‘Inglourious Basterds’ Review

by John Nolte

“Inglourious Basterds,” writer/director Quentin Tarantino’s very satisfying but longish WWII revenge fantasy, opens with one of the finest sequences you’ll see all year – one, that for good and bad, sets the tone for what the auteur has in store over the next 153 minutes. The quiet, green countryside of Nazi-occupied France is broken by the sight of approaching motorcycles. Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz) has arrived for a visit with the stoic but gentle patriarch of a quiet, unassuming farming family. Landa is both accommodating and unfailingly polite. He’s also reptilian, purposefully unsettling and nicknamed “The Jew Hunter.”

With spare camera moves, very little score and two superb actors using their eyes to interpret the ominous subtext of intentionally banal dialogue, for nearly twenty minutes Tarantino tightens the suspense well beyond the snapping point and then well beyond that. Never does the encounter play in the way you expect, nor will the many plot-points this sequence sets up play out in the way you expect… Tarantino cherry-picks what he likes from certain genres, the whole is always something of his own.

Even though it is long and talky, describing the opening sequence as such ignores how ablaze every second of what ends up becoming a complicated and heartbreaking morality play is with character, story and drama. Tarantino’s problem is that nearly all his sequences are staged in this manner and while most of them work, a few don’t – especially in the middle which sags more than it has to and never really reclaims the irresistible vitality of that first hour.

Col. Landa’s introduction is called Chapter One, Chapter Two brings on the the Basterds, a brigade of Jewish Americans led by Lt. Aldo “The Apache” Raine (Brad Pitt), a Tennessee native with a thick southern accent and orders that call for him and his men to drop behind enemy lines and give the Nazis a taste of their own medicine. In one very well written monologue delivered with gusto by a never-better Pitt, the mission is clearly explained and so is the moral justification for it. In the fight against the purest of evil, the greater good can always benefit with some righteous bloodlust. Scalps will be taken, beatings with baseball bats will be administered, no word on waterboarding but God Bless America.

The third part of Tarantino’s ambitious story involves Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a beautiful blonde Jewish woman hiding in plain sight as a French movie theatre owner. She has better reason than most to want revenge against the Nazis and when a German soldier with some pull becomes smitten with her and arranges for Josef Goebbels’ latest piece of propaganda to be premiered at her establishment, a plot is hatched and the three storylines effortlessly intertwine.

As a movie star, I’ve always admired Pitt, as an actor not so much. He’s quite good in tailor-made roles but outside the zone he never again displayed the range that seemed so obvious when he disappeared into the role of a white trash serial killer in “Kalifornia.”  Over the past few years, however, that’s changed. Pitt’s upped his dramatic game considerably and as Aldo Raine he’s 100% convincing. He’s also — like the script itself — slyly and subtly hilarious.

The real stand out is Christopher Waltz as Landa, who creates the most disturbing and fascinating portrayal of a Nazi since Ralph Fiennes in “Schindler’s List.” Unlike Amon Goeth, though, Landa doesn’t have a tortured or conflicted bone in his sadistic body. He not only loves his job, he takes enormous pride in just how good he is at it. A psychological chess player always ten moves ahead of his prey, you don’t lose during the game, you lose as soon as Landa chooses you for an opponent. Laurent is also impressive, holding the screen in long close-ups with beautiful doe eyes that disguise a fever for vengeance the actress sells through her character’s pain, not some off-putting manning up.

You have certain expectations walking into a Tarantino film and “Basterds” meets most of them. The larger-than-life characters, quotable dialogue and a camera always exactly where it’s supposed to be, but knowing the director wanted to create his own man-on-a-mission film in the vein of “The Dirty Dozen” and “Where Eagles Dare,” the lack of visual scope was a letdown. There’s no grand Nazi lair here, no guns of Navarone or vast battle scenes. The story is large but the setting’s almost too contained, especially the climax.

Since his 1992 debut with “Reservoir Dogs,” Tarantino has had a remarkable run broken only by 2007’s disappointing “Death Proof.” “Basterds” may not be his best but it’s a worthy entry into an already remarkable canon of vibrant, original genre-enhancers that burst with an overwhelming affection for movies thanks to the passion of a director in love with a medium he respects and dabbles in like few others.


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Posted Aug 21st 2009 at 6:43 pm in Featured Story, Reviews | 93 Comments