made this movie and what he's trying to say. My friend said it doesn't matter, that I should just enjoy it for the entertainment. However, I said that Tarantino has been making movies for almost 20 years, and he hasn't made one with something interesting to say since Jackie Brown, which came out in 1997 (granted, he's only directed two movies in between that one and this one, but still). We know he can make dazzling technical movies and that he can get excellent work out of his actors. Can he do anything else?

Getting back to Inglourious Basterds (and yes, I'm going to SPOIL it, so read no further if you really want to see it clean): What's Tarantino really trying to say? Ultimately, this is Death Wish with better financing and better acting. It's a revenge fantasy, and while I don't have an issue with revenge fantasies per se, Tarantino's last big movie, Kill Bill, was also a revenge fantasy. Revenge obviously plays a big role in all of his movies, to the degree that he's almost pathological about it, but does it need to be the driving force of this movie? We've heard the objections to the movie, about how it distorts history and is therefore disrespectful to Jews, because Tarantino's belief that killing Hitler somehow makes up for the millions slaughtered by the Nazis. I didn't get that - this is like a lot of old-time World War II movies, in which the Holocaust is virtually ignored because it gets in the way of a good action movie. Sure, Tarantino can make an action movie set in World War II in which he gleefully kills the Nazi High Command - I don't have a problem with that. I guess my objection is more with the tone of the movie. Tarantino seems to be far too gleeful about this movie, and it jars with the somewhat serious tone the movie has for a good deal of it. I wasn't particularly uncomfortable with Brad Pitt being a cheery psychopath, for instance - his attitude seems to be the one you need in a horrible war. It just seems like Tarantino, for all his gifts as a filmmaker, simply wants to revel in what he can do instead of trying for something more. If we look at someone like Scorsese, for instance, as an example of someone who has always resisted stereotyping. We might think of him as a director who makes bleak movies often starring Italian-American New York gangsters, but he's made a lot of different kinds of movies - he made The Age of Innocence, The Last Temptation of Christ, After Hours, The Last Waltz, and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, for crying out loud. Scorsese is a great director because he doesn't let himself get pigeonholed. Tarantino, it seems, pigeonholes himself.

I suppose I'm not explaining myself very well. Tarantino is a gifted filmmaker, but he's content to mine the movies he saw in his childhood for inspiration and simply update things with tongue in cheek. Inglourious Basterds is a "remake" of an old Italian movie, for instance. I assume that Tarantino has seen the great World War II movies of the 1960s and 1970s, because that's when he was growing up. But even those movies took the war seriously, even if they had some humor. Tarantino takes nothing seriously, apparently, and because he doesn't make straight comedies, he usually falls short of greatness because of this. At least that's what I think. Maybe I'm not getting it across very well. Sorry!

Anyway, Inglourious Basterds is a marvelous movie to watch. I just didn't get enough out of it. Oh well.

What I've been reading

Last Team Standing: How the Steelers and the Eagles - "The Steagles" - Saved Pro Football During World War II by Matthew Algeo. 270 pages, 2006, Da Capo Press.

I've mentioned before how keen I've become recently on the early (pre-1960) days of the NFL (and football in general), and this is the second book I've read recently about that time (here's the other one). This is also the second one I've read in which the author claims that his topic "saved" pro football. Fleming has a stronger case. In fact, I'm not sure if Algeo even has a case.

That doesn't mean this isn't a fascinating book. This is a rather nice social history of America during World War II, with some football thrown in to make it a "sports" book. The social aspects of the book, especially when compared to the state of our society today, is what makes the book compelling. The football parts of exciting, but somewhat anticlimactic. It's interesting how Algeo tries to make them more exciting than they are. But that's okay.

The book is about the "Steagles," as the title indicates. In 1943, the National Football League was in trouble. In those early days, franchises folded with stunning regularity, and scheduling games was extremely messy. A decade earlier, the NFL had finally gotten around to having a championship game, but there was still a perception that pro football was bush league. This was emphasized when World War II broke out. President Roosevelt sent a "Green Light Letter" to Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the baseball commissioner (Algeo calls him "rigid and humorless," which is probably the nicest description anyone can use for Landis), imploring him to keep baseball open through the duration of the war. Roosevelt, who was a football fan, didn't mention pro football or send a letter to Elmer Layden, the NFL commissioner. Pro football just didn't matter. But Layden and the owners assumed that Roosevelt's stamp of approval for baseball meant that football should continue, as well. What they didn't count on was that by 1943, the second war season, they would run out of players. Yes, something that we can barely imagine was threatening to shut down the National Football League. The Eagles were in a better position than the Steelers, who had six players under contract, but neither team was in a good position. Add that to the fact that both teams were pretty awful, and there was a good chance one or neither would play football in 1943. But the owners (Bert Bell, who had owned the Eagles, was at that point the co-owner of the Steelers, a complicated situation Algeo goes over quite well) came up with a solution: merge the team. The team would play two games in Pittsburgh and four games in Philadelphia, and they would be coached by two men: Earle "Greasy" Neale and Walt Kiesling, who had coached the Eagles and Steelers, respectively, the year before.

If this situation sounds untenable, well, it almost was. Neale and Kiesling hated each other, while Lex Thompson, the Eagles' owner, would only allow the team to be called the "Eagles." The team wore Philadelphia colors, and all of this naturally led the Pittsburgh contingent to feel like they were second-class citizens. However, somehow the team came together and finished with a winning record of 5-4-1 - the first winning record in Philadelphia history and only the second in Pittsburgh. Until the very end of the season, they were in contention to play in the Championship Game. On 7 November 1943 they tied the Washington Redskins, led by Sammy Baugh, ending Washington's 13-game winning streak. They went one further on 28 November, thumping the Redskins 27-14, the team's first loss in over a year. But the Steagles couldn't beat the pathetic Brooklyn Dodgers (football teams were often named after the city's baseball team, an indication of the NFL's second-class status) a week after their tie of the Redskins, and they lost to the Packers a week after their glorious victory over Washington, which put the final nail in the coffin. Still, they had a successful season, which was pretty shocking.

The football side of the book is interesting, although because the Steagles turned out to be a mediocre team, it's not as fascinating as it could have been. Sure, the book would have been better if Phil-Pitt ended up winning their division or even the NFL Championship, but the cards were too stacked against them. Algeo doesn't really make a very good case that the merger saved pro football - the stronger teams, such as the Redskins, Giants, and Bears, weren't hurt too much by the war and the fact that the Cleveland Rams folded for the year didn't destroy the NFL - but that doesn't really matter. Where the book really shines is as social history. Algeo focuses on a few core players on the Steagles - Ted Doyle, Al Wistert, Bill Hewitt, Jack Hinkle, Roy Zimmerman - to tell the story of football players and America during the war. These men were 4-F, so they were looked down upon by able-bodied men who went off to war. Many of them were scorned as well for the injuries that made them 4-F - Hewitt had a perforated eardrum, for instance. Many who went to war wondered why people could play football but not fight in a war, but Algeo makes the point that the Army itself said that someone with a perforated eardrum could not serve, and it wasn't Hewitt's fault. The players were often deeply ashamed about not being able to serve their country, and they played harder because of it. Algeo also reminds us that these men were making very little money playing football, so they worked jobs during the week. The owners and coaches of the team got the men into "essential" jobs - one of them worked on the Manhattan Project - so that they contributed to the war effort even if they didn't fight.

Algeo also makes an interesting point about the current war, although I'm sure he didn't mean it. Reading about the "war at home" during World War II reminded me, again, why I'm so opposed to our current shenanigans. I'd probably be opposed to the Iraq war no matter what, but the fact that our president didn't try to get us all behind the war is ridiculous. In this book, we read about all the things that were going on in the country and how the government tried to make sure everyone felt like they were contributing. It didn't work completely, but it was still a lot better than what we have now. As you read this book, you can't help but wonder what the state of the country would be like if Bush had asked Americans to make more sacrifices to help the soldiers. From interviews with the players, we get the sense that life was hard, but they were constantly reminded how much harder it was for the people fighting the war. It's a fascinating portrait of a country that was united far more than it was now, not because everyone was naturally more patriotic, but because the government actively encouraged (not ordered) the citizens to become involved. We're not involved in this war unless we know someone fighting, and that's Bush's fault. And, I believe, it's a reason everyone is sick of it.

But this shouldn't be a screed about our current situation. Algeo's book is a very interesting look at sports and its relationship to the American public, as well as telling the story of one of the odder episodes in professional football history. If it doesn't quite live up to the title, it's still a very interesting read. Unless you don't like American culture. Is that you? Huh? I bet you like rugby, don't you, you Commie!