Traratino's "Inglourious Basterds" Draws Guilty Laughs and Massive Praise

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 12 February 2010 21:46

Written by Lloyd Carroll

Inglourious Basterds
directed by Quentin Tarantino
starring Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Daniel Bruhl, Diane Kruger

Like a lot of baby boomers, director/writer Quentin Tarantino grew up watching such World War II action flicks as Where Eagles Dare and The Dirty Dozen as well as lighter (and these days politically incorrect) fare about the great war on TV, such as McHale’s Navy and Hogan’s Heroes.

Tarantino has always enjoyed mixing over-the-top violence and guilty laughs and done so in the form of acts from a play. He gets to do all that in his latest screenwriting and directorial effort, Inglourious Basterds -- a movie whose title will drive those who write about it nuts because of the deliberate misspelling. (There's a '70s Italian war film with a name translated to The Inglorious Bastards which inspired this film but didn't serve as the source material).

Tarantino doesn’t hide the fact that his tale is complete fiction -- a total fantasy not based in any WWII facts. Inglorious Basterds is the nickname for a band of American guerrillas who kill Nazis in occupied France just before the D-Day invasion. Most of the “basterds” are American Jewish soldiers, who have a deeply emotional stake and are led by a suave, wisecracking commissioned officer from Tennessee, Aldo Raine (Pitt).

Pitt plays Aldo much the way the late Bob Crane played Col. Hogan, except that his character has an exaggerated “good ol’ boy” accent and a thirst for grisly violence and retribution which befits a Tarantino protagonist. When a Nazi is captured we watch Raine’s joy as he either cuts his scalp off, supposedly like an Apache warrior (the Germans refer to him as Aldo the Apache), or carves a swastika into the scalp of the few prisoners he lets survive.

As with other Tarantino films, there are several storylines in addition to the main one. The key secondary plot involves a Parisian movie theater owner, Emmanuelle Mimieux (Laurent) whose real name is Shosanna Dreyfus. Shosanna managed a miraculous escape from the French countryside years earlier when her family was massacred by a Gestapo unit led by the heinous Col. Hans Landa (Waltz). She wants to live in Paris without drawing needless attention to herself, but circumstances intervene when a dashing German war hero, Fredrick Zoller (Bruhl), falls in love with her.

Then there is Bridget von Hammersmark, a British spy modeled on Hitler’s love interest Marlene Dietrich and played by rising star Kruger. Her character obviously brings a bit of sex appeal to this war film, and it turns out that she is the glue that holds the disparate plot threads together.

The cast of Inglourious Basterds is superb, and Pitt reminds us why he is the top leading man in Hollywood today. Nonetheless, the best performance is turned in by Waltz, who puts you on the edge of your seat as the SS chief in France. Waltz’s Landa is sophisticated — he can speak five languages — urbane, charming and icily diabolical. He does for Inglourious Basterds what Ralph Fiennes did for Schindler’s List when he portrayed SS concentration camp commandant Amon Goethe.

It would have been an injustice if Waltz hadn't been nominated for a supporting actor Oscar, and even though the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are not usually Tarantino fans, he's likely to win and there are bets that this film -- nominated for eight Oscars including Best Picture and Directing -- may be a spoiler in this year's race.

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