Inglourious Basterds

It starts out in the beautiful fields of a French landscape, with the usage of a gritty type of film and natural sounds. To begin a movie like this was reminiscent of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the flashback to Maximus and his family within the fields prior to his capture, breaking and enslavement. The inevitable calm before the storm. Although I knew the storm was coming, I didn’t expect it to be either thought provoking or entertaining in an intellectual manner. I expecting Nazi killing and gore, yet though I got that, I got a little bit more along with it. Inglourious Basterds is unlike any World War 2 era picture you have seen. It is an abstract, alternate reality to a war that consumed the world, a reality that I rather liked and one that you really need to see.

Inglourious Basterds is a film about a fictional Special Forces squad that is sent into Nazi occupied France under deep cover to help the British fight Hitler. Leading the group of eight (yes only eight men) is Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a hardened military, country boy whose mysterious past has left him with a visible scar around his neck. The group’s mission, according to Aldo is to go into the war and kill Nazis. With a claim to Native American heritage and a likening to the Apache tribe, Lt. Raine demands 100 scalps from each men before they are allowed to leave his command. From his introduction you know there would be a lot of creative killing by the Inglourious Basterds.

Early in the movie we are introduced to a German by the name of Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Hans is an intelligent, highly decorated brass that has been tasked with hunting down Jews in France. With probably the most effective performance in the entire movie, Waltz’s Landa was extremely scary. In movies based on World War 2 in the past, the Gestapo leaders are normally depicted as screaming, animal-like bullies who would dump old men from wheelchairs and shoot women in their face. In this dark comedy however, we are shown a scarier version of them in Landa. He is cultured, speaks several languages, is immensely intelligent, calm, charmng, and manipulative. His prey are made to feel comfortable as he interrogates them delicately, slowly revealing that he was unto them even before they started talking. It is hard to explain the intensity he brings with this act without you seeing it but it made for quite a scary German in Col. Hans Landa.

Quentin Tarantino normally has a few goodies in his movies that trademarks them as his. We get a nice intro that reflects the period or the influence behind the movie, like the Kung Fu intro to Kill Bill and the scratchy record music and font changes in this movie. There is normally some display of feminine feet… an angle that I can subscribe to (thank you Quentin), this is fulfilled with a certain “hospital scene” here. And finally the last trademark is that of the femme fatale or the “strong female”, women aren’t prissy or “damsels in distress” in Tarantino films. In this movie we are treated to two she-lions, one being the beautiful, revenge driven Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) and the other being the lovely Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). Utilizing the stunt prowess of his favorite stunt woman Zoë Bell to take the bumps for these two, it is safe to say that the pattern continues.

What I got from Inglourious Basterds was a bit of mixed feelings at everything that was going on. We know that Nazi’s were soldiers with a misguided, evil  plot to create a master race and wipe out others, but I still found no joy in seeing them scalped and maimed with baseball bats. There was no remorse at their suffering to the Basterds, but the level of violence suffered upon them made me wonder how desensitized I had become to seeing it. Early in the movie Landa makes a philosophical comparison of a rat to a squirrel and their similar but conflicted treatment by human beings. One is seen as cute and cuddly and the other as house vermin. The audience laughed as Brad Pitt egged his boys on to scalping Nazis, slitting their throats and braining them with baseball bats, gasped as a Jewish family is gunned down, yet laughed with Hitler when a film is shown depicting a German soldier sniping Allied soldiers from a watch-tower.  In these cases I found myself feeling the analogy over and over, this film does not give us the bravado and honored good guys that Saving Private Ryan did, so it was hard for me to cheer when they got kills. I simply watched.

The satire within Basterds is not the mean-spirited sarcastic type. In many ways I found it to be a more intelligent film than 90% of the cowboy caliber Allies versus Them movies that have been created. With so many little angles that are thrown in along with philosophical anecdotes like King Kong being compared to African slaves (I see you working Quentin, I caught it) and killers being compared to rodents – pick your side, pick your rodent. I left the theater thinking more than I normally do at the end of the serious war movies. It was different seeing Adolf Hitler (Martin Wuttke) depicted as loud and commanding the way he did in his taped speeches. Having watched more than a healthy share of documentaries on Hitler, I found the depiction to be quite comical in its inaccuracy (I know this was done on purpose).  All-in-all Brad Pitt brought the comedy relief, Cristoph Waltz the presence and Mélanie Laurent the sex appeal.

It is another brilliant movie by one of our best Directors and I urge you to go out and see it.