MasterChugs Theater: ‘Inglourious Basterds’

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is filled with vicious Nazis, British spies, American commandos and French collaborators all deceiving and destroying one another in occupied Paris. But it’s not a movie about the war. It’s a movie about war movies.

Of course, for some film fans, that’ll be evident from the onset. The film borrows its title but little else from Enzo Castellari’s 1978 WWII film. In Tarantino’s version, a small group of Jewish-American soldiers under the command of Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine terrorizes Nazi soldiers in Occupied France, performing shocking acts of savagery and corpse mutilations. How close they come to war crimes is unclear because, in a very un-Tarantino manner, he shows little more than a few scalpings that earn Aldo the nickname “Apache” from the Germans and one execution by a baseball bat.

But is it any good? Well, it’s a QT film: a lot of the time, that can break up people into two distinctly diverse groupings. Of course, those people either love anything done by him or hate anything done by him. Now, for everyone else, the question still remains about the quality of the movie.

Guess I’m going to show some of my own “basterd” behavior and make you hit the jump to find out that answer.

Inglourious Basterds is really two films mashed up into one that somehow weave into the stories of each other. One of those films concerns a young Jewish woman named Shoshanna who exacts a brilliant revenge against the Nazis who murdered her family. The other regards a group of mostly Jewish-American military assassins who scour the French countryside killing everyone in a German uniform.

Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine leads a pack of Jewish avengers, the inglourious basterds of the misspelled title, who occupy one part of the sprawling narrative and whose numbers include a bat-wielding American nicknamed the Bear Jew. Also elbowing for attention is a young French Jew, Shosanna Dreyfus, who’s running a cinema in Paris under a pseudonym, and a German Army hero, Fredrick Zoller, who dangerously woos her, unaware of her true identity. There’s the British film critic turned spy, Lt. Archie Hicox, and the German movie star turned spy, Bridget von Hammersmark. Mostly, though, there is Hans Landa, whose unctuous charm, beautifully modulated by Christoph Waltz, gives this unwieldy, dragging movie a much-needed periodic jolt.

As is his preference, Tarantino builds his movie as a collage of interlocking set piece — cinematically dazzling, to be sure, 
 enhanced by an meticulously chosen retro soundtrack — rather than a linear progression. As a result, it’s easy enough to tune out the Basterds while they scalp up a storm, and drop in instead on other colorful players.

Landa is like a huge, self-satisfied cat, smilingly toying with mice he has every intention of slaughtering. To him, the game is watching them nurture the hope that they have a chance of getting away, that they’re mere inches from freedom when, in fact, the opposite is true. But that’s the beauty of Tarantino’s writing and Waltz’s performance. Like Landa’s victims, the audience can never quite tell whether he knows or he’s bluffing, whether he’s a sadist or just an ignorant fool. His presence overpowers every scene he’s in because he’s just so good as the personification of debonair evil. If he isn’t nominated at the very least this year for a Best Supporting Actor award, if not Best Lead Actor, then that will be a major crime.

So, how about the rest of crew? Brad Pitt is so completely over-the-top and ridiculous, you just can’t help but enjoy the absurdity Aldo Raine with his awful Southern accent and cleft jaw. Pitt brings a new meaning to heroic stupidity. Eli Roth was actually not as terrible as I thought he would be as the “basterd” The Bear Jew, so nicknamed by the Nazi’s who fear him. He has one of the greatest single character introductions ever. The cast is also filled with stellar French and German actors: Melaine Laurent (beautiful in a sad, yet woman empowering role), Daniel Bruhl (a charming young German soldier that makes you question who are the true enemies), and Diane Kruger (the hottie from the National Treasure films as a German starlet who wants to help bring down the Nazi’s).

Tarantino knows his movies. Inglourious Basterds reaches its culmination with the attempted annihilation of the world’s most despised war criminals using film—in more ways than one. It’s a basic, ingenious method of doing away with the key people responsible for the twentieth century’s greatest atrocity. Tarantino’s knowledge of old film, both metaphorically (Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda has a bit part) and physically (original 35mm film was exceptionally combustible), allows him to play with each level of meaning in the film.

Cartoon Nazis are not new to the movies, and neither are fascinating fascists, as evidenced by Ralph Fiennes’s Oscar-nominated turn in Schindler’s List. Unlike those in Schindler’s List, Tarantino’s Nazis exist in an insistently fictional cinematic space where heroes and villains converge amid a welter of movie allusions. He’s not making a documentary or trying to be Steven Spielberg: Tarantino is really only serious about his own films, not history. In his besotted historical reverie, real-life villains Adolf Hitler and 
Joseph Goebbels are played as grotesque jokes. The Basterds are played as exaggeratedly tough Jews. The women are femmes fatales.
 In such a cartoon world, the appearance of one stereotype-resistant protagonist — a Nazi, no less — counts as something glorious indeed.

Personally, I didn’t find Inglourious Basterds to be QT’s best movie, as for me, that title still belongs to Pulp Fiction; however, it’s definitely his most well made and well crafted yet, showing his continuing skill at film making. Is it his most entertaining? Quite possibly.

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