INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS
Written & Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Produced by Lawrence Bender
Released by the Weinstein Company
USA/ Germany 152 min. Rated R
With Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Daniel Bruhl, Til Schweiger & Mike Myers
 

The buzz around Inglourious Basterds has been that it’s a self-indulgent fantasy of porno-violence where the roles of Jews and Nazis are reversed to make you squirm. All true, but I liked it.

For better or worse, Quentin Tarantino has become a brand, and Inglourious Basterds delivers what you’d expect: a grab bag of film references (everything from Raiders of the Lost Ark to The Dirty Dozen gets a nod); leisurely, shoot-the-shit dialogue drawing obscure connections between cinema and life; and enough gruesome killings to fill a teenage loner’s notebook.

First, let’s get this out of the way: Basterds shares nothing with Enzo G. Castellari’s lovable 1978 warsploitation romp Inglorious Bastards except a misspelled version of its name and the World War II setting. In Basterds, Brad Pitt (putting on an unconvincing Southern accent) plays half-Apache American officer Aldo Raine, who leads a group of Jewish soldiers deep into Nazi-occupied France to scalp and otherwise wage guerrilla war on Nazis. Meanwhile, a young Jewish woman, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), whose family was killed by Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz), plans to use a movie theater to get revenge on Landa and the rest of the Third Reich.

At over two-and-a-half hours, the film is a shade too long, and the disparate threads of plot never fully stitch together (chapter headings fail to tie up this baggy monster), nor does the film ever live up to its tense, almost fairy-tale opening, with a taciturn French dairy farmer and his three lovely daughters. And despite the care with which Tarantino sets up the Nazi-scalping Basterds, he never really does anything with them. Most of them don’t even spend enough time on screen for us to tell one from another.

And, yes, Tarantino’s film-geekiness is as precious as ever. Of course, the British agent sent to help the Basterds is a German film buff, who chats with Winston Churchill about cinema attendance numbers under Joseph Goebbels, and Shosanna’s quest for revenge is complicated, and inadvertently helped, by a German Audrey Murphy starring in a movie about his exploits—who also enjoys evening chats about G. W. Pabst.

Still, one has to take Basterds for what it is: an alternate World War II universe, re-imagined as a spaghetti Western, and guided solely by Tarantino’s fairly reliable instincts for “Wouldn’t it be cool, if….” Tarantino is clearly having fun with the world he has created, and it’s infectious. Even the pseudo-period dialogue has its charms, such as when Pitt tells an injured actress being treated by a vet, “Doggie doc’s gonna pull that slug outta your gam.”

In interviews, Eli Roth (who plays, in his limited, annoying way, a baseball bat-wielding Basterd known as the “Bear Jew”) said the film was “kosher porn,” and there’s some truth to that. The Basterds carve swastikas into the foreheads of captured Nazis, so they can’t blend back into society after the war as so many did. (Note: some of the Germans so victimized appear to be ordinary German soldiers, not Nazis: is Tarantino saying all Germans were complicit? Or that the Basterds are going too far? Or did he not realize that even in WWII there was a difference between party members and other Germans? How you answer probably depends on how much credit you’re willing to extend to Tarantino.)

Although Tarantino, like Pitt’s Aldo Raine, likes “killin’ Nahtzees,” he goes out of his way not to demonize them, either to be fair or just impish. In one sure to be notorious scene, Roth is about to bash in the head of a German officer, who refuses to divulge information that would cost the lives of his men. Roth points to one of the medals on his shirt and asks, “What did you get that for, killing Jews?” And the German answers with quiet dignity, “No, bravery.” I don’t know what Tarantino is trying to say with this: I just think he realized there are crueler ways than realistic-looking scalpings (which the film has plenty of) to make audiences squirm. Brendon Nafziger
August 18, 2009