By Eric Eisenberg
Say what you will about Quentin Tarantino, but the man knows how to put his mark on a movie. Be it is obsessive foot fetish, Mexican stand-offs, obsessively long shots, or lineage-connecting characters, it isn’t hard to pick one of his films out of a line-up.
With a mix of all of the above plus some larger-than-life characters with crackling dialogue, Inglourious Basterds is no different.
Seemingly maturing since his last outing, 2007’s Death Proof, which came packaged in theaters as Grindhouse, Tarantino shows some restraint in his reimagining of World War II, saying just as much with pauses and stillness as he does with quick wit and action sequences.
The film centers around a young Jewish French girl named Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who, after her family is killed by the Nazis, specifically a SS Colonel named Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), opens a cinema in Paris. Following a “heroic effort” by a young German soldier named Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a propaganda film is made and set to premiere at Shosanna’s theater.
Meanwhile, an American secret service unit, led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), has positioned itself in Nazi-occupied France and has spread fear throughout the Nazi regime by taking no prisoners and leaving survivors with a Charles Manson-esque swastika that they wouldn’t be able to remove after the war ends. Upon word that the highest members of the Third Reich are to be in attendance of the premiere of the new propaganda film, an operation is planned that could end the war. What they allied forces do not know, is that Shosanna has a plan of her own.
From the opening scene, where Landa, whose nickname is “The Jew Hunter,” interrogates a French dairy farmer regarding the unknown whereabouts of a local Jewish family, Tarantino ventures into a territory that has not yet been seen in his films: Hitchcockian tension. As the Colonel asks his questions and explains his position in the party, the farmer’s poker face slips ever so slowly and you can almost hear every heart in the audience sink. Even after the farmer is worn down and has revealed everything, however, the tension never leaves. At one point in the conversation, Landa pulls a comically large Calabash, a reference to Sherlock Holmes and Landa’s perception of himself as a detective, from his pocket, but the scene doesn’t allow you anymore than a slight smirk as anxiety continues to rise and the fate of the Jewish family is sealed.
But as much as Tarantino built the film, it is Waltz’s performance that provides the paint and furnishings. Winning the best actor prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Waltz is nothing short of brilliant in his performance, interacting with characters in German, French, Italian and English and emanating fear from those around him in each dialect. The audience gulps when Landa orders milk in the middle of the film. I’ll repeat that: the audience gulps when Landa orders milk. That kind of presence is rare.
Pitt, the film’s headliner, also shines in what is actually a somewhat limited role, despite the impression given by both the title and the film’s promotion. Following the film’s first trailer, many were put off by Pitt’s southern accent, which seemed somewhat overdone, but works perfectly for a character that would look comfortable riding Babe the Blue Ox. With a mysterious scar around his neck and a personal vendetta against the Germans, the background of which not explored, Lt. Raine is a legend in his own right and Pitt brings the goods with a comical albeit violent performance.
What truly makes a Tarantino film, though, is how the director’s personal love of film shines through. In each of his films, Reservoir Dogs through to Death Proof, there are references from classic cinema spread from the title screen to the closing credits, some say to an excessive degree. Inglourious Basterds, however, shows his love more than any of his previous efforts. Even the title is a reference to Enzo Castellari’s Italian film of the same name, misspelled because the owner of the rental store Tarantino worked for mislabeled the film so he was constantly unable to find it. With splashes of The Dirty Dozen, numerous World War II-era foreign film posters scattered throughout Shosanna’s theater, and references to David O. Selznick and Charlie Chaplin, the film more than contains homages to previous films, but, instead, the whole film is a dedication to the history of cinema.
The film is also not without the pulp/Grindhouse attitude that has been in his films since the mid-1990s. With the exception of Pitt, Diane Kruger (as the German actress/Allied spy Bridget von Hammersmark), Mike Myers (in a small role as a British general) and B.J. Ryan (from NBC’s “The Office), the entire cast is made up of little known actors, most of who actually share heritage with the characters they play, something fresh after last year’s Valkyrie. Key players are introduced with blasting trumpets and bold fonts and their back stories are told by the ever-smooth and Tarantino-regular Samuel L. Jackson. The audience can only laugh at this, as they are meant to. Nobody does over-the-top quite as artfully.
Where the film might find its detractors is in the amount of violence in the film. More on the level of Kill Bill than Pulp Fiction, the Basterds interrogation of the soldiers they capture tends to be more stylish than subtle. In some places it works, such as expressing the extreme anger of Donnie Donowitz, played by Eli Roth, whose hatred of the Nazi’s choice of victim leads him to use a baseball bat as his primary weapon. In others, such as Raine sticking his finger in the bullet wound of a person he’s questioning, it simply seems gratuitous, as something of that nature can be implied instead of shown. In his first feature film, Reservoir Dogs, the camera slowly pans away as Mr. Blonde cuts off the ear of a cop he is torturing. In the 17 years since, it would appear that Tarantino has lost some of that discipline.
Inglourious Basterds is simply the film that all of Tarantino’s previous works have been building up to. At the age of 46, he is no where close to retirement and should he continue to direct in to his 60s and 70s, he could have as many as 20 more films to make. Up to this point, however, Tarantino has yet to make a finer film.
© Eric Eisenberg, All Rights Reserved