Review: Inglourious Basterds

No one else could have made this movie.

I know that sounds incredibly obvious. From the opening moments its clearly a Tarantino movie through and through. What I mean is that no other director working today could have gotten away with what he has. Not Scorcese, not Spielberg, not Scott.
He has made a 70 million dollar World War Two movie that is 60-70% subtitled, he cast Brad Pitt in a supporting role and cast relative unknowns in the main roles, the film features pretty horrific imagery and ends with somone machine gunning Hitler in the face.

He made a film with no concessions whatsoever. That needs to be admired and applauded.

He also made it very, very "Tarantino".


It's interesting comparing Tarantino's recent works with his earlier breakout films. Death Proof and Kill Bill are the films he revels in, each existing in a heightened reality allowing him to excercise his very unique (and oft imitated) personal style unchecked. Hell, Pulp Fiction, Resevoir Dogs and Jackie Brown seem quiet and intimate by comparison. They're not straight drama, but they are grounded in something resembling reality.

Inglourious Basterds falls somewhere between the two.

As Chapter One helpfully explains the film is set "Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France". The trailers and marketing campaign would have you believe that this film is about a group of Jewish-American soldiers sent into France to brutally massacre Nazi spreading panic through The Third Reich. That's not completely true. Like Pulp Fiction, Basterds is actually a series of plots that weave in and out of each other finally converging into an explosive climax.

It's a very rich story filled with great characters and a strong structure. The problem is, im not sure Tarantino trusts himself to make a straightforward movie and just let the story tell itself. So expect booming Samuel L Jackson voiceovers, an el mariachi soundtrack anouncing characters and lettering scribbled across the screen with arrows pointing out the villains.

Tarantino doesn't cameo in this but he certainly makes his presence known and the effect can be jarring.

But where the effect kept me at arms length, I'm well aware that for others it sucked them in even more. For them Tarantinos stamp was simply the triumphant cherry on top. If i'm honest, im a little jealous.

So what works? Absolutely everything else. Tarantino is capable of creating truly mesmerising scenes with just a handle of characters sat around a table (something i thought he may have forgotten after Death Proof), gone is the hyper real ramblings from Death Proof and to an extent Kill Bill, the dialogue is far closer to the casual conversational style that made Resevoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction so exciting.

The opening scene for example, an informal chat between the film's villian and a French farmer is so unbearably tense my clenched jaw began to hurt. Tarantino slowly turns up the tension at such perfect pace in this scene and allows it to last just long enough to make it unbearable. Its an expertly judged scene.

Of course a scene in which a villain chats to a farmer cant rely on direction alone. It takes serious actors to pull it off, which where we come to the film's secret weapon: Christoph Waltz.

Earning every accolade thrown at him, Waltz plays Col. Hanz Landa, an SS Colonel so famous for his uncanny ability to seek out Jews, that he has earned the nickname "The Jew Hunter". Waltz is magnificent in this. The kind of villain that has you grinning everytime he is on screen. Landa is charming, funny, intelligent and capable of absolute horror. While he is excellent at his job he is completely emotionally detached from it. When he complains about the paperwork it requires he may as well be an aggravated office administrator.

The genius in the performance is how straight Waltz plays it. Landa could so easily have been a moustache twirling cartoon, but Waltz makes him so much more. He owns every single scene he is in and does so without taking a single bite out of the scenery. Honorable mention goes to Melanie Laurent as Shoshana who is arguably the real hero of the piece. Laurent gives Shoshana strength and fire but also a subtle fragility, a fragility exposed in an early scene with Landa that is eye wateringly tense.

Again, Brad Pitt headlines this but its Waltz you'll be thinking about when you leave.

That's not to say Pitt and the Basterds aren't memorable, they just aren't the focal point of the plot. In fact for the most part they act as comic relief. They get the cool big moments and quotable dialogue but the heart and soul of the film is in the quieter moments. It's not in scalpings (oh yes) or gun fights it's all in the exchanges.

So there we go. That review is far more positive than I thought it would be. It's "Quentin Tarantino presents Inglourious Basterds" which is fine. It's vital that Directors can still make films without having to pander to studio interference, in the caseI wish Tarantino had reigned himself in just a bit. At times it feels like he a made "Tarantino" movie first and a WW2 epic second. I wish it had been the other way around.