Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
Written By: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, & Christoph Waltz
Runtime: 153 min
Rating: R
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Take enough history classes, and you know how all the stories end. It’s like that dreaded spoiler – what’s the fun of watching a movie when you already know its conclusion? See enough movies, however, and you’ll realize most stories, especially in American cinema, end the same, too: guy gets girl, bad guy gets dead, and things get good again. It’s not the end, but the stuff in the middle – the intrigue, the cinematic flair – that makes movies and history interesting. Quentin Tarantino has made a career out of the stuff in the middle, flipping off genre and screenwriting conventions, bending them to his directorial will. It’s no surprise, then, that the marketing for his latest, greatest film, Inglourious Basterds, couldn’t be more misleading.

Forget about Brad Pitt’s square-jawed presence on posters and the piles of bullets and Nazi scalps in the trailers – this, as (500) Days of Summer’s narrator would say, isn’t a war movie. It’s a movie about war. About the havoc it wreaks on the souls of sides both good and evil, if there’s even a distinction between the two. It’s a story of two hunters: Col. Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa (Christoph Waltz), and his American foil, Lt. Aldo “The Apache” Raine (Pitt), men equal in cruelty and accent. Raine orders his men, dubbed “The Basterds” by their enemies, to collect 100 Nazi scalps each. One could imagine Landa giving his men a similar order for Jew lives.

It’s also a story of boy-meets-girl. The boy, Nazi soldier-turned-actor Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl) meets the girl, Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), whose family was massacred by men wearing the Zoller’s uniform. Landa was one of those men, and will be present in Shoshanna’s Paris theater for the premiere of Nation’s Pride, a film Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels is so proud of, he’s invited all of his party’s elite. The Basterds plan to attend, as does the Fürher himself. This premiere will be explosive, to say the least.

For brevity’s sake, Inglourious Basterds is also several other stories: A British espionage thriller, a men-on-a-mission war film, a period piece, and a French romance with cinema as its backdrop, to name a few. It’s also the story of how Tarantino, oft-maligned for his dependence on pop culture-laden dialogue and film geek references, has matured as a filmmaker. Working in an era where many of the movies his characters would typically reference haven’t even come out yet, Tarantino lets his craft do the talking. Evocative framing, layered, nuanced performances and stunning cinematography help this film exist on thematic levels deeper than any Tarantino has reached before. A more assured and technically sound film than his others, one thing remains the same: this film is damn good fun from beginning to end, cruising through its running time with memorable lines, unforgettable characters, and the coolest lesson you’ll ever see on the flammability of nitrate film stock.

Some will say that the episodic jumps from one group – and one movie – to another steal time from the characters and undercut the impact of third-act twists and turns. But I’ve never cared about Tarantino characters as much as I did here. Sure, there are plot threads left untied, and some – Aldo’s neck scar from a failed hanging, Landa’s obsession with milk, Sgt. Donny Donowitz’s (Eli Roth – who knew he was a damn good actor?) preference for a baseball bat as a murder weapon – that are never explained at all. Yet Tarantino, as he expertly does in almost all of his films, gives us exactly what we need to hear and see in order to care for his characters and care about what they’re confronting. His Basterds characters are so well-rounded and realistic, partly because the historical events surrounding them are far too real. This too contributes to the brutal honesty in Basterds. Tarantino is referencing the tragedies of history as much as he is his favorite movies, and his film is richer because of it.

For a movie full of blood, guts, murders, and carved scalps, nothing is more powerful, more stirring, than what takes place in Shoshanna’s theater. Read any interview with the cast or crew, and you will know what happens, and who is killed. Tarantino has made no secret of his intent to rewrite history – perhaps he’s bored by the classes, too – and he does just that. As Nazi after Nazi is massacred, another of his intents becomes clear: We can all be consumed by revenge; and once we are, we become no better than those we are out to get. War, it seems, is worse for what it does to the warriors, than to the cities destroyed in their battles. One of the film’s final images is of Shoshanna’s theater burning to the ground, and all of the films she owns with it. How terrible is war, if even the movies can’t survive it?

Clarence Hammond
© Cinephile Magazine, 2009