Movie review: “Inglourious Basterds”
From Friday’s Weekend Look section of The Oklahoman. 4 of 4 stars
Writer-director Quentin Tarantino achieves his most glorious cinematic feat yet with his long-awaited World War II opus “Inglourious Basterds.”
Per usual, the “Pulp Fiction” filmmaker mashes up an assortment of genres, from espionage movies and revenge tales to period epics and black comedies. But his characters are even more memorable, the story’s five chapters are more intricately interwoven, and his vision – and not just his rampant film geek tendencies – has become more ambitious.
From the opening moments – and Tarantino’s movies always start strong – “Inglourious Basterds” establishes itself as the auteur’s best work. The film drops the audience onto a small French dairy farm during the German occupation.
The stoic farmer (Denis Menochet) receives a visit from Nazi Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), AKA “the Jew Hunter.” Through pregnant pauses and polite requests for cold milk, the unfailingly well-mannered and quietly threatening Landa forces the farmer to admit to hiding a Jewish family under the floorboards of his house.
In a sudden hail of machine gun fire, Landa’s troops kill the Dreyfus family, except for teenage daughter Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), who flees into the woods.
Elsewhere, American Lt. Aldo “the Apache” Raine (Brad Pitt) is rallying a small unit of Jewish-American soldiers to go behind enemy lines and slaughter Nazis. The twangy Tennessean’s intent is to strike fear in the hearts of the Nazis with shockingly cruel acts of retribution on German troops. Each of his men, nicknamed “the Basterds,” are commanded to collect 100 Nazi scalps, though Boston boy Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), AKA “the Bear Jew,” prefers to fill his quota of kills with a Louisville slugger.
Back in France, Shosanna has resurfaced in Paris, hiding in plain sight under a Gentile name as the owner of a movie theater. The pretty blonde attracts the attention of German war hero Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), whose exploits as a sniper have been made into a movie by Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth). When Zoller convinces Goebbels to have the film premiere in Shosanna’s cinema, she sees a perfect opportunity to take revenge not only on Landa, who is heading the event’s security detail, but also on Hitler himself (Martin Wuttke).
Naturally, the star- and SS-studded event attracts the attention of the British and American high commands, who think the “Basterds” are the just the bunch to raid the party.
Along this cinematic collision course, Tarantino introduces even more unforgettable characters: Diane Kruger in full old-school glamour mode as a German movie star/double agent, Michael Fassbender as a former film critic on a spy mission, Mike Myers’ straight but still funny turn as a veddy British general, and Rod Taylor as bulldoggish Winston Churchill.
The actors put in uniformly strong performances. Waltz, who won best actor at Cannes, politely terrifies in four different languages. Laurent is luminous even as she seethes with rage, and Pitt puts in another hilarious but grounded turn on par with “Snatch” and “Burn After Reading.”
“Inglourious Basterds” mixes all the Tarantino hallmarks – the outlandish violence, the tributes to old movies, the darkly laugh-out-loud moments – but he has finally perfected the balance. He even reins in his pacing peculiarities, his habit of letting his talky scenes drag on just a bit too long, though just barely.
However you spell it, glorious is the word for it.
-BAM
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