Glorious “Basterds”

The film opens with a very familiar scene. A hulking man methodically chops wood outside his peaceful country house. On the horizon, a small motorcade grows louder as it spits up rocks and dust from the unpaved road. Nazis. The man softly orders his daughters into the house, washes his face, and waits. What the viewer expects next is obvious, but what unfolds instead is a gut-wrenchingly tense, dialogue-focused scene. Inglourious Basterds‘ best scene, hands down, as Quentin Tarantino locks the viewer into a unwaveringly strong emotional state while revealing that his methodology moving forward will never be predictable.

As the trailers suggested, Basterds is indeed about a band of Jewish soldiers reigning brutal terror on Nazis in occupied France. Brad Pitt’s badass hick Lt. Aldo Raine gets the Nazi scalps he demands and the audience is treated to the graphic delivery. But despite the marketing, the film spends most of its time exploring the evolution of the story’s set piece rather than spending two hours killing Nazis.

Power-drunk Joesph Goebells has convinced both himself and Hitler that his cinematic vision (propaganda) will usher a new dawn for filmmaking. His newest “masterpiece” tells the story of a lone Nazi officer – playing himself in the movie – who sniped more than three hundred Allies from a tower. Goebells and his star settle on a premiering the film at a small French theater owned and operated by a young Jewish woman hiding under a false identity.

The Basterds catch wind of the premiere and its high-ranking guests and set out to blow up the Third Reich. At the same time, the theater’s owner and her lover devise a similar plan, and the two groups of would-be assassins set their plans in motion – each unknown to the other.

Though it would likely excel through its cathartic violence and style alone, Tarantino’s movie – like all of his previous films – strikes the perfect chord with its characters and their actors. Brad Pitt’s ethics-be-damned Lt. Raine is a scene-stealer, but he faces stiff competition from Til Schweiger’s quiet-but-nutso Nazi defector Hugo Stiglitz. Melanie Laurent commands her scenes as the Jewish theater owner, and the rest of the supporting cast is perfect (including Austin Powers-ish Mike Myers). But everyone else pales in comparison to the SS “Jew Hunter” played by Christoph Waltz who delivers the most interesting (and Oscar-worthy) character of any Tarantino film.

Inglourious Basterds ignores history and defies reason, but Tarantino’s latest is certainly one of his best.

4.5/5

EDIT: Jeffery Wells makes an excellent case about one very disturbing scene in the movie. I thought about writing about it in my review, but decided that it was relatively inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.  After reading Wells’ article, I decided that he is absolutely right – not about the movie as a whole (which I still give a 4.5) but about the scene he describes.  It was shown partially in the trailer and almost turned me off from seeing the movie at all.

The scene happens early enough in the movie that its brutality is forgotten as the rest of the film unfolds, but it is a smear on the canvas for sure.