Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds

By Jonathan Fisher, August 25th, 2009


Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds is a cinematic funhouse. There's so much talent, energy and balls both in front of and behind the camera that it has nearly single-handedly restored my temporarily-lost fanboy giddiness. This is a movie that will excite you about the movies.

The plot(s): In 1944 Germany, a softly-spoken French farmer is visited by a German officer. This is Col. Hans Lauder (Christoph Waltz), who has earned the nickname of "The Jewish Hunter". Lauder is polite, amenable, and completely evil. In this scene and throughout the rest of the movie Christoph Waltz creates one of the most memorable movie characters in recent memory. This guy will live as long in the memory as Jules Winnfield did in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction all those years ago. Waltz has got to at least be nominated for an Oscar.

In the masterful opening scene, the seed of the film's second plot strand is planted. Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) is a young Jewish girl who escapes Lauder's clutches. She escapes to Paris and begins a new life as the owner of a cinema. She is targeted romantically by German officer Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl from Goodbye Lenin!). Zoller is a war hero whose valiant exploits in killing 300 Allied officers from a watch tower has been made into a film. Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), the head of German propaganda, has turned the film into a cultural landmark for the Nazi party. After some gentle persuasion by Zoller, he agrees to host the premier of the film at Shosanna's small theatre.

The third, and perhaps most important strand of the film, involves the plight of the Basterds, led by Lt. Aldo Reine, played magnificently by Brad Pitt. The Basterds are a rogue group of American soldiers, primarily of Jewish descent, who don't just wage a war against the Nazis. They aim to destroy them. Reine, in a fantastic opening monologue, outlines the Basterds' modus operandi -- decimate the Nazi forces, collecting their scalps as they go. Eventually the Basterds catch wind of Zoller's movie premiere thanks to a British officer played by Michael Fassbender, and they form plans to sabotage the movie premiere. Their plan involves a glamorous German movie star, Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) who is filmed by Tarantino in the style of the movie starlets of old. He focuses on legs, feet, curves. You can tell Tarantino enjoyed every minute of making this movie, one he has been crafting in his head since before Reservoir Dogs.

Inglourious Basterds has a, er, surprise ending. Needless to say, this is not a retelling of history. This is Tarantino's glorious bastardisation of history. The final scenes are scenes that I will watch over and over again when I eventually own this film on Blu-Ray. They epitomise the fluidity and confidence with which Tarantino directs.

The post September 11 mentality of Inglourious Basterds may resonate with some audience members (particularly American ones) as a reflection of Western values today. It's fine to torture the torturers. Extravagant violence is justified, and enjoyable, if your opponent has been deemed to be 'soulless'. I see it a bit differently -- the violence in Basterds is so stylised (as is always the case with Tarantino) that it's nearly a parody of that mentality. But, at the core of the violence, there is a subtext of morbid enjoyment that we as an audience gain. How we react to the violence, how we critique it in our own minds, is a challenge that Tarantino's movie puts to us amongst the black comedy and lightning-fast dialogue.

A word on the performances. I'm on record above in saying that Christoph Waltz deserves an Oscar for his performance as Lauder, but people often forget just how talented Brad Pitt is, I guess because of his off-screen persona as Hollywood's pin-up. But over the years, he has put in some fantastic character performances -- there is a reason that the likes of Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, the Coen Brothers and now Quentin Tarantino favour him. His performance as Reine is hilarious, written perfectly by Tarantino. Melanie Laurent is a spectacular newcomer, and she has the looks and talent to go a long way in the movie industry.

Tarantino is the master of writing characters that live long in the memory. In so many movies, the term 'over-the-top' is applied as a criticism. For Tarantino, it's a style. He knows just how far to push his characters, and his actors' performances, without allowing his movies to become laughable, or pretentious. I just don't know how he does it, and I've seen all of his films multiple times.

Tarantino's encyclopedic knowledge of film is well-documented. He uses it to good effect here. There are plenty of movie references, some over-the-top and obvious, some a little more subtle. There are lots of visual nods to one of my favourite movies, John Ford's The Searchers, as well as plenty of references to classic European cinema, including the thumping Ennio Morricone-penned theme to the Taviani Brothers' Alonsanfon over the film's final credits. The Morricone shout-outs betray Basterds' influence: spaghetti westerns, as well as war movies like Patton and Full Metal Jacket. As always with Tarantino, we get the sense that he is not simply name-dropping these films for the sake of it. Rather, he takes his massive knowledge and passion for movies and fashions films that have his own unique, energetic stamp on it. Along with Scorsese, Herzog, P.T. Anderson, the Coen Brothers and a handful of other directors, Tarantino is one of the true visionaries of modern cinema.

Inglourious Basterds is my favourite movie of the year so far, and could well prove to be the best movie of the year. Tarantino is one of the few film-makers around today that never wastes a shot, a line of dialogue, a camera swoop or an edit. Tarantino cheekily gives Aldo Reine the final line: "This may well be my masterpiece." Inglourious Basterds may be Tarantino's.

A video of Tarantino listing his 20 favourite movies made since the release of Reservoir Dogs: