tasty genre salad from Tarantino

Rating: 7/10 (20 April 2010)

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds starts off with the bucolic peace of an isolated dairy farm in Nazi-occupied France being interrupted by a motorcycle squad headed by an SS Officer (Christoph Waltz) who is hunting for hidden Jews. The scene brings to mind late-60s spaghetti western, World War 2 action, Hitchcockian menace, Mel Brooks send-up – and maybe even more. With Tarantino at the helm, you know there will be violence, but it will be couched in silly humor, usually involving banter about banal topics.
In this take on the Second World War, Tarantino combines elements of The Dirty Dozen (suggested by the titular pack of Jewish guerrillas, led by Brad Pitt with a Mountain Man accent, whose mission is to hunt, kill and scalp – not necessarily in that order - as many Nazis as possible) with various other film genres to rewrite history as if it too were another film genre. In this case he concocts a scenario in which the aforementioned guerrillas, in collusion with cineastes, plot to blow up a Paris movie theatre during a screening of a Nazi war epic attended by the leading figures of the Nazi high command, including Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Bormann.
There are many hilarious sequences, mostly having to do with levity against a backdrop of danger and slaughter. One moment you're laughing at an ironically placed bit of dialogue, and the next you're gasping at an act of violence or moved by the plight of the character at hand. The skill of Tarantino is that he is able to make you care on a strong dramatic level about key people while simultaneously populating his imaginary world with figures straight out of action comics.
It seems that at least half of the dialogue is in German, French or Italian, but the often verbose yellow subtitles blend too often with the visual background resulting in a loss of many lines and levels of plot that are provided through dialogue.
Tarantino's trademark pop cultural references are present in force, but appropriately focused on the cinema of Nazi-era Germany in which names like Lilian Harvey, Leni Riefenstahl, and G.W. Pabst and titles like "Lucky Kids" (Gluckskinder, 1936) and "The White Hell of Piz Palu" carried as much cultural clout as Jeanette MacDonald, Dorothy Arzner or Frank Capra or "Maytime," "Top Hat," or "The Good Earth" would have carried in the States at the same time. Tarantino even manages to replicate the look and feel of Nazi epic film opening credits with the faux movie that unspools at the Paris theatre ("Stoltz der Nation" – "Pride of the Nation"). He has done his Nazi-era pop cultural homework.
The best acting overall comes from Waltz as the SS officer. He clearly relishes every moment of the role and devours it like a gourmand at a feast. At times he brings to mind such versatile actors from the past as Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness. Runners up are Denis Menochet as the dairy farmer whose ambiguous, curiously restrained reaction to the SS intruders sets the tone for the whole film; Daniel Bruhl as the German war hero who becomes the star of the biopic about himself; Melanie Laurent as a fugitive Jewish woman hiding her identity as a Parisian theatre operator; Ludger Pistor as a good-humored Nazi officer who corners some of the conspirators in a basement tavern. The better-known Brad Pitt and Diane Kruger are effective but not outstanding.