a spectacular achievement of "movie" cinema

Rating: 10/10 (21 August 2009)

Inglourious Basterds won't please everyone. It's not a full-blown crowd-pleaser like other (dumber) blockbusters from this past summer. It's a war film, but in the same way that Pulp Fiction was a crime film. Some will be thrown off by things that people tend to take for granted with Quentin Tarantino films: it's "talky", with pages and pages of dialog performed sometimes like a stage play, and the violence, when it happens at a moments notice, is graphic and harsh and not with much hope for the character killed or injured or, in this case, scalped. It might not even be a film some will claim is the greatest film ever of a generation like with PF. But, for me, it is about as pure a piece of cinematic bliss I could ask for this year. And, dare I suggest, it's as audacious and genre re-defining as anything Tarantino's done, or may do again.
Tarantino makes up his own rules to break them down and see what makes them tick. Godard was like that, but in this case we don't see a filmmaker lose control of his own rules as Godard ultimately did in his career. Instead its a sprawling epic that throws a few really big damn monkey wrenches into Americans vs. Germans vs. French in world war two. It tells concurrent stories that come together in the BIG climactic chapter (and make no mistake, these are BIG, long chapters unlike Kill Bill) about a Jewish girl, Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent) who runs away just in time before the Nazis kill her family who are in hiding on a French farm, and years later becomes an owner of a movie theater in Paris and is picked out by a popular 'star' Nazi soldier (Daniel Bruhl) to screen a film starring himself in a recreation of his slaughtering 300 people from a roof-top.
The other is, naturally, the Basterds. It's actually with these story lines that Tarantino makes up his first rule to break: why not have a movie called Inglourious Basterds and *not* have them in every frame of the movie? Indeed, by my estimation, the Basterds are in about 55 to 60% of the full running time of the movie. But their scenes are the larger-than-life sort where we see Brad Pitt in an outstanding-cartoonish portrayal of a mass murderer/scalper who, in the real world, is a true-blue war criminal. Him and his men, which include "the Bear" (Eli Roth in a surprisingly good turn) and Hugo Stigliz, tear-ass around Europe taking down any Nazis in site (the "killin' Nazi business" as Ray says very clearly), and its hear we see an exaggeration of the take-no-prisoners philosophy of men in combat. Prisoners? Too much to bring along. Better to sic the Bear on em.
And all the while Tarantino provides us with an absolutely menacing presence with Hans Landa, a German colonel who appears in the opening scenes in a manner akin to Angel Eyes in the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (this is surely intentional, of course), only his evil is the smiling, chilling kind that reminds one of a William S. Buroughs line: the face of evil is the face of total need. Landa needs information, constantly, and asks so questioningly and with such cunning that we feel a sense of uncommon dread when he appears on screen, even when its just to eat a pastry with the (incognito) Shosanna. And leading in this role, almost threatening to tower over all of the other great or at least just revelatory performances, is that of Christoph Waltz. Take your eyes off this guy, I dare you. He's about as hypnotic and alluring and subtle as they come, and can floor you like Samuel L. Jackson reciting a Bible quote.
But oh, yeah, this film is "talky", make that clear again I should. Some scenes go on with a kind of cruel precision that one finds often in Tarantino's work, where you wonder if it might be going *too* long but, in reality, you'll probably be too caught up in the acting, or the suspense that builds (i.e. the basement-bar scene is a classic example) to such a thick point you'll get goosebumps. But at the same time that Tarantino makes a muchly European movie, with small nods to German and French cinema and a surprisingly mature control of the characters and mis-en-scene, he also makes a gaudy spectacle with his Hitler (at first) coming up like Moe Howard of the Three Stooges in You Natzi Spy, or even just Pitt's voice and mannerisms. It's something special to see a filmmaker embrace conventions and then set them with a box of grenades in another. If you see the climax you'll see what that means even more (and that, perhaps, reaches a pornographic exploitation of Nazi carnage).
Inglourious Basterds left me intrigued, startled, laughing, cringing, jaw-agape and eyes-widened, and left me hungry for more. Some will leave disappointed and some will complain. There not without their rights in this case. It's also one of a handful of examples in 2009 cinema of true f***-the-world "art" you'll come across. I, for one, can't wait to go into it again, even with that final line screaming (delightfully) of its director's hubris.