Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds (****)

I see those red squiggly you-misspelled-something wrong lines underneath the title, so I guess I wrote the title as it was supposed to be. Judging by the intentionally misspelled title, one would perhaps assume that Inglourious Basterds would be nothing more than another vehicle for Quentin Tarantino to go nuts with random B-movie references and winks at the audience, as has been his recent formula with Kill Bill and his half of Grindhouse. In truth, it does have its fair share of nods to past movies and stylization in it, and it takes more liberties with history and convention than just about any other World War II movie ever made, but the crux of the movie isn't really haphazard craziness at all. It has its share of the violence and debauchery that Tarantino is pretty much synonymous with, but it also has some excellent performances, a tight, suspenseful plot with some poignant moments, and some great visuals. At times--like when Eli Roth, playing "The Bear Jew"--is beating a guy to death with a baseball bat, the movie seems to border on becoming an exploitation picture, but always manages to pull itself back again and throw something different and slightly more profound at us. This is the most thoughtful movie Tarantino has put out in a while, and I think it might be his best outside of Pulp Fiction.

As has become a trademark of QT, Basterds is separated into several chapters--five, I believe, in this case--separated by title cards. The first is "Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France", not coincidentally similar to the title of Sergio Leone's spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West, and not just because of the strands of Ennio Morricone music that pop up throughout this chapter and the rest of the film. The scene involves Nazi Col. Hans Landa--known to some as "The Jew Hunter"--arriving unannounced with a group of troops at a poor dairy farmer's home. Landa is played by Christopher Waltz, a German actor who speaks German, English, and French in the film and has a terrifying, commanding presence throughout regardless of what language he speaks. He won Best Actor at Cannes, where the film debuted, and if he doesn't get nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars, it'll be because of the sort of movie that this is and not because of any fault in his performance. Landa suspects that the farmer is keeping a Jewish family in hiding. He is, although we're not shown this explicitly until a while into the scene. It reminds me a lot of the opening scene of another Sergio Leone movie, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, where Lee Van Cleef as the villain, Angel Eyes, comes to visit a terrified man and his family and sits down and helps himself to some salad before getting down to business. Given Tarantino's love for Leone's movies, I'm sure that's what he modeled it after. The scene is slow-developing and is built around a long conversation, but is nonetheless incredibly tense. Part of this is a result of Tarantino's direction: though the characters are just sitting around a table talking, QT moves his camera around, cutting between the character's faces as they study each other while the other is talking and then, only towards the scenes conclusion, panning down to show the family laying prone hiding just underneath the floorboards. But a big part of what makes it worse is also Christopher Waltz, whose performance creates one of the most remarkable cold-hearted bastards in any movie I've seen. I suppose he's a bit like the evil Spanish military man in Pan's Labyrinth, but he's less outwardly angry. Oft-times he's smiling and acting jovial, but at the same time manages to make it known that his character can and will kill anyone in the next instant if need be.

Chapter two bears the same name as the movie itself, and introduces us to the titular "Basterds" and their commander, Lt. Aldo Raine. If you've seen the trailer, then you've already seen his speech to his unit where he explains that they're going to be dropped into France and that they'll "be doin' one thing, and one thing only: killin' Nazis." Aldo harks from Tennessee, and Brad Pitt plays him with a heavy drawl as he delivers most of the movie's funniest lines. His performance doesn't have the same impact Waltz's does simply because his character isn't as serious, but its good in its own right. The basterds quickly make a name for themselves with their somewhat questionable tactics, like collecting the scalps of the Nazis they kill. Word of their exploits gets back even to Hitler itself, who is quite upset about the whole thing; especially that some of the German soldiers even think that one of them is "a golem." A soldier is called in to recant the tale of the Basterds ambushing his squadron, which ends with Raine carving a swastika into his forehead.

The third chapter introduces our last main character--who in many ways is the films purest hero, since the Basterds would most certainly have to fall into the anti-hero realm--Shosanna, a Jewish woman living in Paris under a false identity. She's the proprietor of a movie house, and one night when she's changing the marquis, she piques the interest of a German soldier walking the streets. Turns out, the soldier is a hero of Germany, having killed a bunch of Americans from a sniper's post in battle, and is going to be the subject of a new Joeseph Gobbels propaganda film. The soldier persuades Gobbels to debut the film at Shosanna's theater, and all of a sudden she has to find herself maintaining her cover while dealing with Gobbels and Landa, who is working security for the premiere. The premiere is to be attended by all of the Nazi high command, and the Allies devise Operation Keno: a plan to have the Basterds blow up the theater. Shosanna has no knowledge of this plan, but she's pretty much had her fill of Nazis, and she devises her own plan to burn the theater down using a bunch of old, highly flammable film reels. And so, as happened in Pulp Fiction, the previously unrelated storylines begin to gradually intertwine.

I've heard some people declare this film "insensitive," and I'm not sure why. Despite how the film is depicted in the trailer, this isn't Kill Bill: World War II edition. The Basterds are brutal, violent, anti-heros, but the violence on screen is very brief. The Basterds don't even do that much actual fighting in the film. There's a couple of violent images, but it never feels crazy, over-the-top sadistic. The movie also pretty much throws away actual WWII history to invent its own, but it doesn't really change the entire idea of what was going on. The Nazis are still the bad guys, the Allies are still the good guys. I don't know what there is to find insensitive about a movie that's obviously trying merely to entertain and not to teach anyone about any actual World War II events.

More than anything, the movie is a reminder of what a genius Tarantino is at dialogue. Even though this is a war movie, so much of it plays out through conversation, and none of it is boring. There's an extended scene that only towards its conclusion becomes relevant to the main plot, where a bunch of people are sitting around a table in a tavern playing a game where they try and guess which famous person somebody wrote on a card they have stuck to their foreheads. Tarantino manages to make it absolutely fascinating. Every once in a while you'll hear somebody call Tarantino a hack, on the basis that his best movie, Pulp Fiction, was co-written with someone else, and that he's been milking Fiction's success ever since. There's no other writing credits to be seen here, and while its not on the same level as Pulp Fiction, which is thus far his best movie, it is nevertheless really damn good.