There are very few filmmakers who have see their every output be heralded as an event. Directors like Steven Spielberg, Denis Villeneuve, and Christopher Nolan consistently release great pictures, but they are prolific enough that, while they are mostly must-see films, they are not EVENTS in all caps. Quentin Tarantino may not be the auteur that someone like Nolan or Villeneuve are, nor is he as universally beloved as Spielberg, but he doesn’t have to be. He makes films when he wants to, which can often take many years in between and shift gears at the last moment, dropping projects without much warning but plenty of fanfare. He has famously insisted that he has ten films in him, and when that tenth one is done, he is retiring. To capitalize on that, each of his last few films has been advertised with the number they are on that list, with Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and 2 both advertised as his 8th film as they were meant to be just one movie.
While not all of his films have been critical darlings or audience pleasers, even the lesser-revered ones such as Jackie Brown are mesmerizing to watch and often one heck of a good romp in the world he has created. I, like many before me, first heard of Tarantino in 1994 when I saw this intriguing poster at my local theater for Pulp Fiction. The cast list was incredible, and I just had to see this film, knowing nothing else about it. From there, I found Reservoir Dogs, just like a lot of his fans from my generation, and the rest is history.
When it was announced that Tarantino was working on a World War II film inspired by The Dirty Dozen, many were intrigued by what he had in mind. Tarantino is notorious for cribbing from obscure films, so to have it announced that he was making a version of The Dirty Dozen seemed different, uncharacteristic for him. What was characteristic is another inspiration of his: the Italian Euro War film The Inglorious Bastards from filmmaker Enzo G. Castellari. This somewhat obscure 1978 film gave Tarantino his title and a small amount of the plot.
This was also the start of Tarantino’s revisionist history films, a theme that carried on to Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Some felt that by revising history the way Inglourious Basterds does, it takes away from the true horrors of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party, while others found that this gave the film an ending that was a bit masturbatory but gave audiences a moment of pure excitement to see Hitler, amongst many other high-level Nazis, the deaths they truly deserved. Others felt that the film would have been better served had the ending been about some high-level fictitious Nazis rather than known real ones that we already know the fate of.
Still others point out that the time frame of the film creates some major events to have never happened, such as the mass genocide of the Jews, most of which happened later on in history than where this film lives. These people spend too much time trying to examine how this would have affected the real war and cannot get into the spirit of what Tarantino is doing. This is World War II as he would have liked it to end, not taking into any serious consideration anything else. This is not a scholarly movie but a movie about emotions and how deep down we want to see Nazis punished in the most brutal way possible, Hitler and his generals especially. This film opens with “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France” because Tarantino wants you to understand that this is a fantasy.
And we get that tone in the opening sequence of the film, set in the countryside of France and scored to Beethoven’s Für Elise, a melodic bit of music that usually symbolizes peace. But here it is accompanied by the introduction of one of the most vile and reprehensible, yet charismatic, men to ever grace the movie screen. This is Standartenführer Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a charming, multilingual Austrian SS officer who has embraced his nickname of The Jew Hunter. He arrives at the home of French dairy farmer Perrier La Padite (Denis Ménochet) and, while the conversation starts out pleasant enough, there is an undertone of menace there that is immediately obvious and ramps up steadily as the conversation goes on. This is one of the truly great character introductions in cinematic history and, though Christoph had been acting since the late 70s, this was most people’s introduction to him as a performer, especially in America. This scene ends with a Jewish family hidden under the floorboards getting massacred and the lone survivor, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), escaping on foot.
From this scene, we jump ahead three years and are introduced to U.S. Army lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) who is recruiting Jewish-American soldiers to a black ops commando unit called the “Basterds”, whose sole purpose is to enter Nazi-occupied France and instill fear in the Nazis by killing and scalping as many of them as possible. As part of that campaign of fear, they allow a few soldiers to live, though not before marking them with a carved swastika on their foreheads so that they can never truly hide their affiliations after the war.
In the meantime, Shosanna is now in Paris, running a theater and hiding behind false papers. She has caught the eye of SS soldier Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a Nazi war hero whose exploits are the subject of an upcoming film. Zoller convinces his superiors to hold the premiere at her theater despite her obvious disinterest in him. All the top Nazi officials will be in attendance, making them the perfect target for sabotage. At the same time, Aldo Raine and his men have been informed by one of their spies, the German movie star Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), of the premiere and have come up with their own plan to take advantage of the event.
We get the tone of this picture right from the first scene. Christoph Waltz brings a bit of levity in his interactions with Denis Ménochet and at first he comes off as disarming. But we soon realize that he is a man who is very discerning and calculating. He smokes an oversized pipe like he’s Sherlock Holmes but spouts out some very vile and racist propaganda about the Jews, all the while with a big smile on his face as if he were talking about nothing more important than the weather. The menace is there but it is behind this facade of good-humor.
Waltz is so good in this opening scene that it becomes a bit off-putting when we shift focus to the “Basterds” and we get Brad Pitt with his comical, over-the-top, southern accent rambling on about his Appalachian heritage, his Native American ancestry, and how his team of men, all of them Jewish, owe him 100 “Nat-zi” scalps. Aldo Raine is a caricature rather than a real character and Brad Pitt never seems to be able to instill humanity or believability in him. This goes for his men, too, none of whom are developed in any way. Before long we are asking questions we shouldn’t be such as, “How exactly are they crossing through France undetected and how are they even feeding themselves?” We never see them traveling nor get any sense of where they are getting basic supplies needed to survive.
We’re laughing at the absurdity of Lt. Aldo Raine and wincing at the graphic violence being inflicted on the Nazis but only because it is all up there on screen. Any time Brad Pitt is on screen, the film feels tonally off. What he is doing is funny but it doesn’t fit well with the rest of the film. Some of his command decisions seem so poorly thought out, too, that it is impossible to believe this team is as successful as it is. We get a scene of Adolph Hitler (Martin Wuttke) screaming at his generals, asking why they cannot stop these men and we are asking the exact same question.
Late into the picture we are introduced to Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), a British spy sent by Winston Churchill and General Ed Fenech (Mike Myers in a distractingly bad and out of place performance) to rendezvous with Aldo Raine and his men as part of the plan to deal with Hitler at the film premiere. This rendezvous, played out in a basement tavern is one of the best in the film and filled with mounting tension. It kicks off the finale while simultaneously eliminating several of the unnecessary characters, including Hicox himself. It’s a brilliant bit of writing, building up tension through the dialogue as we wait for someone to screw up and give things away. Having Hicox there does feel extraneous as the mission could have easily just been conveyed to the Basterds and left Hicox and his story on the cutting room floor.
This is a Quentin Tarantino film and thus we can expect there to be copious amounts of blood and gore. While there is plenty early on, this gets ramped up in the grand finale as we get treated to hundreds of Nazis being riddled with machine gun bullets while the theater around them burns and then explodes. It’s a fever dream of a sequence that plays differently depending on what you wanted out of this picture. It’s also capped off with a final sequence in which Hans Lander, who can see the end of Nazi Germany coming anyway, betrays his Führer and cuts a deal with Aldo and the Americans for amnesty for himself and his assistant, whom we are to suppose is his gay lover. How this is to play out has been telegraphed since the beginning yet it is still satisfying to watch.
Inglorious Basterds will definitely not appeal to everyone. Some people will not get what Tarantino is doing here, and that’s perfectly fine. There are other films, such as The Dirty Dozen, that take a more serious tone when dealing with the war. For those wanting a rollicking good time with a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously, this will be a satisfying watch, even if it isn’t tonally consistant. Brad Pitt may be a bit too much every time he opens his mouth, but even this isn’t ruinous, just poor casting. He would redeem himself the following decade in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, a film he is absolutely perfect in. This is Tarantino’s wishlist of World War II fantasy events, and watching it with that in mind, this is pure unadulterated, and brutally violent, fun.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Lawrence Bender
Best Director: Quentin Tarantino
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz (won)
Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino
Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson
Best Film Editing: Sally Menke
Best Sound Editing: Wylie Stateman
Best Sound Mixing: Michael Minkler, Tony Lamberti, and Mark Ulano
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Release Date: August 21, 2009
Running Time: 153 Minutes
Rated R
Starring: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, Mélanie Laurent, August Diehl, Julie Dreyfus, Sylvester Groth, Jacky Ido, Denis Ménochet, Mike Myers, Rod Taylor, and Martin Wuttke
Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
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