A Fantastical, Revisionist Look Back at World War II, Tarantino Style

Rating: 8/10 (3 March 2010)

Polarizing filmmaker Quentin Tarantino's unadulterated love of cinema is really the most pervasive factor in his fantastical 2009 World War II adventure. Running an epic-length 153 minutes, it may appear on the surface like "The Longest Day", but the director/writer takes inspiration from Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, Robert Aldrich's "The Dirty Dozen", Hollywood wartime propaganda B-movies, and his own adrenaline-infused and blackly comic films ("Pulp Fiction", "Kill Bill") to tell an audacious "what-if?" story about a group of guerrilla U.S. soldiers in Nazi-occupied France. The tightly wound plot revolves around three key figures: Colonel Hans Landa, an elegant, seemingly bloodless Nazi officer known as "The Jew Hunter"; Lt. Aldo Raine, a Tennessee-born resistance fighter who has organized a special squad of Jewish-American soldiers whose goal is scalping and killing Nazis; and Emmanuelle Mimieux (née Shosanna Dreyfus), a pensive young Jewish woman who runs a movie theater in Paris.
As presented by Tarantino over the course of five discrete chapters, the three disparate figures converge upon Mimieux's theater for the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film called "A Nation's Pride". There in attendance is to be not only Third Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels but also the Fuehrer himself. Needless to say, the filmmaker has carefully set up all his chess pieces for a flamboyant finale that represents a manifestation of some kind of crude moral justice that revisionist history allows only grand storytellers like Tarantino. Riddled with quirky incongruities, some of which border a bit too closely to self-parody, his signature style is evident through a series of set pieces, most heavy on insinuating dialogue, that suddenly explode like the tavern mêlée in La Louisiane.
In a turnabout from his Oscar-baiting performance last year as the passive Benjamin Button, Brad Pitt brings cocksure arrogance to Raine in an enjoyably hammy turn. Mélanie Laurent perfectly captures Shosanna's simmering resentment until her cathartic release during the explosive conclusion, while Diane Kruger cuts a somewhat more predictable figure as a Dietrich-like femme fatale actress in cahoots with Raine's battalion. Tarantino fills smaller roles with oddball choices like Mike Myers as a pip-pip British general, Rod Taylor ("The Birds") as Churchill, and "Hostel" director Eli Roth as a baseball bat-wielding Nazi killer. Regardless, the best work comes Christoph Waltz's nuanced turn as the sadistic Landa. It's a masterfully subtle performance amid a movie that is anything but subtle.
Waltz's best scene comes right at the beginning with his unbearably tense conversation with a stoic French farmer suspected of hiding a family of Jews. There is also glorious camera-work from veteran cinematographer Robert Richardson ("JFK"). The extras seem a bit too stretched out for the 2009 two-disc set, especially with no Tarantino commentary being offered in this package. Instead, on the first disc, we get two extended scenes and one alternate, the movie-within-the-movie "A Nation's Pride", and a few trailers. The second disc offers a half-hour round table discussion among Tarantino, Pitt, and film critic Elvis Mitchell; a faux-making-of featurette for "A Nation's Pride"; a discussion of the original Italian movie, "Inglorious Bastards" (upon which this movie bears little similarity); and a few other more obscure extras. Love it or hate it, the film reflects the filmmaker's uniquely audacious style in his most serious effort to date.