Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Just when you thought this summer’s movies couldn’t get much weirder, here comes Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a rip-roaring, fast-talking mash-up of war movie, western, film noir, movie criticism, and God-only-knows-what-else. It’s bizarre, violent, and eccentric, and to say it plays fast and loose with history is the understatement of the summer. It’s also incredibly well-made and vastly entertaining. Tarantino is admittedly an acquired taste – some love him, some don’t. Those in the first camp will find the filmmaker in “glourious” form with this film.

The movie begins “once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France.” A French farmer gets a visit from Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a Nazi officer recently assigned to hunt down Jews remaining in the area. He smiles and asks for a glass of milk. He is just here to tie up loose ends, he says. But Landa is not the clumsy bureaucrat he seems. He slyly deduces that the farmer is hiding Jews. He finds them, and orders his soldiers to open fire. Only the teenage daughter of the Jewish family, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), escapes alive, fleeing across the fields.

Next we are introduced to the “inglourious basterds” of the title: a crew of American soldiers (mostly Jews) handpicked by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) to secretly parachute into France and, as Raine bluntly puts it, kill Nazis. Raine is from Tennessee, and claims to be descended from American Indian warriors. He orders his men to collect Nazi scalps. He’s not kidding. Soon, even Adolf Hitler has heard of “Aldo the Apache” and his brutal Basterds. One of them, Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) has a special talent for dispatching Nazis with a baseball bat to the head. He’s not kidding, either.

A few years into the Basterds’ reign of terror, we meet Shosanna again, living in Paris under an alias and running a cinema. She meets a young Nazi (Daniel Bruhl) who has a keen interest in film (and in her). Turns out he’s a decorated war hero, and the star of a propaganda film made by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s right-hand man. He thinks Goebbels should be interested in this young woman, too—but not for the reason you think. Meanwhile, the Basterds are assigned to hook up with British and German secret agents as part of a plot to kill Goebbels at the propaganda film’s premiere. Only it seems the premiere is being moved to a new, smaller venue. Guess who owns it.

All these plots and people (plus a few more) come together in ways only Tarantino could devise. Along the way, the movie dips into many and varied wells of cinematic and cultural inspiration. Consider the opening, where the officer hassles the poor farmer. Tarantino overlays it with Beethoven played on Spanish guitar, and we realize that this is a riff on all those “spaghetti western” scenes where some bad dude harasses the local peasantry. Or consider the later scene in a tavern where at least two double agents are drinking, which is as tense as anything Ian Fleming or Graham Greene ever served up. Tension is a key ingredient in Inglourious Basterds. Alfred Hitchcock is said to have explained that when a bomb under a table goes off, that’s surprise—but when we are told there’s a bomb under the table but don’t know when it will go off, that’s suspense. A number of bombs—real and metaphorical—take their time going off in this film. Being a Tarantino film, there is violence aplenty, but this time the director saves it for controlled bursts. We know it’s coming, but not always when or to whom. This underlying tension helps keep the film from dragging over its 2-½-hour length. The movie asks for enagement; there are treats for the brain as well as the eyes here.

The acting is also a treat. Pitt is the “name” actor here, of course, and he tears into Aldo Raine with gusto, affecting a Tennessee twang and a mouthful of backwoods trash-talk. Raine literally takes no prisoners. With a never-explained scar on his neck and a mean, sneaky moustache framing his upper lip, the lieutenant leads his Basterds on their Nazi-killing sprees with what can best be described as delight. Raine is the distillation of every movie cowboy-soldier from Patton on down, and he really does want them Nazi scalps. It’s a performance that’s funny and fearless, and it confirms my belief that Pitt does his best work in quirky, comedic roles. On the Reich side, the find is Waltz. Movie Nazis are always cruel (as real ones tended to be), but Landa is actually smart. He affects a smarmy, slightly effacing manner and looks uncomfortable in his uniforms. But this is an act. The charm masks a ruthless intellect, and his lopsided smile never quite reaches his eyes. This is a man who can create menace by ordering food. He is a worthy antagonist not because of his firepower, but because he’s a brilliant detective. Waltz makes Landa a memorable villain; his presence lingers. Of course he and Raine are opposite numbers—skilled and dedicated hunters who tend to season their actual orders with their own agendas. You think you’ve seen these characters in movies before. Not these guys, you haven’t. Naturally they end up face-to-face. Think you know what will happen when they do? Guess again.

Surrounding these two are the usual treasure trove of odd Tarantino characters. Laurent, equal innocence and hatred shining in her big pale eyes, brings to Shosanna some of what Uma Thurman brought to the heroine of Kill Bill. Diane Kruger does a nice femme fatale turn as a German actress-cum-Allied-agent, and Michael Fassbinder strikes all the right plummy notes as her British contact. And if it looks like Eli Roth knows his way around a deadly bat, well, of course he does—he’s the guy behind the gruesome Hostel movies.

Oh yeah—the “revisionist” history. It’s no secret that Inglourious Basterds “basterdizes” (if you will) actual events quite a bit. Big deal. If this movie is about World War II, then Jaws was about sport fishing. WWII is just the backdrop. Somebody’s tails had to be kicked, and it may as well be Nazis (against almost any other enemy, actually, the actions of Raine’s men would be beyond appalling). There is real history on Tarantino’s mind here, but it’s the history of cinema. Above all, this is a film about movies. Almost every character knows or loves movies. Film as a genre and as a physical medium figures prominently in several key plans. The British agent is also a film critic. Goebbels preens and fumes like a Hollywood studio head. Raine’s troops view the execution of Nazi officers as “the closest we get to going to the movies.” I can’t recall a more self-consciously cinematic picture.

The self-attention is worth it, though. In his early efforts, Tarantino sometimes seemed to be trying too hard to be cool. This time, he seems to be trying harder to make a good movie, and he has. If the word can ever be applied to his kid-in-a-candy-store approach, this is the most mature film Tarantino has made to date. All the usual quirks are there—the whip-crack dialogue (even in subtitles), the obscure cultural references (G. W. Pabst will be getting his share of Googling), the preposterous characters and, yes, the bursts of over-the-top violence. But it all hangs together better than some of his other efforts, and the technique never overwhelms the story. Yes, District 9 was more thought-provoking, and Star Trek was more of a flat-out romp, but from a variety of purely artistic standpoints, this is the best movie I’ve seen this year. It may not make converts of anyone who’s not a Tarantino fan, but it proves once again that he’s a force to reckon with on the big screen. I can’t think of anyone else who could have made this film work. Actually, I can’t think of anyone else who even could have thought of this film, and I mean that in the best possible way.