Quentin Tarantino can always be counted on to write killer dialogue. In Inglourious Basterds, his bold and bloody homage to World War II action movies, the writer-director has produced his most wordy epic yet.
Dispensing with the innovative cut-and-paste timelines featured in Pulp Fiction and his taut debut Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino now orchestrates a talky G.I. Jew fantasy propelled by the director’s favorite dramatic motif: revenge.
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Taking his cue from World War II action pics like The Dirty Dozen, Devil’s Brigade and 1978’s original Inglorious Bastards (yes, both words were spelled correctly in that version), Tarantino has fashioned a relatively straightforward storyline in which a special unit of Jewish Americans land in occupied France and start scalping Nazis. They later cross paths with a theater owner with her own scheme.
Heading up the opposition: SS Col. Hans Landa (played by Christoph Waltz, pictured above). With his unctuous portrait of a wily brute sheathed inside the cosmopolitan persona of a strudel-chewing gentleman, Waltz delivers a bravura performance that should earn him admission to Tarantino’s already-considerable pantheon of charismatic villains.
(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)
Throughout the course of his 2-hour, 32-minute movie, Tarantino punctuates the characters’ lengthy conversations with characteristic balls-to-the-wall gorefests propagated by primitive weaponry — baseball bat, knife, bare hands. The promise of impending mayhem lurks beneath seemingly innocuous scenes: Drunk soldiers play a charades-like game in a bar; a pretty theater owner changes the titles on her marquee; a farmer washes his face against a backdrop of gorgeous rolling hills. But there’s no getting around the Nazis.
Tarantino declares his intentions from the outset. The R-rated Basterds begins with white words against a black screen that read “Once upon a time … in Nazi-occupied France.” Throughout, this black-humored fairy tale raises chills by tapping into real-life horror beyond the ken of Tarantino’s previous work.
Bringing Basterds’ cat-and-mouse dynamics to life is an enthusiastic cast that savors the chance to go deep with intense, ’40s-style melodrama. Brad Pitt, perfectly at ease with his hunting knife, Southern drawl and Clark Gable-era mustache, shrewdly plays Basterds leader Aldo Raine, a Tennessee woodsman turned Army lieutenant.
Tarantino routinely creates richly nuanced female ass-kickers — just ask Uma Thurman (Kill Bill) or Pam Grier (Jackie Brown). Here, he gives nerves of steel to surly theater owner Shosanna Dreyfus (played by French actress Mélanie Laurent) and glamorous double agent Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger, turning in the best performance of her career).
The Basterds themselves, surprisingly, lack distinctive quirks. One exception: Eli Roth‘s Sgt. Donny Donowitz, aka “The Jew Bear,” who makes a bloody impression through deft use of a Louisville Slugger.
Inglourious Basterds‘ most remarkable performance belongs to Waltz, the heretofore obscure German actor who plays the Nazi officer in charge of hunting down French Jews.
Tarantino provides Waltz’s Col. Landa character with tasty bits of business including a fondness for dairy products and a set of tidy rituals appropriate to a paperwork-obsessed bureaucrat. For the opening farmhouse scene alone, in which Landa spends 20 minutes acting like a perfectly civil guest while squeezing crucial bits of information from his host, Waltz deserves, and will surely receive, an Oscar nomination.
True to form, Tarantino splices bits of droll repartee into even the most horrific life-and-death situations, forcing audiences to laugh instead of scream at otherwise horrific brutality. Exhibit A: Keep an eye for the scene capped with Pitt’s Aldo declaring, “I believe I just made my masterpiece.”
As in his previous movies, Tarantino continues to deploy music cues like sledgehammers to pulverize the emotional subtext of key scenes. Excerpts from composer Ennio Morricone, creator of the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, drive home the influence of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti-western showdowns as retrofitted into a World War II period piece.
Tarantino brings his own stamp to the material most tellingly by incorporating cinema history into the plot. He works in references to Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, German silent-film comedian Max Linder and German director G.W. Pabst. A critical plot point relies on a film inspired by an actual movie produced by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. And the back story for brave British commando Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender)? He’s a film critic. Now that’s a stretch.
Basterds even links to Tarantino’s own body of work through Samuel L. Jackson‘s uncredited voiceover narration. Jackson, of course, redefined “hit man” when he played the weirdly irresistible Jules in Tarantino’s 1995 breakthrough, Pulp Fiction. Along with the late David Carradine‘s implacable title monster in the Kill Bill movies, Basterds‘ main bastard, Col. Landa, has earned a place of inglorious honor in cinema’s dastardly hall of fame.
WIRED Actors romp through Tarantino’s lush dialogue en route to satisfyingly visceral revenge; fresh fodder for new Hitler remixes on YouTube.
TIRED Be prepared for some French and German dialogue with English subtitles.
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