Inglourious Basterds
Written and Directed By: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Faabender, Diane Kruger, Daniel Bruhl, Til Schweiger, B.J. Novak, Omar Doom, and Mike Meyers
Director of Photography: Robert Richardson, Editor: Sally Menke, Production Designer: David Wasco
Rated: R for strong graphic violence, language and brief sexuality.
In an early moment in Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist WWII epic Inglourious Basterds, a character remarks, “I love rumors. Facts can be so misleading, where rumors, true or false, are often revealing.” Its this idea—that legends and myths are much better at understanding our culture than the actual facts that lay before us—that brings Mr. Tarantino to his latest film, a mixture of deadly dialogue, brutal violence, and cinephelia. WWII has often been a sacred ground for filmmakers, with few willing to push the boundaries and most films glorifying the cause like Saving Private Ryan, The Pianist, Battleground, The Longest Day, and so many other. Which is why the aptly misspelled Inglourious Basterds is an audacious work to begin with—it is willing to rewrite history in order to examine not the war itself, but the cinematic culture of the war on screen.
The film, at least what the advertising campaign wants you to think, is the story about eight Jewish American soldiers, led by a Southern redneck named Aldo Raine who’s played by Brad Pitt, dropped into Nazi-occupied France with the mission of terrorizing the Nazi party. The Dirty Dozen led team who are the titular nicknamed “basterds” walk through France in civilian clothes, desecrating the soldiers and removing their scalps as tokens, leaving few alive to spread their tale. They come in ironic names—one, played by Mr. Tarantinio’s friend and fellow director Eli Roth, is called the “Bear Jew” and bashes Nazi heads in with a giant wooden baseball bat.
But then so much of Inglourious Basterds is not about the “basterds” or even a violence filled spectacle in the way that Mr. Tarantino prefers. Bringing together his French New Wave influence with spaghetti westerns, Nazi propaganda flicks, and other classic B movie genres, Mr. Tarantino focuses his story away from the terrorizes to a different cat and mouse game. The cat is a notorious German officer who named Col. Landa, nicknamed the “Jew Hunter.” Played with such deliciously evil precision by Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, Landa models himself in a Sherlock Holmes type of way that he finds and kills the oppressed people. Mr. Waltz is such a revelation, because he is willing to poke fun at himself at the same time and make himself a comical character. He might give a frightening monologue about comparing the Jewish people to rats, but then he pulls out a smoking pipe so big without any sense of irony that one can’t help but laugh. Mr. Waltz frets around on screen with such audacious wonder and fun that he takes the cold blooded reality of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List and then adds Wile E. Coyote to the mix.
Though it is hard to find an equal to Landa and Mr. Waltz’s performance (and as strong as Mr. Pitt is, his character never reaches those heights), his opposite coin is a young French woman named Shosanna, whose family is killed by Landa in the opening scene. After her escape, she starts a cinema in Paris, and then comes upon an opportunity to host the entire Nazi party for a premiere, and at the same time her revenge. Shosanna is played by a French actress named Melanie Laurent, who is truly the heart of the film. Her cold performance combined with her stunning beauty come out of something like Jane Greer in Out of the Past, and she certainly outshines Diane Kruger, who plays a German actress that doubles as a spy that helps the basterds sneak into the premiere.
Like all of Mr. Tarantino’s work, Inglourious Basterds is built around conversation. Mst scenes play out like spaghetti westerns with a hint of Godard—every moment is a chance that guns can come out blazing, which keeps up the tension, while characters discuss the likes of German cinema or King Kong. His soundtrack is anachronistic, and makes sure that as much as we may think we are in Nazi France, we’ve dropped into Tarantino-land.
And although most of Mr. Tarantino’s work is best appreciated the second and third times around, where the nuance of his work is revealed (most notably in his last brilliant feature, Death Proof), Inglourious Basterds, despite its two and a half hour running time, feels somewhat rushed at time. This is most evident in the basterds themselves, many who are given little to do or little story, and most notably feel like Mr. Tarantino’s “artistic” flourishes that serve no real purpose. Compare this to an early scene in which Col. Landa asks to switch to English during an interrogation with a French farmer—the payoff of what seemed like a useless moment of dialogue has a deadly payoff.
What also stands out too unfortunate is the flat space in which his dialogues take place. More than any of his other films, Mr. Tarantino’s camera simply sits, and he rarely lets his camera tell the story. He’s almost too focused on performance and conversation that his imagery, unless when he truly makes it spark in the mise-en-scene, feels flat and undeveloped.
But in the end, Mr. Tarantino has taken the holy grail of WWII and challenged it. He’s made a film where Nazis are truly cartoon characters, Jews are raving lunatic killers, and women are deadly sexy femme fatales. It’s a cinephila’s dream of how WWII could have happened, and in the end, the legend is always better than the truth.
