Inglourious Basterds Movie Review (2009): Brad Pitt Stars in Quentin Tarantino's Epic, Revisionist WWII Film

After a pair of misfires (Kill Bill Vol. 2, Death Proof), Quentin Tarantino is back in rarefied air with Inglourious Basterds – a slice of revisionist World War II history that’s visually opulent, unrepentantly tense, swiftly violent, unpredictably anachronistic and exceptionally comedic.

Not just for the presence of Brad Pitt, this is Tarantino’s Ocean’s movie – beaten and bloodied up into something simultaneously larkish and substantial with its tale of scalped Nazis and vengeful Jews.

Though not exactly his most mature or progressive work (that would be Jackie Brown), it’s the best film in which Tarantino has corralled his hodgepodge of strengths since Pulp Fiction.

Christoph Waltz Becomes An Oscar Frontrunner with Inglourious Basterds Performance

Bless Tarantino, too, for introducing American audiences to Christoph Waltz – an Austrian actor who here plays the ruthless Nazi Col. Hans Landa. His villainy is as methodical and suddenly painful as a needle under a fingernail, and Waltz immediately injects menace and mayhem into every chapter of the film.

Basterds opens in a beautifully pastoral French countryside, punctuated on the soundtrack by the strains of Beethoven’s Fur Elise meshed with Ennio Morricone’s recognizable guitar flourish. (Unable to secure Morricone to score the film, Tarantino has poetically plundered his best work, with a dash of David Bowie’s Cat People [Putting Out Fire] later for good measure.)

Tarantino takes his time with this scene, one of his most mesmerizing – establishing Landa’s pursuit of Jews and those who would hide them with sustained character beats. He’s a German Jules Winnfield, only with no thirst for redemption from a vicious life of hunting and extermination. Landa’s stature and stateliness are his sharpest weapons, and every bit of his torment will be official and recorded.

This prologue gives the full measure of reasons to fear Landa – he’s anal-retentive, exacting, patient, playfully homicidal and fallibly human in the most grotesque way possible. The man eats strudel the way he tears into his victims – little nibbles mixed with ravenous bites. As memorably manipulative as Heath Ledger’s Joker, Waltz deserves recognition in the race for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

If a plug of chaw, wet and mealy in the corner of a hillbilly’s mouth, could talk, it would sound something like Aldo Raine (Pitt), a brusque backcountry lieutenant.

There’s magic in Pitt’s mangled English. Just try not to smile at this line: “Doggie doc’s gonna dig that slug out your gam, and you’ll be ready to walk the rouge car-pet.” While Pitt realizes he’s the star power here, it’s a damn good time to watch him be even more gleefully goofy than he was in Burn After Reading.

A human Yosemite Sam, Raine is the Tennessee-born ringleader of the Inglourious Basterds. They’re a specially selected military hit squad of Jewish-American soldiers tasked to deliver 100 Nazi scalps.

Their all-star is Sgt. Donny “The Bear Jew” Donowitz (Eli Roth, director of Hostel), who bashes in brains with his bat. Their ringer is Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger, in a near-mute turn reliant on crack facial expressions), an infamous German soldier who’s abandoned the Nazi party.

Landa and the Basterds will meet (Landa and Raine, especially, in a tantalizing showdown). But both will unknowingly cross paths with Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent, with all the poise of a young Catherine Deneuve). She’s one of few Landa has left alive, and she seizes the opportunity for revenge as owner of a Paris theater.

Throw in a dash of British intelligence, Italian imposters and a pair of German-propaganda film stars, and Inglourious Basterds is a movie that’s international without straining.

It’s emblematic of Tarantino’s comfort in this film that it feels so effortless and organic. You can sense that in the fringes of Robert Richardson’s cinematography, too – far more encompassing as it is of nature and the human form than seen in any previous Tarantino film.

Sawdust, moths, leaves, dust, smoke, carbonation, beer foam, blood and pillowy lips – it all leads to one of the decade’s most haunting motif payoff shots. (Also, Tarantino and longtime editor Sally Menke – the Thelma Schoonmaker to his Martin Scorsese – also provide such sly rhythm to their comic opportunities throughout.)

There are those who might knock Tarantino for “wasting his time” on a tale like this. Yet by weaving in parables about propaganda and the propensity for cinematic flourishes in wartime, Basterds earns all of its eruptions into violence. They’re fast, consequential and linger longer than any gratuitous counterpart. To spoil details would ruin the riveting suspense and contagious bloodlust Tarantino generates.

Moral relativism isn’t part of Tarantino’s plan here, but why would anyone expect it to be? This is, after all, a movie that introduces Hitler in a billowing cape worthy of a comic-book villain. With purposeful misspelling to fit intentionally brash rewriting of history, Inglourious Basterds is what Tarantino’s back-half of Grindhouse should have been.

Nov 3, 2009 4:17 PM

Guest :

How about 'ignominious terds' ? Or just 'terds'? what a boorish insulting piece of work this is.
See the thing is, the Second World War is sacred ground. If some film school 'cineaste' wants to display his lack of originality by ripping off the music and culture and filming technique of another, more valid epoch, fine. Just not this one.
Some salient personal, and general facts:

In 1915 my grandfather enlisted in the British army at the age of 15 and was shot through the shoulder while running a trench. The bullet bounced off his Enfield, went through the wrist, and exited. He served in the second world war as well, as a grunt and a prison guard. My earliest memories are of his scars and his box of goodies- A P38 Walther, deaths heads' insignias, swastika pennants. Our neighbors had 50 caliber ammunition hanging in their garage. My uncle and namesake went down over Arnhem, Belgium in a B25, with the loss of the entire crew including himself. My father was torpedoed into the water of the North Atlantic twice, miraculously one of only 14 survivors of both sinkings. I ceased to believe in God a long time ago, but that my gentle, soft spoken father would return from the War to spawn me is one of the few mysteries that remain open.Although none of these men would ever discuss the war with me, I learned through a shipmate of my father how he had to clean the vaporized remains of his friends from the inside of the gun turret he manned after a German shell had hit it. He also said that when they landed in America, they stopped at a bar and had a few beers. On exiting, they saw a funeral cortege go by. They were both seized with fits of laughter; all this fuss over one body.
A second uncle was shot in the heel on Utah beach, June 6, 1944.
Of the 55 million people killed during the War, over 20 million were Russian. About 400,000 Americans were killed during the War.The Russians lost that many just taking Berlin, hence their reluctance to give it up. Over a million russians died during the siege of Stalingrad.
Some historians have said that Glasnost would not have been possible until a time when most of the veterans had died off, taking their nightmarish memories with them. After the D-Day landings, the Russian news agency reported that a landing had been made by the Allies in France, suffering light casualties. To them this was absolutley true, the red army sometimes losing that many in an hour.By late 1942 the Russian axis of advance extended roughly the distance from Chicago to Atlanta, with thousands of artillery pieces lining up wheel to wheel and pounding each other, day after day. At the end of the war, an aide to Eisenhour described a motor trip from Berlin to Russia, and how he did not see one living thing between the Russian border and Moscow. Not a person, not a dog, not a building standing.
These days we hear much ado about the coming apocalypse, apocalypse this, apocalypse that. Well here's the news, the Apocalypse has come and gone. It was called World War Two, and any attempt to mine this for 'entertainment 'value , however highbrow the intentions might be, is simply repugnant. The existence of this film is simply pissing on a tomb that extends from Hiroshima to Manila to Pearl Harbor, east to London, Warsaw, and Moscow.
The Second World War was the single most important event in human history. Never before or since has there been a war worth fighting, where the line between good and evil was so starkly drawn. Think this is overstated? When you wake up in the morning, you of little imagination, put your mind to this:
Say you live in Boston. 1000 Einsatzcommando arrive at seven in the morning and systematically move from house to house killing everyone inside, moving street to street, block to block, then city to city, until every person of your color or ethnic background is annihilated. These things actually happened.
Little Quentin is just that, a child, and framing this film as some revisionist fantasy does not excuse it for a second.
and by the way, Quentie, of you want to rip off my culture, however bellicose it might be, get your facts straight. Landa couldn't be awarded the congressional medal of honor, since he's not US military personnel.