History as fiction, fiction as history

Rating: 8/10 (29 June 2010)

Quentin Tarantino returns to form with "Inglorious Basterds," an uber-violent World War II revenge fantasy, modeled, at least in part, on "The Dirty Dozen." Brad Pitt, replete with noose-scarred neck and Southern drawl, plays Aldo Raine, a lieutenant in the U.S. military, who's recruited a band of Jewish mercenaries - dubbed the Inglorious Basterds - to roam the war torn countryside killing Nazis then removing their scalps as souvenirs. The few who are allowed to survive have a swastika carved into their foreheads as a warning to all future victims that the boys are coming to get them.
The "basterds" get their best opportunity to inflict maximum damage when Goebbels agrees to premiere one of his Nazi propaganda films in a theater in occupied France, a premiere at which just about anyone who's anyone among the German high command - including Der Fuhrer himself - will be in attendance. The plan is for the "basterds" to go in and annihilate virtually the entire Nazi regime in one fell swoop.
After years in which we've watched Jews in WWII films being marched off helplessly to death camps, "Inglorious Basterds" provides an almost purgative function by letting us see the victims finally doling out some long overdue, eye-for-an-eye justice to their murderous oppressors - even if it's a retribution largely consigned to the realm of fantasy and fiction (though the recent "Defiance" obviously provided us with a factual account of just such a turnabout).
Interestingly, though, despite their having star billing in the title, the "basterds" themselves are actually accorded a surprisingly small amount of screen time in the movie, so that anyone going into it expecting nonstop violent action scenes centered around the group's activities may be sorely disappointed. In reality, much more of the movie's 152-minute running time is devoted to the story of a beautiful Jewess (Melanie Laurent) who, after escaping death at the hands of a sadistic SS colonel (the brilliant Christopher Waltz in his bravura Oscar-winning performance), is now, as the owner of the theater where the movie will be shown, in a unique position to exact her revenge, both for herself and for all her people who have suffered under this brutal regime (her plan is to burn the theater down with all the Nazis inside).
Tarantino has self-consciously divided his screenplay into five subtitled chapters. The scenes within each chapter run long and all take place in a single setting, but they are rarely static, thanks to Tarantino's skill at composition, his penchant for crackling dialogue, and the suspense that arises organically from the situations being dramatized. Still, this is far from a fast-paced action-movie crowd-pleaser, so one should be forewarned that a certain amount of patience is required from the viewer.
Episodic in structure and deliberate in its pacing - with a healthy dose of black humor and a soundtrack just anachronistic enough to provide the imprimatur of "coolness" one demands from a Tarantino film - "Inglorious Basterds" provides an imperfect but imaginative spin on World War II "history."