Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds

149 Minutes

It’s fitting that the opening credits for Quentin Tarantinto’s new film, Inglourious Basterds, runs through three different fonts before the action even begins;Tarantino has been equally lauded and castigated for letting his myriad influences dominate his own films, and the haphazard mishmash of typesets follows accordingly. Basterds is less a WWII epic (as it has been advertised) or a spaghetti western (as the director insists) than stew of everything that makes those genres great. And you know what? It works magnificently.

Through the course of various titled “chapters,” Basterds follows three slowly merging plotlines. The most heavily advertised, of course, has been Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt as a delightfully cartoonish hillbilly soldier) and his troop of Jewish-American soldiers, most notably including Hostel director Eli Roth and The Office’s B.J. Novak. Their mission, as stated by an opening scene in homage of The Dirty Dozen, is to terrorize Nazi soldiers in occupied France…primarily by scalping them. The second thread deals with a young Jewish woman (Mélanie Laurent) who masquerades as the owner of a cinema in Paris dealing with the Reich’s sudden plan to hold the premiere of Joseph Goebbels’ latest propaganda film at her venue. The third concerns “Operation Kino,” a covert Allied plan to infiltrate said premiere with the assistance of a famous German actress and the acting skills of a film critic turned dashing military man ( Hunger’s Michael Fassbender). As could be expected of Tarantino, each plotline is fragmented; the chapters introduce characters and action only to jump to the next and return until all slowly become a single part of the action.

With a less skilled director, this kind of misdirection can be fatal. Fortunately, Tarantino has always shown a certain flair for non-chronological storytelling. Even more fortunately, Basterds’ ace in the hole is its primary antagonist, Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who more or less ties each thread together to its eventual gory climax. As Landa (who won Best Actor at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival for the role), Waltz plays against all our preconceived notions of cinematic Nazis; he is almost terrifyingly affable and warm, unceasingly genial while reducing grown men to tears. With a lesser villain, Basterds might have floundered under its immense length and ambition, but Waltz holds the film together through sheer force of amiability and implacability.

As with his previous work, Tarantino revels in goriness and anachronism. The Nazi-scalping scenes are brutally graphic, as is the final bloody denouement. He also can’t help the kind of self-indulgence that leads him to occasionally inject Samuel L. Jackson’s bad-ass voice as a narrator or including David Bowie’s “Cat People” late in the film. But Basterds is a film that is destined to be polarizing- either you are the kind of person that will laugh out loud at the sudden ’70s style graphic to introduce psychopathically violent ex-Nazi Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger) or you’re not; that’s not apologia, but a simple fact. Of course, it helps not to dismiss it as simple bravado on the director’s part, but part of his relentless knowledge of minutiae; Stiglitz is named after the ’70s Mexican B-movie actor while “Cat People” is a tertiary reference to the 1942 cult classic film. Is there any meaning behind that? Probably not, but it’s fun to play connect the dots.

Of course, Basterds is not without its faults. Ultimately, most of the characters, including Pitt’s “Aldo the Apache” and most of his troop, are cardboard soldiers without character development or notable personalities. They also have surprisingly little screen time- I estimated it to be no more or possibly less than Hitler himself (as buffoonishly played by Martin Wuttke). Tarantino also goes overboard with cameos at times- Mike Myers as a British general is amusing if you can get over the fact that it’s Mike Myers. It’s also possible to argue that Tarantino’s typically verbose and circular dialogue drives nothing forward, but I would not- dialogue that delights in itself is part of what makes Tarantino’s films so recognizable.

Ultimately, Basterds will appeal to those who love films like The Dirty Dozen and The Guns of Navarone, but not to those who go expecting to see warmed-over remakes of those classics. It is its own movie- beholden to a hundred others, but still with its own voice and black humor. A movie that kept me relentlessly absorbed for two and half hours and wanting to immediately watch it again deserves applause; Basterds did that and more.

by Nathan Kamal