A film review by Craig J. Koban August 26, 2009 |
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Rank: #4 |
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INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS
Lt. Aldo Raine: Brad Pitt / Shosanna: Melanie Laurent / Col.
Hans Landa: Christoph Waltz / Sgt. Donny Donowitz: Eli Roth
/ Lt. Archie Hicox: Michael Fassbender / Bridget von Hammersmark:
Diane Kruger / Fredrick Zoller: Daniel Bruhl / Sgt. Hugo
Stiglitz: Til Schweiger / Cpl. Wilhelm Wicki: Gedeon Burkhard / Marcel:
Jacky Ido / Pfc. Smithson Utivich: B.J. Novak / Pfc. Omar
Ulmer: Omar Doom / Major Hellstrom: August Diehl / Perrier
Lapadite: Denis Menochet / Joseph Goebbels: Sylvester Groth / Hitler:
Martin Wuttke / General Ed Fenech: Mike Myers / Francesca
Mondino: Julie Dreyfus / Sgt. Rachtman: Richard Samuel / Master
Sgt. Wilhelm/Pola Negri: Alexander Fehling / Winston Churchill: Rod
Taylor |
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So begins Quentin Tarantino’s INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, which most certainly has to be the most daringly audacious, swaggeringly inventive, and maniacally entertaining war film I have ever seen. However, pigeonholing it
within the simple and neatly defined moniker of a “war film” certainly
does not do it justice: Yes, this is a World War II film that uses that
historical conflict as a backdrop, albeit very, very loosely.
However, within the hypnotically frantic and colorful imagination of
Tarantino, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS becomes a whole other exercise altogether.
Part DIRTY DOZEN-esque war thriller, part European art house
picture,
part DEATH WISH-infused Jewish revenge flick, part 1940’s film noir,
part 1970’s exploitation grindhouse caper, and a whole smattering of Sergio
Leone Spaghetti Western overtones…Tarantino’s BASTERDS swings fanatically for
the fences without a care in the world as to whether it has any semblance
of reality or accuracy. The
film may not have the shocking and industry stirring freshness and vitality of
PULP FICTION (what few films do?), but this is definitely
Tarantino’s finest hour since that landmark 1994 effort. BASTERDS - which has very
little to do with the Enzo Castellari 1978 film of the same name - will
easily have its
detractors and…shall I say…outright haters.
Narrow-minded critics and viewers will come out saying that it
glorifies and exploits painful memories of the Nazi-led Holocaust by using
it to make a revenge-porn action film.
There is certain truth to that statement, to be sure, but the
hecklers will overlook that INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is not engaging in
historical veracity, nor is it attempting to ground its story in any sort
of pragmatic past-reality. No,
Tarantino is using the Nazism and the horrors of WWII to boldly craft a
macho-crazy Spaghetti Western with Great War iconography with further hints of French New Wave
cinema. More crucially,
BASTERDS is a pure wish fulfillment fantasy from beginning to end (it
has gnarly, tough, and head strong Jewish heroes that get to dispense with
Nazi vermin as told in a story that gleefully reinvents history as it
goes). It tells a
narrative that definitely would force the augmentation of many a high
school history textbook. What the film does so marvelously
and with so much passion is that it revels in its auteur’s
obsessive love and knowledge of the movies itself: very few filmmakers are
as nitpickingly knowledgeable and observant about the cinema as Tarantino and
very few, in turn, display their zeal for it in their movies.
The greatness of Tarantino is simply in how he conjures up such an
irresistible and smoothly orchestrated pastiche of multiple genres to
embody a cohesive whole. From
the opening frame of BASTERDS – a very distinct visual homage to Clint Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN –
punctuated Ennio Morricone’s sweltering and blissful music cues, the revels in its
encyclopedic knowledge of the movies it’s
emulating. The plot itself – which
revels in Tarantino’s predilection to unconventional storytelling
devices and tricks – is divided into five distinct chapters, all which
unavoidably coalesce upon the other.
Within those five chapters the film tells two distinct plot threads
that are all meticulously tied together into a rousing and explosive
(literally) final act. In the
first act – the film’s most sublime and masterfully executed – we
are introduced to Shosanna Dreyfus (the luminous Melanie Laurent), a
French Jew that is hiding with her family under the floor boards of a
dairy farmer’s shoddy house. Regrettably,
the home is visited by a very shrewd, verbose, articulate, outwardly
charming, but inwardly monstrous Nazi SS Colonel named Hans Landa (Christoph
Waltz, in a deliriously empowered performance for the ages), who just may
be the most developed and innovatively written Nazi character in the
movies. This guy – infamously nicknamed the “Jew Hunter”, and
for good reason – is not a one-dimensional, unthinking killing machine.
Upon his majestic and unforgettable entrance, this Nazi is
simultaneously a slimy and barbaric butcher of lives and a crafty,
ruthlessly smart, and cunningly literate figure.
He’s a Nazi Sherlock Holmes that blends seductive charisma with
satanic aggression and repulsion.
After Landa deduces – in a
fiendishly suspenseful scene built upon Tarantino’s patient and lyrical
dialogue exchanges that have made him famous – that the farmer is in
fact harboring Jews, he orders his men to open fire on the floor boards.
Shosanna manages to escape the viscous slaughter and escapes to a
new life later in Paris, where she lives under a new identity and – of
all things – becomes the proprietor of a local art house cinema.
When the film catches up to her in successive acts she finds
her life inundated with the flirtatious advances of Fredrick Zoller
(Daniel Bruhl), a recent Nazi war hero and a lavish and popular movie
star, seeing as he portrays himself in a very well regarded (at least to
Germany) war propaganda film that exploits his recent combat victories. His film is to be held at one of the largest theatres in the
city, but Shosanna finds herself in an audience with Joseph Goebbels
(Hitler's right hand man), who
eventually wishes her to host the premiere at her smaller, but more
tastefully auspicious theatre. When
she discovers that most of the Nazi brass – along with one very important leader – will be in attendance, Shosanna hatches a mischievous
plot for revenge. Now…let’s flashback a few
acts to the “Basterds” themselves.
It is here where Tarantino’s wish fulfillment/Jewish-revenge fantasy
takes a galloping leap forward. These
Basterds (by the way…not a misspelling, but yet another wickedly
enigmatic stylistic choice for Tarantino) are an elite and feverously
bloodthirsty tribe of Jewish American soldiers led by the pencil thin-moustached,
former moonshine bootlegging Lt. Aldo Raine (in the film’s
funniest performance of goofy, self-satisfied male bravado and tough
talking war rhetoric by Brad Pitt, having an absolute ball here).
The men he leads have no interest in capturing the Germans at all.
“The Germans will be sickened by us, the German will talk about
us, and the German will fear us,” laments Raine to his loyal troops, and
their mission is to eradicate every “Wiener Schnitzel lickin’
finger” of the Nazi swine. Oh,
they do wish to capture key Nazi personal to elicit pertinent
information from them to assist their mission, but when the SS unavoidably
fails to assist them (as is the case with one darkly funny and shockingly
brutal interrogation sequence), the Basterds unleash a whole lot of
vengeful and remorseless baseball-bat bashing justice to their
enemies. During one interrogation
sequence Aldo hilariously, but intensely, question and
intimidates a Nazi thug (“We ain’t in the prisoner-takin’ business,
we are in the killin’ Nazi business.
And cousin…business is a boomin’!”), but he fails to get any
answers. This leads him to asking his toughest and most mean-spirited Basterd comrade to
“oblige” the Nazi with death. The
killer is the “Bear Jew” that specializes in killing Nazis with
several Babe Ruth home run swings to the noggin, and he is played by –
whom else? – the beefy and crazed director of the HOSTEL films, Eli
Roth. His killing of the Nazi
represents probably the movie industry’s only justifiably rousing
torture porn sequence ever. The exploits of the Basterds
have become so legendary that Winston Churchill himself and the British
high command send in one of their own Lt. Archie Hicox (a terrific
Michael Fassbender, barely recognizable from his hellish performance
dedication in this year’s HUNGER, but refreshingly suave and urbane
here). Churchill, Hicox, and
the Basterds hatch a plan: They
learn that all of the Nazi upper command – including ol’ Adolf himself
– will be present at Shosanna’s theatre for the premiere of the
aforementioned propaganda film. Their
mission: they will gain entry into the gala with the help of a gorgeous
and resourceful allegiance-changing German actress named Bridget von
Hammersmart (the luscious Diane Kruger).
While there the Basterds will, in no mistaken terms, shoot and blow
up as many Nazis – including the Fuehrer - as humanly possible.
Unknown to them, though, is that Shosanna and her lover are also planning
their own fiery and bloody eradication scheme of their own. This
final act is a thrilling and bombastically entertaining send off for the
film, which also manages to completely alter the historical landscape for
the Third Reich in manners...well...altogether satisfying.
This, of course, is largely attributed to the lustful audacity of
Tarantino to go against the grain of making yet another dime-a-dozen WWI
flick; instead, he leaps well over genre conventions – and our knowledge
of history – by unleashing a revenge-fantasy steeped within a bizarre
parallel universe where all is not what it seems.
There is the sheer unpredictability of where the entire enterprise
is heading from turn to turn, which only heightens the film’s tension
and intrigue.
At 153 minutes, BASTERDS is a very patient and leisurely film, but
deliberately so, as Tarantino is given enough breathing room to let his
densely layered and multi-story arcs to play out naturally until they all
come to a head – in some form or another – in moments of ear piercing
violence and pathos.
Again, Tarantino may be the only director that has the goods to
both glorify and deconstruct the divergent genres he’s mish-mashing
together here, but there is nothing haphazard about his cinematic collage
in BASTERDS; the film copiously borrows from other films, but not to
plagiaristic levels.
The difference with the way Tarantino appropriates from the films
he adores is in the chutzpah and imagination he displays in morphing them. The film has many moments of
bustling ingenuity and intrepid style, but four key sequences will go down
as the most meticulous executed and masterfully envisioned that you’ll
find all year. Of course,
there was the opening sequence already mentioned with Hans interrogating
the Dairy farmer, with festers with a hair-raising tension to nearly
unbearable levels (Tarantino intuitively knows how to milk tension
primarily with dialogue and interplay).
The second involves Kruger’s Bridget setting up a meeting with a
squad of allied agents masquerading as Germans in a shabby and tightly
confined bar where real Nazis engage in binge drinking and games.
Fassbender’s Hicox leads the group by trying to impersonate a SS
officer, but there is one cunning and very observant Nazi officer just
around the corner (in a perfect reveal) that
comes to his table and begins to question Hicox's authenticity.
Embodying the tone of Hitchock in mass dosages, Tarantino
mercilessly teases the audience for what seems like an eternity until a groundswell of
tension builds that explodes in a ballet of bullets and brain matter. The
third sequence is a quieter one, but also one that is still exhilarating, where Landa has a moment with Bridget at the film’s climax
during the movie premiere that acts like a Cinderella fantasy gone
horribly afoul.
Again, Tarantino fiendishly oils up his audience members with the
casualness of the initial stages of these scenes, which only allows for
their shocking conclusions to be that much more powerful.
And, finally, we the final action set piece showing the suicidal
attack of the Nazi high command from both Shosanna and Aldo’s men, which
will certainly be talked about for years to come.
Gratuitously violent and savage as well as being absurdist and
cheekily preposterous? You betcha, but there is no denying that Tarantino
is a man of his word by fulfilling his promises that this will be a World
War II film of a different, more vengefully gratifying breed.
Perhaps what’s even more astounding is how well he manages to sprinkle in moments of macabre comedy amidst the final
sequence's unapologetic carnage.
Perhaps the film’s most uproarious moment occurs when Pitt and
Roth’s Basterds are forced to impersonate Italian film crewmembers
(serving as Bridget’s escorts) that has a Three Stooges manner of
buffoon-inspired guffaws. Pitt’s timing with one-word
answers in stilted Italian is pitch perfect in this instance, and his
whole performance is one that feels like broad caricature, but maybe it
is, seeing as he’s playing a broad, patriotic war hero archetype in the
John Wayne mould. No matter,
because he is a frequently hilarious, infectious, Nazi hunting hoot here
as “Adol the Apache”, as is Eli Roth as the maddeningly lethal Bear
Jew.
The film’s
two luminous female leads, Diane Krueger and Melanie Laurent, give the
film a nice injection of feisty, sexy, and intrepid femme fatal
fervor
(just watch how well Krueger commands the screen in that infamous sequence
in the bar where she is surrounded by men both good and bad). I also loved the super debonair Michael Fassbender as the Brit
commando that once was a film critic in his pre-war life (for once...critics
are the heroes in a
film). INGLOURIOUS
BASTERDS has one towering performance in Christph Waltz’ terrifyingly
wondrous portrayal of the Jew Hunter, a malevolent beast of a man in
four languages no less. It’s
one of the most fascinating and hypnotic portrayals of a villainy in a long
time, as Waltz morphs his character’s sardonic and well-mannered
gentlemen with the black heart of a monster.
From the first sip of his milk in the film’s bravura opening
sequence, this is a performance
that is destined for Oscar gold. Alas, the real star is Tarantino himself, who has came out of relatively obscurity in the early 1990’s and rushed into the Hollywood directorial elite with guns blazing ever since. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS represents a Tarantino we are all familiar with – one that combines sharp and strappingly assured dialogue with avant-garde storytelling strategies with an aestheticized zeal for blood curdling, in-your-face violence. Yet, gone from him is the reliance on pop culture referencing, the 1970’s grind house-martial arts/action milieu (which was exploited in his last three films, KILL BILL 1 and 2 as well as DEATH PROOF) and instead this is a Tarantino that – as he did with PULP FICTION – flamboyantly and defiantly gives a middle finger wag of shame to stale and regurgitated Hollywood formulas and goes boldly forward by carving out his own genre niche. Of course, like all of the films on his resume, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS feels borrowed, but Tarantino homogenizes all of his influences into the ballsiest, most brazen, most cheerfully self-aware, and triumphantly and joyously indulgent war film ever. For those that wish to be bathed
within the inertia of a Tarantino fantasia of his version of The Great
War….INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS welcomes you.
All those whom are not…flee for the exits immediately.
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