Inglourious Basterds, reviewed

Between District 9 and Inglourious Basterds, this may have been the best weekend I've had at the movies, ever. Inglourious Basterds is, of course, the long-promised World War II movie from Quentin Tarantino, who's been on a genre-film kick for the entire decade with the martial-arts/spaghetti-Western mash up Kill Bill movies and the car-chase/slasher film mash up Death Proof. In my mind, the thing that Inglourious Basterds has in common with the abovementioned movies is the way in which it knowingly flouts your preconceived expectations of it; Kill Bill was sold as a showpiece for gory martial arts action and delivered a climax in which the villain fixed the hero a sandwich and chatted her up for about twenty minutes prior to a battle that resolved in under 5 seconds, and although Death Proof delivered big-time on its promise of killer car-chase action, it spent most of the running time of the film serving up lengthy conversations and generally meandering leisurely toward the central conflict.

Now, Inglourious Basterds is being marketed as Tarantino's answer to The Dirty Dozen, a mega-violent ensemble piece in which a band of American guerrillas change the course of the war by rampaging through Nazi-occupied France. This movie isn't hard to imagine: set up the backstory of the individual members of the squad, bring them together, have them suffer some inital setbacks and successes, set up the big climactic action set-piece, and let it play itself out with a bang.

This is not the movie that Inglourious Basterds actually is. I think that most people who see this movie will be surprised at how little screen time Brad Pitt and his team actually get in the film; I'd say that they're only in maybe a third of the scenes, and even that might be an overestimation. There are a lot of threads and subplots in the alternate history that Basterds sets up, and Tarantino doesn't privilege the story of the titular 'Basterds' over any of the others. In fact, Brad Pitt, the name over the title on the posters, barely even appears onscreen in one of the longest segments involving the squad midway through the movie.

Also, Inglourious Basterds isn't nearly as violent as the marketing would lead you to believe. It certainly has its fair share of gore (you'll see plenty of scalpings and Eli Roth does indeed beat a German soldier to death with a baseball bat on camera), but until the climax, the plot doesn't really hinge on action sequences at all. Rather than brutal violence, the true hallmark of Inglourious Basterds is lengthy cat-and-mouse conversations between various protagonists and various suspicious antagonists. Coming in at a close second are the near-constant explicit and implicit references to film and filmmaking culture that permeate each thread of the plot. Inglourious Basterds is even talkier and more movie-obsessed than Death Proof, which I would have hardly thought possible before seeing it for myself.

So, instead of movie-star Brad Pitt and his rough and tumble men giving the audience 2+ hours of gratuitous violence, we get a large ensemble cast having a bunch of conversations. However, Inglourious Basterds takes this conceit and absolutely knocks it out of the park, which is no small feat. Credit is due to the dialogue, which meets and occasionally surpasses Tarantino's typical high standards. It's notable and refreshing that the typical Hollywood way of casting American actors in foreign roles and having all the dialogue be in English doesn't hold here; most of the actors are the same nationality as the characters they portray, and a big chunk of the spoken dialogue is in German or French with subtitles. And the performances are very strong, particularly the leads, which completely fulfill the vision of iconic genre characterization that Tarantino seems to have been reaching for with this film. Brad Pitt's Lt. Aldo Raine takes the exaggerated Southern cadences of George Clooney's character from O Brother, Where Art Thou? and turns them down just a tad in intensity, with the result being a great comic portray of a swaggering American. Melanie Laurent has a rich part as a theatre owner plotting her own revenge against the Nazis, and her expressive, intelligent performance grounds the movie and gives it its emotional center. However, Cristoph Waltz absolutely steals the movie out from underneath everyone with his portrayal of SS Col. Hans Landa. Simply put, Landa is one of the greatest villains in movie history, and Waltz's accomplishment in bringing him to life is extraordinary. Taken alone, the first twenty minutes of Inglourious Basterds, in which Landa glad hands his way through the interrogation of a French dairy farmer suspected of harboring Jewish fugitives, would probably be worth the price of admission. I doubt there's going to be a better performance this year, and if there is, I can't wait to see it.

It should go without saying that Quentin Tarantino isn't remotely interested in historical accuracy with Inglourious Basterds; without spoiling too much, the fifth "chapter" of the movie portrays events that manifestly did not happen during the war itself. The climax of Inglourious Basterds is more than worthy of all the buildup involved in getting to it, and it certainly didn't leave me feeling unfulfilled at the end. The final scenes have a sort of manic, cathartic quality to them that sort of reminded me of the end of There Will Be Blood, minus the strange shift in tone. There's already been a fair amount of debate online and in print as to whether Inglourious Basterds crosses a line in its manifest irreverence toward the facts of history, and the final scenes appear to be the most divisive. While it's pretty well indisputable that Tarantino's movie isn't about World War II, human suffering, or the Holocaust as much as it is about the power of cinema to create and revise our realities, I don't think that's necessarily a bad or even a disrespectful thing. Regardless, Inglourious Basterds is a well-crafted piece of work that's several cuts above anything else I've seen this summer (with the possible exception of District 9) and it absolutely deserves to be seen.