A wealth of almost-themes and lush production values, amazing cast, a must-see

Rating: 9/10 (6 August 2009)

Tarantino's World War II feature Inglourious Basterds shows the director's best and worst features, but in a wholly new setting. Here is his propensity for sectioned films (there are five "chapters") with disparate plots with neat but wildly implausible interconnections. His love of elaborate extended set pieces where the dialogue takes over, sometimes at excruciating length. He casts playfully and ingeniously and provides his actors irresistible opportunities to strut their stuff. He's a master of old-fashioned camera-work, with bold and traditional uses of big close-ups. He tries out some pretty fancy production pieces, notably gun battles and a classic old movie theater rigged up for a Nazi gala, and these are never less than colorful and delightful eye candy. The new twist is the swing to Europe -- German-occupied France -- with tons of subtitled French and German dialogue, and even translating back and forth between them. A big question is this: can we really stomach a partly comic, partly grandiose, partly grind-house version of the war European filmmakers and at least all older Europeans still take deadly seriously? Can World War II be the basis for a movie about movies so fanciful that it seeks to resolve the war in that old Paris cinema with a host of Nazi bigwigs all on hand for a propaganda film? Besides the Dirty Dozen team of American Jews headed up by Brad Pitt's southern redneck and charged, as viewers of the movie trailer will well remember, to bring back "Nazi scalps" (a hundred each, in fact) -- something a little in the vein of Samuel Fuller's 1980 saga Big Red One, once planned in this long-contemplated project as a 16-episode TV series -- there's a not-so-secondary dual theme of concealment and identity. The movie begins at a French dairy farm with a visit from the most impressive and despicable character, Col. Hans Landa (played with relish and equal linguistic skill in French, English and German by Austrian Christoph Waltz Waltz), who's nickname is "the Jew Hunter." The farmer is hiding Jews, and Landa finds them -- but it all happens in dialogue, followed by a violent rain of bullets. One of the hidden family escapes alive, Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), who reappears improbably several years later as the proprietor of a Paris cinema, having taken on a French Christian name.
This sequence is excruciating enough, but less so than one in which an English OSS officer's posing as a Nazi officer, Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), is gradually smoked out in a cellar bar. At that point the excruciating becomes hard to separate from the tedious. And then three's the German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diana Kruger), undercover for the Allies, who's caught out later like a doomed Cinderella, by a shoe that fits. Meanwhile there are several Germans who pose as Nazis while their real aim is to kill Nazis, and there is young German war hero Fredrick Zoller ( Daniel Brühl), fluent in French, and in love with Shoshanna as well as with movies -- and he becomes a movie star, beginning by playing himself in a propaganda film . The ingenuity and parallelisms are so fascinating one wishes identity were made more resonant as a theme.
Another theme or Tarantino fetish much on display here is for deal-making. The dairy farmer is bargained with. Lt. Aldo Raine (Pitt -- the name a homage to veteran war movie actor Aldo Ray) is ready to bargain with Nazis, letting them keep their lives and their scalps if they'll give up German military information. Col. Hans Lada makes the biggest deal of all -- his life for, well, the Third Reich, basically.
A big element is the celebration of movies, not only by the climax in a movie house, but in the constant references to old ones, to the point that Inglourious Basterds, the title itself a deliberate corruption of the name of a schlock Italian WWII film, becomes more than anything about old war movies. At times the whole effort gets mired in material that is too familiar -- the nasty Nazis, the drinking scenes, the face offs, the suspenseful plots -- material that has been done better and with more gravitas elsewhere. Quentin Tarantino's movies have never been about "reality." They're ingenious fantasies, built up out of cinema, delighting in the magic of what can happen on the screen.
But World War II was always movies, too, and propaganda. The "Basterds" -- the team of Jews out to give individual Nazis horrible deaths -- are a propaganda weapon. And so is the movie "Nation's Pride," made starring Zoller, depicting how he singlehandedly killed 300 men, And Tarantino gives us something it's surprising he's not done before, a movie-within-a-movie. Zoller calls himself "the German Sgt. York." Tarantino does not resist the temptation (how could he?) to put his versions of Goebbels (a very juicy Sylvester Groth) as well as Hitler, and even, off in the corner of a scene, Churchill, on the screen.
Also present is the quintessential Tarantino theme: revenge. The "basterds" are having revenge for the annihilation of Jews. Zoller's insistence that the premiere be transferred to Shoshanna's cinema gives her the opportunity to wreak vengeance on a whole auditorium full of Nazis for the brutal killing of her family.
Things get very complicated when three plots by the British, the "Basterds," and Shoshanna (with her black French boyfriend Marcel (Jacky Ido) all converge on the premiere of "Nation's Pride" at Shoshann's theater, with some confusion of the continuity in this event.
Whether or not you buy the whole thing, the production is lush, the acting is rich, and there's a fascinating interweaving of almost-themes. Waltz carries the day, but Pitt, with his down-home shtick, though it's not as funny or as vivid as stuff in Full Metal Jacket, is still quite entertaining, and he too gets his chance to put on a (comically clumsy) fake identity. Troubling, drawn-out--and not to be missed.