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Inglourious Basterds is ostensibly based on World War II, but it exists in a universe all its own. It's the kind of film where characters have names like Wilhelm Wicki and Dieter Hellstrom. It is hyperreal, and therefore almost entirely fake.
Opening in the early 1940s, the film is comprised of two storylines: that of a young Jewish girl named Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), who perhaps-not-coincidentally resembles a young Uma Thurman, and the exploits of the titular Basterds, a small band of Jewish soldiers scouring France for Nazis to torture and kill. The Basterds are led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), who sports an accent that Foghorn Leghorn would find absurd.
Lt. Raine informs his men that he requires one hundred Nazi scalps from each of them. "We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are," he tells his men. This isn't the kind of movie that needs to have a message, but it sort of has one anyway: some foes are too low to reach from the moral high ground.
Making a film about the Nazis is a masterstroke for writer-director Quentin Tarantino, whose films always delight in their own brutality, and who's finally found a group of villains heinous enough that audiences can fully join in the reveling. The resulting violence is predictably extreme, but deceptively sparse. Tarantino knows how to boil a frog and relishes the slow crescendo of each confrontation, even if he lets a couple of scenes simmer too long. Hitchcock's bomb theory permeates the entire affair, swapping the explosives out for everything from pistols to people. On the surface, the characters are putting all their cards on the table, but the real game is always being played underneath it.
That Inglourious Basterds is interested in language and conversation for their own sake is no surprise, but it also takes a Coen-esque delight in its cartoonish dialects. Lt. Raine and Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) mutilate their diction (and their enemies) until it transcends caricature, a fact which intersects with the Basterds' mission in an especially amusing way. Pitt is the standout here, unrolling a thick Tennesseean twang that sounds like it might spontaneously generate its own banjo accompaniment. But Pitt's performance is more than an impossible inflection; it's in the squint of his eyes, the puff of his chest, and the hands on his hips.
Pitt's convincing bravado is still less inspired than the performance of Christoph Waltz, who plays Col. Hans Landa. Waltz is a veteran of German cinema and gifts Landa (dubbed "The Jew Hunter") with an unnerving calm that only increases his menace. Unknown to American audiences, he disappears into the role and imbues his character with a creepily misplaced levity. He's in it for the sport, and sees the Basterds as nemeses more than enemies.
The two storylines eventually converge, but the journey and the destination are one and the same. There's hardly a moment along the way that isn't improved by some wild flourish, and in a film like this the flourishes are the entire point. Inglourious Basterds is like a Christmas tree, with each scene existing only to be decorated. Tarantino hangs visual ornaments everywhere, and each bauble is shinier than the last.
In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Carleton Young says that "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Inglourious Basterds has no interest in facts, but a great deal of interest in legends. World War II encompasses many remarkable true stories, but each of them must be remade to fit the shape of this film. Though the truth of the war may sometimes be stranger than Quentin Tarantino's fiction, it's not as fun.
Opening in the early 1940s, the film is comprised of two storylines: that of a young Jewish girl named Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), who perhaps-not-coincidentally resembles a young Uma Thurman, and the exploits of the titular Basterds, a small band of Jewish soldiers scouring France for Nazis to torture and kill. The Basterds are led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), who sports an accent that Foghorn Leghorn would find absurd.
Lt. Raine informs his men that he requires one hundred Nazi scalps from each of them. "We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are," he tells his men. This isn't the kind of movie that needs to have a message, but it sort of has one anyway: some foes are too low to reach from the moral high ground.
Making a film about the Nazis is a masterstroke for writer-director Quentin Tarantino, whose films always delight in their own brutality, and who's finally found a group of villains heinous enough that audiences can fully join in the reveling. The resulting violence is predictably extreme, but deceptively sparse. Tarantino knows how to boil a frog and relishes the slow crescendo of each confrontation, even if he lets a couple of scenes simmer too long. Hitchcock's bomb theory permeates the entire affair, swapping the explosives out for everything from pistols to people. On the surface, the characters are putting all their cards on the table, but the real game is always being played underneath it.
That Inglourious Basterds is interested in language and conversation for their own sake is no surprise, but it also takes a Coen-esque delight in its cartoonish dialects. Lt. Raine and Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) mutilate their diction (and their enemies) until it transcends caricature, a fact which intersects with the Basterds' mission in an especially amusing way. Pitt is the standout here, unrolling a thick Tennesseean twang that sounds like it might spontaneously generate its own banjo accompaniment. But Pitt's performance is more than an impossible inflection; it's in the squint of his eyes, the puff of his chest, and the hands on his hips.
Pitt's convincing bravado is still less inspired than the performance of Christoph Waltz, who plays Col. Hans Landa. Waltz is a veteran of German cinema and gifts Landa (dubbed "The Jew Hunter") with an unnerving calm that only increases his menace. Unknown to American audiences, he disappears into the role and imbues his character with a creepily misplaced levity. He's in it for the sport, and sees the Basterds as nemeses more than enemies.
The two storylines eventually converge, but the journey and the destination are one and the same. There's hardly a moment along the way that isn't improved by some wild flourish, and in a film like this the flourishes are the entire point. Inglourious Basterds is like a Christmas tree, with each scene existing only to be decorated. Tarantino hangs visual ornaments everywhere, and each bauble is shinier than the last.
In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Carleton Young says that "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Inglourious Basterds has no interest in facts, but a great deal of interest in legends. World War II encompasses many remarkable true stories, but each of them must be remade to fit the shape of this film. Though the truth of the war may sometimes be stranger than Quentin Tarantino's fiction, it's not as fun.