Freaky things happen when egalitarianism, nonconformity, and competitiveness all commingle: It’s like inviting Kanye West, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé’s unborn child to the same party. But the movie gets its guests so good and plastered that they lapse into conviviality—of which Pitt’s G.M. is the human crucible. The actor puts on a great show. Although this Beane withholds what he feels—he doesn’t travel with the team, so as to resist bonding with players he may need to lay off—he makes no bones about what he’s thinking; and each thought gets transferred into a gesture. Beane’s aperçus bubble up like coffee in a percolator. What we see seems more like a salty hick than the real Beane, who was raised in San Diego and got into Stanford on scholarship (which he turned down, a decision the movie milks for drama); he seems more like a waggish Heartland all-star—like, in fact, Pitt. But the star is all in and totally convincing—despite playing an uncanny reflection of what seven-out-of-10 hetero guys see when they preen in the mirror. He may not have much money, but he sure has balls—base and otherwise.

For contrast, Jonah Hill plays Peter Brand—the desk jockey who introduces “sabermetrics” to Beane—with as little motion as possible. This Yale-educated goober seems aware that every time he does move, he flubs it up, so Hill acts with remarkable economy, combining his complaisant young nebbish from Get Him to the Greek with his stonefaced Cyrus. The writers throw in some perfunctory benevolent-jock / idolizing-nerd gags that redound to Pitt-Beane’s noblesse oblige; but even doofy old jokes can be told well, and I was not alone in laughing at them. (Besides, nobody’s at risk of taking offense; Brand is a fictitious version of Beane’s real-life collaborator, who was chronicled in Michael Lewis’s 2003 book. The same may not go for Spike Jonze as Beane’s ex’s new husband; he’s a rich ponce, and the condescension, sportive or no, is palpable.) It’s almost as if the supporting actors were all told to stay out of Pitt’s way. The athletes—like playboy nepotist Jeremy Giambi (Nick Porrazzo); Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), the shy career catcher who Beane recruits as a first baseman; and David Justice (Stephen Bishop), whose once-bright star is fading—perform with the trepidation of men on their last legs. As the A’s field manager, Art Howe—the most sympathetic representative of the old guard—Philip Seymour Hoffman is superbly cast; he gives Hill’s underplaying a run for its money. He seems to have come out the womb as prudent as a grampa.

Perhaps it’s a tribute to Beane and his philosophy that Bennett Miller—Where has he been? Was he sent back to the minors after Capote?—directed Moneyball without an ounce of excess; and though the obstinate auteurist in me thinks that such a strategy pushes the filmmaking up the mezzanine and just out of spitting distance from art, I admire its hardness and thrift. The bulk of the movie is set not on the field, where myths are made, but in the dingy offices of the Oakland Coliseum, where glory is manufactured. Wally Pfister’s lighting is a tad too authentic to the blah of fluorescent bulbs; but that’s nitpicking—at this stadium, even the players have to put quarters in the vending machines. Besides, there’s some visual intelligence at work. Fenway Park, shown on a rainy day, has the expansiveness and gravity of a cathedral—it gets the reverence that the A’s Coliseum, the Rodney Dangerfield of ballparks, does not. And when Brand whizzes through his software, the images are blown up so that each pixel’s as big as a planet. This may have a subversive edge: as if sabermetrics magnifies to a meaningless degree.

Perhaps because we see so many meetings and so little action—and the script, a fine balance of wit and jargon, is Steve Zaillian’s doctoring of Aaron Sorkin—Moneyball has been widely compared to The Social Network. (After all, sports are to this movie what politics are to political dramas. If only Moneyball had the so-called Facebook movie’s vulgar hook; it deserves all the help it can get.) Fincher’s film, however, glows in the mind like a stubborn ember; his equivocations over Mark Zuckerberg burned beneath the ingenious structure and seamy dubstep and serpent’s-tooth-sharp editing. One can be divided over Beane’s “politics,” but one can hardly be divided over the man. The movie Beane is neither acquisitive nor duplicitous; he loves his daughter (Kerris Dorsey, another fine underplayer), is on good terms with his ex-wife (Robin Wright), doesn’t drink heavily, isn’t addicted to women. His soul will always be pinned to third base, waiting to run the homestretch—even if bystanders already see his feet firmly planted at home, and the umpire’s called him safe. That keeps him, and the filmmakers, protected from pretentiousness; he’s a romantic in realist’s clothing—a gooey ol’ getup. Beane, further, fits the mold of the American innovator—a literal game-changer—at a time when we’re desperately in need of such; and he is, at the same time, increasingly amenable to the virtue of cooperation. But he has also put himself in a position rife with irony, as the filmmakers well know. At the end, he turns down an opportunity to be the highest-paid manager in the history of sports. Switching coasts to coach the Red Sox is a veritable promotion to the top, but Beane wants to slide a championship ring down the finger of underdog Oakland. Boston doesn’t get him, but they copy and paste from his playbook; and, as the closing credits remind us, they break the Curse of Bambino, with its help, a meager two years later. And therein lies the paradox for this rugged individualist and innovator: By putting empiricism in place of the old scouts’ orthodoxy of instinct, he’s made himself—in all his charisma—almost obsolete.

That said, I do not disbelieve claims that he is ingenuous, guileless, unpretentious, ambitious, or talented; I do not believe that The Tree of Life is a bad movie; but I also do not believe its Creator is infallible. First off, there’s a reason this film invites such anvils of praise as “confirmation that cinema can aspire to art.” His “art” is writ so large it can be seen from space: and, indeed, he chucks us at the second star to his right, and goes straight on till the first-ever morning. In case you haven’t heard, Malick follows his opening shots of grown-up Jack (Sean Penn) daydreaming in a Dallas office, during the present day, with the reactions of Jack’s parents to his brother’s death, circa the 1960s—the cause of death is undisclosed, though Malick had a younger brother who is said to have taken his own life in 1968—and then the director hops back a bit further: to the Big Bang. The ensuing light show was designed in part by Douglas Trumbull, who, as a young man, went Beyond the Infinite with Kubrick in 2001. It’s a striking montage: Like the waves breaking on themselves in Jack’s memory, there’s an ebb and flow to the cosmic matter and, later, the lava, churning out civilization’s lifeblood. It’s an illustration of time. But it doesn’t have an inch more depth than Duncan Jones’s essay on ephemerality, scrawled in editing, in Source Code. This sequence was intended for another film—one that Malick never got around to making. It shows.

What follows, for quite awhile, is equally blunt “art,” although some of the images and gestures lodge in your mind like morsels of food lodge in your teeth. Though set in Texas, where Malick grew up, it never seems very hot; for the interiors, it’s as if the curtains veiled a full moon that’s parked itself next door. The camera is a character, the buoyant head atop an invisible child’s shoulders. Essentially, The Tree of Life is a portrait of the artist as a sensitive kid; and young Jack (Hunter McCracken, fantastic) isn’t much different than other sensitive kids. The O’Brien family is mildly dysfunctional—a headache rather than a heart attack—with a childlike Earth-mother (ginger-haired Jessica Chastain), representing “grace,” and a melancholic tough-guy dad (Brad Pitt), representing “nature,” as the two poles between which Jack is torn. And though it could be said that this lengthy midsection, by way of the director’s impressionistic editing, is true to the processes of memory, it struck me as a best-of reel of every early memory Malick ever wanted to sanctify on film; and it’s sanctified, all right, by the Mahler and the Brahms that exult in the imagery. But it’s like a Hallmark card written by someone with direly serious literary ambitions: The story doesn’t live up to the style, whether you call it a story or not. (Though the story does catch up eventually.) Malick’s camera gapes at adults as if they were skyscrapers, and skyscrapers as if they were adults; this glabrous equipoise is genuinely childlike. But when exaltation is the default mode, each scene—each memory—carries the same weight as the last. The style says: Everything is beautiful. Which is to say, it says nothing.

Movies like Sucker Punch are suffocating because there’s no fresh air in them, just an accretion of pop-cultural dust; but this film, set in ’50s suburbia—Malick was born in 1943—and yet devoid of any such buildup, seems almost as phony. The O’Briens never went to movies? Never read a book or listened to a piece of music written after 1900? Didn’t even own a TV? It may be intended to represent the idealized American past; it’s an attempt at timelessness, which is an artist’s prerogative. But Jack is posited as a mid-century Huck Finn: an impossibility for almost any kid who wasn’t raised in Winter’s Bone. In Malick’s first feature, Badlands (1973), a touching study of preliterate romanticism, the killers tried to flee from society in a tree-house Neverland, but their paradise was inevitably lost. So why is Malick now applying that idyll to his own past? He once said of that film that he “tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. … I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would … take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.” His purposes in The Tree of Life may be different—the lovers on the lam in Badlands were older than Jack, but, fundamentally, they were children, too—but he’s lost his sense of irony. The very thing he once critiqued has now corrupted his memory; his critique has become his method. I don’t want to condemn the movie for going beyond the stranglehold of pop; Certified Copy functioned pretty well without it. But its absence here vexes me. (It seems almost as if he’s too good for the banal topicalities of life on Earth; but maybe I’m just being P.M.S.-y.) With the exception of Badlands and The Thin Red Line, Malick has stuck with pre-modern times; his style, responsible for some of the most awe-inspiring encounters ever on film, in The New World, is better off staying there.

The false start of the brother’s suicide is a mistake the movie never completely rectifies; since the character remains a veritable nonentity for most of the film’s duration, the event seems almost to have been exploited for poignancy. Malick’s use of a Biblical epigram, like his trademark sweet-nothings whispered in voiceover, are debatable effects—some get high on the incense he burns, even when I choke on it—but this psychological misstep cannot be swept under any impressionistic rug. The movie does improve, however, about two-thirds in, when the characters solidify as people; Malick displays a flair for drama that’s unprecedented in his oeuvre, and Brad Pitt explodes into life as a serious actor, bursting any expectations left over from his Benjamin Button or Jesse James. During the mnemonic rotogravure of the middle section, he’s stuck doing the strong-but-fair song-and-dance; but then, during a domestic dispute—the youngest son tells his ornery father to “be quiet”—Pitt shows the fairness that keeps O’Brien’s strength in check. He absorbs his wife’s blows—she’s frustrated, and knows she’s the real target of his animus—and then mollifies both her anger and his own, in something like a classical, tragic, deeply understanding embrace: one of the most poetic images in the movie. (Curiously enough, this stupendous bit of direction has been executed in rather traditional continuity editing.) The other standout, when Malick actually deals with Jack and his brother, lives up to the film’s ambitions; there’s heat, and tension, as history freezes for a moment before Jack betrays his brother’s trust—it isn’t a real pause in time, necessarily, but hesitation imposed by hindsight. And when we see the counterpoint, of the two boys embracing one another, wet with tears, no context is needed. Malick has beaded a string of memories here that doesn’t need to be chronological; the ordering device is a combination of nostalgia, love, and regret—the hazy sheath of childhood sufferance.

Those few scenes were almost enough to burn the twaddle out of my memory; it gives credence to the inscription on Malick’s cloak. (If one were to picture the director, instead, in my metaphorical sweatpants—well, a whole lot more would burn in one’s mind.) But I said that he both is and isn’t the man behind the curtain; the man who isn’t is the artist, and the man who is is the mystifier, a role he may take on unconsciously. I don’t think it’s the height of his aspirations that chafes me raw, but, rather, the blatant lack of perspective—the tendency to make a normal childhood, his own childhood, the stuff of a fairy tale, replete with the “magic” his apostles are so happy to supply. (Seeing everything as sacred is easy; being able to discern what is from the walloping mass of what isn’t is the task of an artist.) This poet, philosopher, recluse, Rhodes scholar is probably so deep that, beside him, I’m a kiddie pool. There is magic in his work, but there’s also crap—what others might refer to as “universal themes.” Is he expressing his love for, and descrying the divine in, the “ordinary” or merely the conventional, the archetypal? Is he expressing the abstract irrefutabilities espied in his work by the literati or is he just luring them down the primrose path of thought experimentation? (Maybe, one could counter, inspiring such examination is a virtue in itself; reading some of the critics who sing Malick’s body electric is as, or more, edifying than watching his film.) He asks the BIG questions, but doesn’t always frame them—just draws attention to the fact that he’s asking them. Beauty plus benignity equals A-R-T of the first degree. No wonder it only happens about five times every 40 years! God should thank Himself, however, that Malick sometimes remembers where He really is: in the details.

There’s a sense of inevitability that permeates The Hurt Locker, and though it affects us on a deeper level than most procedurals do by virtue of both skill and discretion, the film stays true to that limited form. I don’t wish to be unfair; the way the filmmakers follow the procedural lockstep is integral to their conception, and part of the movie’s power stems from the singular, sensuous way they underplay the suspense scenes—poeticizing the horrors that are, for these characters, routine. The flesh is thick, and there’s a heart beating beneath it, but we can still detect that skeleton with clichés in its marrow: the trailer-park individualist who gets the job done but puts others at risk in the process; the by-the-book black soldier whose respect the lone wolf earns; and the younger, more impressionable lad who comes to idolize the loner. There’s familiarity in all this, as well as in the lone wolf’s relationship with a young local boy (Christopher Sayegh)—an Iraqi Shia LaBoeuf who, in a nice touch, endears himself to Americans by way of curse words. (It sounds as if Lil Wayne was his English teacher.)

But the director, Kathryn Bigelow, is a pro in both the banal sense and the positive one; she knows the ropes, but knows how to tug them, too. Her focus is narrow and her methods are austere, but her targets are well embodied, and pregnant with echoes of their grander context. It’s as if she made a war film in the style of The Wrestler. She stages combat effectively, appositely—the complexity of her images is almost subliminal. Rich in its invocation of atmosphere, The Hurt Locker coats the sun-baked sands of arid Iraq with a cool iridescent gel. It’s not the kind of star-glamour antifreeze required for a bland, exploitive movie like The Kingdom (2007)—a lemon; it’s more like the psychological analgesics that professional soldiers mask their anxieties with. We aren’t given babes in the woods like Charlie Sheen in Platoon; unformed baby-men whose innocence is despoiled by war are a dramatic shortcut, as easy to sympathize with as puppies under Jack the Ripper’s knife. Bigelow lets us under her guarded soldiers’ skins with a vision that’s neither tawdry nor ironic.

These troopers constitute a bomb squad in its final weeks of deployment in Baghdad: cocksure SSgt. James (Jeremy Renner), prim Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), and sensitive Sgt. Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). James is something of a legend for having disarmed 800-something I.E.D.s in his day, and approaches each new one with an aloofness that drives his teammates batty. This is pure procedural—vindicating the competent badass (and we’re cued in immediately that he’s a badass because he smokes cigarettes) who doesn’t follow the rules but gets the job done is old-bag Hollywood heroism. But the more we see James in action, the more his strut seems abreast of a fresher truth; back on the home front, he’s either a father or some woman’s baby-daddy—his ex-wife still lives with him, so he’s not sure. He’s graceful under pressure, and in the heat of combat, he’s coolly maternal to his men; yet, as Eldridge tells him, he’s one hell of a leader, but lackluster as a people person. He needs the specter of death barking up his leg like a rabid dog; without it, he can’t be all that he can be. His ravenous addiction to war is the tragedy of war.

One can imagine that Mark Boal’s script is delicately sparse: an outline using Post-It-note character summaries for guidance. I don’t mean this derogatorily. The characters don’t fully explain themselves or their biographies in much detail, but that doesn’t make them seem incomplete or phony or untrue to the types of people they represent; it’s a gracious form of ambiguity on Boal’s part—gracious to us and the actors. Renner, of course, is the star—but, unlike Jamie Foxx in The Kingdom, Renner makes his baditude seem mildewy, a defense against his battered sensitivity, which seems native to that plucky, plaintive face. I remember that face from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, though he was subordinated there by Brad Pitt, Sam Rockwell, and Casey Affleck; but the chilly serial killer he played in Dahmer, which I once caught as a midnight snack on IFC, seems more closely related to his bomb tech here. Renner’s instinct leads him to introversion, which is perfect for SSgt. James; like Boal’s script, James’s character needs not be altogether there on the screen, but Renner isn’t like Christian Bale’s pilot in Rescue Dawn, who really wasn’t there at all. Renner’s self-seclusion isn’t appropriate for most leading-man parts I can think of, but he sends the stock role that James resembles into a tailspin. Mackie and Geraghty haven’t that mobility to work with in their characters, but perform very well; Mackie pulls off his Oscar-baiting breakdown (and I hope they take the bait), and Geraghty is meek without ever being weak—or annoying. In fact, he’s rather touching.

In a way, Bigelow and her team are more courageous than those who wear blinders in decrying the War in Iraq exclusively, sound as their premises might be. The makers of The Hurt Locker challenge the notion of war itself—be it in the form of bombs over Baghdad or muskets in Manassas (bayonets through Bull Run, if yer a Yank)—because of the toll it can take on soldiers. Lest one objects to pure pacifism, rest assured that the picture refuses to impose any doctrines on its audience or dog it with any dogma. A fundamental ambiguity exists. Like any hardcore addict whose value system is overridden by preternatural longings, James is weakened as a human being. His longing for adrenaline (and maybe something else) puts his life and those of others at risk even when in the service of saving lives; it’s cost one innocent his legs and one son his father—what next? In practice, the military needs techs like James, but, in theory, should it? Without answering directly, the film keeps you haunted by the question because of its adroit action sequences; Bigelow stimulates the lesser angels of our nature aesthetically rather than frivolously. (The relationship between the violence in The Hurt Locker and that in Inglourious Basterds is that of erotic poetry and exotic porn—porn directed by a self-aggrandizing poet manqué.)

The Hurt Locker merely demonstrates that the surest way for a film to be anti-violence is for it to present dynamic human figures on both sides of a conflict that one can relate to or care for to that minimal degree that one is pained to see them harmed. (One might protest that the Iraqi insurgents seem like boogeymen scheming at a distance, but are the Americans’ overarching objectives made any clearer?) What makes The Hurt Locker unique is that it chronicles its hero’s transformation into a masochist. (That arc occurs in The Deer Hunter, too, but in a more sensational, less plausible way.) We are made to understand his suffering and more, and because of that, the film encroaches the domain of art. The sort of of complex feelings that the movie inspires are lessons that will be relevant long after the sands have settled in Iraq.

One final thought. It is not only as a cinephile, but as one who—perhaps with undue naïveté—assigns more credit to the good taste of the mass audience than the conglomerates do, that it behooves me that a procedural combat picture made with intelligence, vision and broad appeal (broader than Apocalypse Now if narrower than Three Kings) should deserve to play on a fraction of the screens that a blockbuster like G.I. Joe does. It’s David and Goliath to a literal extreme. I haven’t seen G.I. Joe, and may be mistaken in my prejudice, but my educated guess is that it’s a big, cretinous slugger written as much by focus groups and advertisers (and military lobbyists) as screenwriters. When a script is scrawled on sheets of thousand-dollar bills, those involved in its production need assurances that their venture can pay for itself—not to mention the upkeep of the producers’ six swimming pools.

On the weekend of August 30th, The Hurt Locker played on 306 screens, as opposed to G.I. Joe’s 3,467. Despite the 10-nominee dilution, The Hurt Locker may have enough buzz to fan out come Oscar time, but is it really fair that a movie should play on one-tenth of the screens another does just because it cost less than one-tenth of the other to make? Sure, The Hurt Locker isn’t based on toys that sold jingoism and made dapper dates for Barbie dolls, but is it fiscal conservatism to slap in the face the fiscally conservative? I’m too skeptical to believe that talent has any bearing on such judgments. The state of capitalism has gotten dreary in recent months, but you needn’t be a comrade to know that “liberal” Hollywood’s more conservative than ever.

Tarantino’s Nazis surely get their due—either from the “Inglourious Basterds,” a brutal brigade of Jewish-American soldiers led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt—giving a funny, good-trouper performance), or Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a French Jew orphaned by the S.S. I’m sure Tarantino’s admirers, and young Jews like the Seth Rogen character who liked Munich because it showed the Chosen People finally kicking some ass, will approve of Inglourious Basterds’s dehumanization of Nazis. But wouldn’t they be offended that, for the eponymous squad of vengeful Semites, Tarantino has assembled a pitiful bunch that, save for the “Bear Jew” (Eli Roth), looks shlubby and undifferentiated? To top that off, the director has faithfully followed old-Hollywood convention by casting a glamourous star as their commanding officer: a Gentile good ol’ boy with better looks, better lines, and much more chutzpah than his men—men who fade into the background whenever he’s onscreen.

The Nazis are dehumanized, but so is everyone else: Tarantino converts his characters into little toy stereotypes, who, when wound up, amble down the quickest path toward bloodshed. The writer-director has an undeniable ear for dialogue, and he can make his characters sound like people—witty, ingratiating people, at that. But he betrays their human characteristics if it provides him an excuse to stage a clever set piece. Why else would Dreyfus (who looks like Uma Thurman) begin as a battered, sympathetic, movie-loving peasant girl, and end up glorified as a cold-hearted mass murderer with a shallow fixation on femme fatale glamour? Oh, that’s right. So Tarantino can squeeze in more movie references and squeeze out more blood. And the stiff-upper-lip Britisher (Michael Fassbender) who joins the Basterds, and reeks of suavity and finesse and noblesse oblige, is made a former film critic. Is the director trying to flatter me into giving him a good review? Nah. He’s probably just fanning the flames of his movie-trivia-drenched ego—massaging his fantasy self. Only a few minor characters—like the German father of a newborn—seem to have anything going on beneath a veneer of cool.

The true extent of Nazi horror is only touched on once, in the first scene of the movie. Colonel Hans Landa (the electrically chilling Austrian actor Christoph Waltz), the S.S.’s infamous “Jew Hunter,” manipulates a French farmer into admitting that he’s harboring “enemies of the state” beneath his floorboards. In the minutes that slowly tick away before the hidden Dreyfus family succumbs to German bullets, the scene is brilliantly written, directed, and acted. Waltz is so ingratiating, and yet you see glints of genuine evil in Landa’s cold eyes and back-slapping smooth talk. His is the evil of opportunism—you buy his rotten humanity, and shudder at the incongruity between his placid Aryan smile and the antisemitic propaganda he invokes, which you know he’s too smart for. Landa thinks his vision is clear because he sees through prejudices, which is why he, a “German hawk,” can think like a “Jewish rat.” But the analogy Tarantino feeds him is too clever; the writer outsmarts himself with his own fancy-pants epigrams. He does not follow through on what could be revealing screenwriting. Instead, he runs for cover as soon as the bullets fly, and shits on his own scene with a misplaced parody of spaghetti-Western music, capped off with a misplaced parody of The Searchers (1956) as Shosanna bolts out the door. The Searchers is famous for its maybe-he’s-racist-maybe-he’s-not portrayal of a Civil War veteran (John Wayne) who hunts down the Comanches that kidnapped his niece. Thematically, it’s relevant—but is an American director, who’s shallowly reducing World War II to Tom and the Jerries, really trying to draw a parallel between the Master Race and Manifest Destiny? He teases us with Pitt’s part-Indian Yankee called “Apache,” whose trademark is to scalp his Nazi son-bitch victims, but this is a clear case of mixing metaphors. A multifaceted artist could foreseeably make the comparison and have it be enlightening; Tarantino uses “deep” thoughts as mere decorations—flimsy trinkets that “prove” his own cleverness. They’re as hollow as Landa’s cold-hearted pleasantries.

Cleverness is what Inglourious Basterds is about. Cleverness and the barbaric pleasure of eye-for-an-eye revenge—the only drive that Tarantino’s painted-cardboard characters possess. Nazism is used as an aphrodisiac for this because it can be used for this; who’s going to come out and defend perpetrators of genocide? Tarantino’s art is in drawing attention to himself, but if one so much as thinks about what he says in his movies, one violates his grandiose vision—and, worse, is considered joyless or square. The director has it both ways: His keen sense of what’s politically correct (probably a defense against those who called him a racist for his movies’ liberal use of the  “‘N’ word”) makes his fictional avengers seem just; but, like Andy Warhol, Tarantino can hide behind chic, shallow amorality, as well. Then there’s that third layer: that he’s an artist, albeit a postmodern one who can pilfer as he pleases. And because he’s self-conscious, and because he does have talent and artistic flair, he can claim to be an alchemist who transforms scuzzy exploitation flicks into Oscar buzz. Hardcore fans of schlock vindicate themselves with him as its martyr. But despite having titillating artful touches that get it damn-near close, Inglourious Basterds is never elevated to art; it’s just exploitation inflated by money and self-importance.

There’s a movie-within-the-movie: a propaganda film by Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) that seems to be nothing more than shots of a Nazi sniper shooting and reverse shots of his anonymous victims histrionically dying. But when Tarantino cuts to mocking closeups of Hitler (Martin Wuttke) laughing at the carnage, you wonder, How’s that movie any different from Inglourious Basterds? We even see the fake film’s producer crying tears of self-admiration. Is Tarantino in any position to mock this?

Was I entertained by his movie? Yes. Is that all that matters? No. A good entertainer can make you pleased with facile things, even if there’s nothing in the attic and the basement is full of worms. In The Dark Knight, for example, Christopher Nolan’s smash-bang pacing kept one unaware of the suspicious subtext. Tarantino’s a smoother craftsman than Nolan, but more careless about what he says through his cartoon mouthpieces. He turns carelessness into a rancid personal style, a kind of spoiled-child anarchism. I don’t think he’s being false to his values or personal vision; he wants to give us what entertains him. But what entertains him could entertain a three-year-old. His is movie art for beginners because it’s movie art unabashedly reduced to the bare minimum needed to satisfy our collective pleasure principle. The hip ambiguities of Jackie Brown have degenerated into a wet-dreamworld that suffers from a pop-culture infestation and an antisocial hard-on for vengeance.

Since Tarantino’s self-infantilization is on par with the late Michael Jackson’s, his estimation of what gives his audience pleasure has become insultingly low. Yeah, we like sex and violence, and who hasn’t, at some point, been wronged and fantasized about a showy retaliation? It’s one thing to bring teenage daydreams—which often feed on the silly, evanescent movies that hormonally overwhelmed adolescents seek refuge in—to the screen, but Tarantino seems in denial about how silly his reveries were. Violence in movies doesn’t need to serve some social function, and I don’t think the average viewer is turning into a psychopath because of it. (S/he may be becoming desensitized to psychopathy, but that’s another story.) But violence in a great film serves a narrative purpose or follows a dramatic logic; it’s motivated. Violence for its own sake, as it is here, is masturbatory; violence motivates the plot. It’s lewd, neanderthal fun, if smartly, prettily executed—but that’s all, folks. Tarantino fails to show here that he grasps this, which makes him small potatoes. For all his talent, he seems dead-set on plateauing creatively; he resists the adult world like Peter Pan, but he’s aggressively lacking in innocence. His content is hedonistic and yet his style has become snobbish. Loving trash does not make one a vulgarian; aggrandizing trash does. Tarantino’s merger of simplifications and distortions with grandiloquent references and “personal touches” is enough to fill a garbage dump. At worst, it can make complicated issues like torture seem cut-and-dry.

Inglourious Basterds fulfills and exacerbates A.O. Scott’s dictum that movie marketing is handing arsenic lollipops to our inner children, but this film’s even guiltier than a Transformers 2 or Star Trek or G.I. Joe because we’re resigned to their big-franchise stupidity and opportunism. If there is a shred of genius in this film, it’s a wan, needling one; for me, it was like having my face shoved in dog shit and being forced to admit I enjoyed it. I didn’t react this way to Pulp Fiction, which was also a distillation of sorts. And I certainly didn’t react this way to Death Proof, which, at its best, turned reductivisim into concision; it had a dedication to craft that made it gleam like a vintage convertible, freshly waxed by its loving owner. It even seemed fascinated by real human lives, flubby though they were. But a movie like Inglourious Basterds can make you feel corrupt—and not in the way that moralists fear. Tarantino, despite his wrongheaded pretensions, has the energy requisite to make you feel that maybe this is all you need: a plateful of horny, violent dog shit. He celebrates, in earnest, the history and potential of cinema, and it amounts to—fuckin’ up Nazis. What a transcendent downer. Said energy is hard to distinguish from glitz and self-satisfaction, but it does amount to vision—grubby and complacent though it may be. Some day, perhaps, Tarantino will move beyond self-worship—which has been incorporated into his hero worship—take a step back, and see that good movies are more than the sum of their parts. But not with this film. Who’s an inglorious bastard? Someone who has massive artistic and financial power, and wastes it.

At a svelte 97 minutes, the movie runs like a lightweight imitation of the Coen canon: first-time offenders commit a modest crime, and it metastasizes into an ordeal big enough to swallow an ensemble cast. And the Coens have assembled quite a cast: George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins and—what the hell—Brad Pitt. The latter is a particular asset. His character, Chad, and McDormand’s Linda, are the cloddish fitness instructors who find the memoirs of a former C.I.A. analyst, Osborne Cox (Malkovich), in their gym. Cox is—or flatters himself by thinking he is—the only sane person in a web of wackos. Malkovich’s bursts of rage are this blue-blood’s only defense mechanisms. The analyst is the only one aware of the absurdity of his situation, and thus the character the Coens are seeing through, so his breakdown has added comic resonance: a twinge of self-effacement. Cox has been laid off for bogus reasons, and his icicle of a wife (Swinton) is cheating on him with a meathead (Clooney) who’s cheating on her. What little control Cox exercises over his life is diminishing, so he’s in no mood to deal with opportunistic amateurs looking for him to cough up a so-called Good Samaritan tax in return for his manuscript. Linda is certain that her discovery will be remunerative enough to pay for cosmetic surgery she’s deluded herself into needing—so certain that when Cox refuses to pay her, she offers his document to the Russian embassy.

One can accept the movie’s viewpoint that Americans are a pack of dolts whose self-absorption gets them in over their heads because Pitt and McDormand play their roles without malice. These characters aren’t just punch lines, but people with drives that we can relate to in moments of self-reflection. Pitt, who used his star presence brilliantly to give credence to his Jesse James last year, achieves his effects by taking our expectations of him, and tossing them back at us like a hot potato. He probably hasn’t been able to cut this loose since 12 Monkeys, and the freedom has made him giddy. But the key is that his Chad isn’t a fitness fiend just so he can flex his biceps; Chad wants to have fun, think positive, and be a team-player. Likewise, Linda’s monomania about getting a tummy-tuck doesn’t extend to inhibiting her from crying when Chad goes missing. (McDormand—a.k.a. Mrs. Joel Coen—is proficient at tacky American accents. Linda’s bears resemblance to Sarah Palin’s. Coincidence?) These characters may be the emotional equivalents of babies, but at least they’re human babies. Their superior (Jenkins), however, is no toddler. His overtures to Linda never make it through her thick skull, but he’s willing to act selflessly for her, and that gives the film a touch of heart without weighing it down; we need someone we don’t feel condescending toward.

For most of the movie, the Coens expertly gallop through dildo jokes, chance encounters and hook-ups, sudden deaths, and endless complications. Their characters weave us through it, and at its best, Burn suggests the underappreciated 1975 farce Shampoo, with Clooney’s character resembling an Eastern-establishment version of the promiscuous Beverly Hills hairdresser that Warren Beatty played. The filmmakers likely wanted a reprieve from the heavy No Country—they’ve dropped their usual symbols and languorous tracking shots, and even went so far as to adopt a conventional, mock-action score (by Carter Burwell). But they deprive us of an ending, replacing it with the expository banter between C.I.A. agents (the chief of whom is played drolly by J.K. Simmons) who summarize all the off-screen action, and conclude that there’s nothing worth gleaning from this whole big mess. This is the Coens’ theme: all their plot machinery is meant to add up to nothing; the point is that it’s meaningless. They’ve dropped another weight on our laps.

The ad-hoc operatives function like the petty di ex machina that Shakespeare sometimes used ironically. But the Coens’ irony is shrill; they seem to be withholding one of their famously elaborate endings punitively. And with so many plot elements left up in the air, their stunted dénouement seems slovenly beyond the joke of its slovenliness. When members of the audience laugh at this postmodern insolence, one wonders how aware they are that the filmmakers have just slapped them across the cheeks. Do people really care so little for these characters that they’ll allow the film to annihilate them so snidely? The Coens have insulted both the audience and themselves.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is almost as long as its title, but it may be the most valiant attempt at truly literary filmmaking in a while. It is a film that earns its elegantly archaic photography (shot by Roger Deakins, the Coen brothers’ frequent cohort) and, perhaps, its slow deliberation over each and every frame. Although the setting is long past—in what remained of the Old West by the 1880s—the movie goes beyond the acceptance it may have had as simply another handsome period piece; it’s surprisingly relevant today.

The film opens with the last train robbery perpetrated by the James gang. It is here that Deakins is at his most indulgent; the dreamlike, fuzzy-edged cinematography is at an apex, pairing the sumptuousness of Terrence Malick films with the blurry decay of old photos. Bob Ford (Casey Affleck), an awkward 19-year-old raised on Jesse James (Brad Pitt) dime-novels, insists that he take part in the venture. Jesse’s father—and later his wife—get the creeps from this naïve teenager, but the boy is admitted, nonetheless, and, on the train, he gets his first taste of Jesse’s temper: an engineer who refuses to kneel down before the bandit is bludgeoned mercilessly.

Bob never gains the respect of the rest of the gang, which Jesse picks off one-by-one by for acts of treason against him. By the end, only Bob and his dim-witted older brother, Charley (Sam Rockwell), remain. Bob idolizes Jesse, but he’s like a fanboy who meets William Shatner and then realizes that the Starship Enterprise has never lifted off the ground. His first-hand experience is nothing like the cheap romances that he still keeps hidden in a shoe box under his bed. The true Jesse James is lunatically violent and paranoid; in one scene, he almost tears off a young boy’s ear when pumping him for information, but, by covering his mouth, never even gives the boy an opportunity to reply. The movie, however, has the decency to not peg the icon as simply a raging monster; at the end of the scene, the celebrated outlaw breaks down and cries.

The film is just as much Bob’s as Jesse’s, though. Charley forces an anecdote out of his brother about the long list of comparisons Bob has compiled between himself and Jesse; when his hero—who constantly tests his minions’ allegiance—mocks him for this, the railway bandit’s fate is sealed. The titular assassination makes the perpetrator as well-known as the victim—just as he always dreamed—but his celebrity is tinged with infamy and allegations of cowardice. Jesse James, the romanticized brute, is immortalized as a folk hero; his slayer becomes a folk villain.

It is either remarkable fortune or the sign of pure genius that Brad Pitt, arguably today’s most established male star, performs the role of an over-hyped tabloid celebrity of yesteryear. He does not need to be Brando; as the mercurial, mysterious James, he needs his star’s presence—and, costumed in black and sporting the smile of a charming roué, he gives James the larger-than-life power that made him a myth. (In a nod to one of James’s successors, he slips into an impersonation of Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow from time to time.) But he culls the right degree of sensitivity, too, in a much practiced performance. Everything that James does is minutely tooled; he’s blasé about his celebrity, but thrives on living up to his reputation. His alpha-male instinct for self-protection eventually drives him mad and Pitt plays James as a troubled existentialist, whose unpredictable bursts of malice are intertwined with moody desperation. James’s fate has the weight a tragic hero’s; his own eccentricities lead to his downfall and the lives around him collapse like dominoes.

Though still a relative unknown—despite brother Ben—Affleck will hopefully not be overshadowed. He mumbles through his role like the emo, misunderstood youngster that Bob essentially is, but his antisocial creepiness is made to be very sympathetic. He teeters on having a gay crush on James, which is an effective piece of playing because of Affleck’s internalization; his inability to conflate James the Legend, who he loves, with James the Man, who he fears, is what makes him so inarticulate. Although Bob learns his lesson to a degree, society never reconciles the murderer with their myth; this fatal flaw is Bob’s downfall. As his yokel brother, Rockwell shows the same ability to curry the audience’s good will, but uses a different technique. Rockwell’s sharp, nervous features make Charley seem consistently on the verge of breaking down. He’s someone who, unlike James, cannot mask the high volume of thoughts sputtering in his brain. His childlike inability to process information makes one fear for his safety throughout the picture; he seems like a defenseless sheep pitted against James’s wolf.

Perhaps because the writer-director, Andrew Dominik, is a New Zealander, he has an objective understanding of a celebrity culture that is American in origin. An American may be more apt to turn this material into a garish satire, but Dominik is thoughtful enough to make his characters sufficiently imperfect and three-dimensional to inspire empathy, and has enough restraint to let his commentary slip in as subtext. The movie’s main problems occur when it is too obvious and self-conscious; Dominik piles on redundant exposition in the voice-over and has a tendency to let shots linger for added meaning that simply isn’t there. He does, however, let little things—like warped glass panes—bubble up with open metaphors and, for a sophomore director (his first film was an Australian movie that I’ve never heard of), that is a significant gesture of enlightened respect for the audience. He’s got a feel for dialogue, too. I’m not sure how much credit is due to Ron Hansen, who authored the novel, but the script captures the duplicitous dialect of Southern chivalry when not strewn with meaning-pounders. Dominik even slips in some subtle malapropisms, which are quite welcome in a movie that is largely devoid of humor.

The Assassination of Jesse James is not quite poetry; Dominik is far too controlling. Every emotion, every blink, is planned, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the director required 50 takes for the simplest shots. Calculation can be stifling in movies—and yes, Assassination is indeed calculated. But it’s set apart by an august sympathy behind the painstaking craftsmanship. The director may have O.C.D., but he imparts on his movie a warmth that keeps one from feeling cramped by the frostbitten setting. He makes a statement without implicating the audience or our society; Dominik allows us to know his characters intimately and his movie laments their plight. He shows that romanticization can be a façade, but romanticizes about the America of frontier times like a child enraptured by his history class. Dominik remains skeptical without insulting our intelligence or stepping on our dreams.

So, even though one may get weary at a lengthy epilogue that makes one feel the movie’s 160 minute runtime, The Assassination of Jesse James is a remarkably insightful, empathic, and strikingly beautiful film. If this isn’t nominated for Best Picture, we’re in for the best Christmas movie season in decades.

[14 November 2007]