Movie Review: Inglourious Basterds

So now all of my anticipated summer movies have come out, and they may have saved the best for last. I’ve been a Quentin Tarantino fan since some point in high school, when I decided Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were movies I needed to see. The combination of kinetic dialogue, unpredictable action, and fantastic music selections made them some of my favorite films of all time. After Death Proof, even though I enjoyed it, I was afraid the man had lost his touch. Still, Inglourious Basterds was a project long promised, and I was excited (and a little surprised) to see it had actually been completed.

This movie defied all of my expectations. In fact, in this “review” I cannot offer a true criticism. Tarantino made choices I don’t necessarily agree with, but they certainly mesh well with his vision. I also don’t think I’m being too forgiving either, as this is easily his best work since Pulp Fiction, and I suspect it may be better (I need to rewatch both in close proximity to be able to tell for sure).

Inglourious Basterds borrows heavily from one of Tarantino’s favorite films, Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the top of the heap in terms of spaghetti westerns. Unlike Leone’s classic, I had no trouble watching Basterds in one sitting. Sure it’s twenty minutes shorter, but even at 153 minutes the pacing feels brisk, perhaps because a whole two more films worth of material were cut down in the script editing process. Having chapter breaks also helps.

Tarantino also does his career best in terms of building dramatic tension through dialogue and plot, throwing his characters into the exact situations they don’t want to be in and letting the fireworks fly. It’s a beautiful thing, and is note perfect throughout the movie.

Now, I think I may have enjoyed the movie more because I am of Jewish decent. As a revenge movie, this works extremely well. Watching Hitler and Goebbels die in that matter, though gruesome, was extremely satisfying. It is this act, as well as Shoshanna’s turning of the cinema into an ironic oven made the film extremely satisfying on the revenge-flick level.

For people who do not come from that background, the opening scene of the movie, featuring a French dairy farmer and his family, provides a fresh reminder of why exactly the Nazis in the movie get what they deserve. The brutal shooting of hidden Jews under floorboards by the men under the command of the film’s villain, Hans Landa—nicknamed The Jew Hunter—is reminder enough as to why Nazis are the villains in so many films.

The most recent action film where Nazis—brutal Nazis—were the villains might have been Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. There have been plenty of films since 1989 that take place during WWII with Germans as the bad guys, but the German soldiers of Saving Private Ryan or U-571 aren’t exactly very Nazi-like.

Here’s an except from an interview with Chrisoph Waltz, who played Landa:

We are aware that Nazi films, like Downfall, are all historically correct. Inglourious Basterds clearly isn’t. Is it ok to laugh about the Nazis? What do you think the reaction will be in Germany and Austria?

“I have a slightly different approach to this issue, because I detest these movies that try to make us believe that they are telling the truth. I find it ludicrous, but not laughable, unfortunately. I think it’s hypocritical to say ‘we want to tell, especially a young audience, how Hitler really was as a person’. First of all I’d like to know why?

Second I’d like to know why young audiences need to know how Hitler was as a real person, because how does it help them in their lives? Is that really dealing with the subject in a responsible manner? I could go on for a year and a half about why this is the irresponsible approach to turn it into a backdrop for a sh**** movie that’s boring in the first place. It’s neither this nor that because the approach is boring; what are we meant to derive from it? What message does it give us? That Nazi’s were actually people? ‘This is how it really was, you must not forget’? We know! It’s supposed to appease our conscience; it’s the politically correct rubbish - the overlooking of the criteria that helps us to deal with the subject. We are only the second of third generation after the disaster, the biggest disaster in the history of humanity, and we’re using it to think, ‘we are all good, we are all right because we know that they were wrong’, but how does that help us to get an idea about the course of history? It doesn’t.

But look what Quentin does; he rips it open and all of a sudden you gain a completely new perspective. The question ‘what if?’ isn’t irresponsible, it actually triggers a process within you and you think ‘yes, what if? What can I contribute so that the process and the consciousness of this disaster actually turns in to something that helps me, and helps us all to avoid it in the future. It gives us an active understanding and an active way of dealing with the subject, and doesn’t turn the process in to a consumable product so that we find ourselves saying, ‘good, let’s go and have dinner because we don’t have to deal with this any further’.

And that’s why I love Quentin’s work, because he does it again and again and now he’s done it with this part of history. Laughing is a release reaction, that’s why the sound of laughter is explosive; it relieves tension, and the tension in this story is so immense that you need to laugh in order to stand it, in order to endure it to the end. Sorry, I get very passionate about this!”

This interview may reveal why the quadrilingual Landa is such a great villain, and one of the best of the decade. Chistoph Waltz’s performance is the key to the whole movie, and it will take a lot to top it come Oscar time.

The rest of the performances are uniformly great, especially Melanie Laurent’s Shoshanna and Daniel Bruhl’s Fredrick Zoller. Together they are the true central figures of the movie, and it is Shoshanna’s story that the movie is really concerned with. I also immensely enjoyed Mike Meyers’ cameo, and I may change the text tone on my phone to Brad Pitt’s character’s delivery of the word “Nazis.”

These characters populate the backdrop of Nazi-occupied France in a masterful plot. Tarantino shows off his storytelling skills here in a way we’ve not seen before. To this point, Jackie Brown was the only one to have a great plot, and Pulp Fiction’s flaws are hidden behind its non-sequential storytelling. The parallel structure is well crafted, and each portion of the plot serves its purpose toward the film’s resolution, yet (to my recollection) each of the chapters are viewable as a discreet and separate unit (not totally unlike Raiders of the Lost Ark’s status as an ‘uncut’ Republic serial).

This is easily one of my favorite films of the year so far, and I can’t wait to see it again.

Look for a review of the soundtrack this week too, this post is already to long and I need to sleep sometime.