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Inglourious Basterds

Review by Edward Moran

 

Story : “Inglourious Basterds” begins in German-occupied France, where Shosanna Dreyfus(Mélanie Laurent) witnesses the execution of her family at the hand of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Shosanna narrowly escapes and flees to Paris, where she forges a new identity as the owner and operator of a cinema. Elsewhere in Europe, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) organizes a group of Jewish soldiers to engage in targeted acts of retribution. Known to their enemy as “The Basterds,” Raine’s squad joins German actress and undercover agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) on a mission to take down the leaders of The Third Reich.

Opens August 21, 2009

Review

It goes without saying that blood and brimstone has always been a hallmark of Quentin Tarantino’s cinemaelstrom. Twenty years ago, when he was working on his prentice film, the one that eventually became True Romance, a fire in the production lab reduced one of the reels to cinders. Perhaps it was that memory, singed into his directorial imagination, that inspired the screenplay for Inglourious Basterds, a revenge-driven ramble that climaxes in arson in a Paris cinema—a pyromaniacal wet dream that sends the entire Nazi high command, including the Fuerher himself, aux enfers (to hell).

But wait a minute, didn’t Hitler die in a Berlin bunker in 1945, not in a French movie house in 1944? Artistic license is one thing, but asking audiences to suspend disbelief so far is quite a stretch. Maybe Tarantino thinks that World War II is ancient history now, and that contemporary audiences won’t really notice how freewheeling he is with the facts. Maybe the film is not about the plot at all, but about deconstructing war movies on some arcane semiotic level. Maybe the point of this film is not history at all, but “twistery” in the service of a good moral. If nothing else, Inglourious Basterds is at heart a morality play, the first cowboy movie of the new millennium, a strudel Western that pits the forces of evil against the forces of good, personified by Tennessee moonshiner Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), the leader of a squad of Jewish American soldiers who, true to his backwoods traditions, is out to add as many Nazi scalps as possible to his collection. And true to Tarantino’s tradition, the scalping is done right in front of the audience—and I don’t mean tickets. Raine plays his role as a typical good-ol’-boy mountain man, complete with a drawl that would charm the socks off Davy Crockett. It’s the last gasp for the old fashioned war movie glorifying the rude American backwoodsman vis-à-vis the sophisticated European warrior.

The story is simple and could even be heartwarming if directed otherwise. But it hasn’t been, which is probably why some critics have called it “kosher revenge porn.” Shortly after the Nazi occupation of France, Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) massacres a Jewish family being hidden by a sympathetic French farm family. The only survivor, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), migrates to Paris where she becomes the proprietor of a cinema. A Nazi soldier, Frederich Zoller (Daniel Brühl), becomes infatuated with her and selects the cinema as the venue for a Goebbels propaganda film that will celebrate the glories of the Wehrmacht while asserting German cultural hegemony in Occupied Paris. There are subplots within subplots involving double agents and an intriguing German actress, Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), which could have been quite riveting had they been more tightly condensed. Shosanna plays along with the scheme while concocting a sinister one of her own: plotting with her black assistant to lock all the Nazis in the theater and toss a match to the highly inflammable film stock in the basement.

If this were about the Battle of the Bulge, we could perhaps excuse the film’s sprawling digressions. Inglourious Basterds could have used a razor-sharp editor to cut the film down from two hours and twenty minutes to about a hour and three-quarters. There are just too many longueurs for a film that would thrive on tight, compact scenes. But don’t cut out the scenes involving Colonel Hans Landa. German actor Christoph Waltz is the real star of this film: a complex and charming villain who deserves the sobriquet of “inglourious basterd” far more than anyone else. The suave, sweet-talking Nazi deftly dominated every scene in which he appeared. Poor Shosanna, who is supposed to be the fim’s heroine for her valiant scheme to bring down the entire Nazi regime on her own turf. She is far too passive and emotionless to encourage much sympathy, except for that final scene where she battles Zoller to a duel just as the climactic fire is being set in the basement. But as the swastika-festooned auditorium erupts into an inferno, we cannot help but concluding that Tarantino’s revisionist-history extravaganza is nothing more than a mere flick.

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
Director of photography: Robert Richardson
Edited by Sally Menke
Production designer: David Wasco
Produced by Lawrence Bender
Released by the Weinstein Company and Universal Pictures.
In English, French, German and Italian.
Running time: 2 hours 32 minutes.

Cast: Brad Pitt (Lt. Aldo Raine)
Christoph Waltz (Col. Hans Landa)
Eli Roth (Sgt. Donny Donowitz)
Michael Fassbender (Lt. Archie Hicox)
Diane Kruger (Bridget von Hammersmark)
Daniel Brühl (Fredrick Zoller)
Mélanie Laurent (Shosanna Dreyfus)
Denis Menochet (Perrier LaPadite)
Sylvester Groth (Joseph Goebbels)
Mike Myers (Gen. Ed Fenech),
and Rod Taylor (Winston Churchill).