Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

While talking up Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino regularly mentioned setting out to make a “men on a mission” movie. The Basterds mission? The simple, depthless goal of killing as many Nazis as possible… in all sorts of torturous and barbaric ways. The trailers themselves all but guaranteed this as “The Jewish Revenge” movie. Thankfully then, this is not the Basterds movie and the movie has considerably more on its mind. Instead Inglourious Basterds more rightfully belongs to Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a Jewish woman hiding out in France running a movie theater during the Holocaust, and Col. Hans Landa (the astonishing Christoph Waltz), named after his wartime specialty as “The Jew Hunter.” Landa is among Tarantino’s best creations, a villainous Nazi investigator with a gleeful attitude and a genial manner, he’s all the more creepy and off-putting because of it, and the horrible things he’s capable of unleashing at any time. Any time this character is on screen, Tarantino conducts a master class in building suspense simply through dialogue and the fear of the unknown. The best moments here regularly revolve around some sort of sit down conversational scene. The more problematic areas of the film, as I feared, come from the Basterds themselves. They’re a renegade group of thugs, as they would need to be to be dropped into occupied France and start slaughtering Nazis left and right. The problematic part is more to the point Tarantino wants you to enjoy the slaughter, baseball bat bludgeonings, scalpings, swastika forehead carvings, he’s personally handing out vengeance for WWII. As he’s said himself, this is no doubt a propaganda film but it’s also regularly a sadistic one, and offers the audience far too many opportunities to cheer the massacre. The film is told in five chapters and eventually the stories of Shoshanna and the Basterds converge as they both plan to destroy the movie theater screening a Nazi sniper’s propaganda film Nation’s Pride with the Fuhrer and his highest officials in attendance. There are moments of brilliant filmmaking, storytelling and scriptwriting scattered throughout and I’ll admit the film lodges itself into your memory (I’ve had more cravings to see this film again in theaters than any other 2009 release outside of Public Enemies). As usual, Tarantino’s love of film is found in every moment (hell, he even uses film as a weapon and a film critic for a hero) and the technical aspects are never less than tremendous and ingeniously clever. The performance Tarantino gets out of Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine is also more than noteworthy for its humor and commitment. If it weren’t for Waltz, Pitt would be receiving a lot more notices. This all leads to a finale so dizzyingly outrageous, it took me two days to realize it’s really nothing more than an audacious, juvenile prank. It’s both the best and worst of Quentin Tarantino… and to me that’s still pretty damn good.