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Reviews > Movie Reviews > Inglourious Basterds…

Inglourious Basterds Review
17 Aug 2009
Critics rating: 5 stars out of 5
Reviewed by Tom Charity , LOVEFiLM
Inglourious Basterds

"A Tarantino film is always a notable event, even when (as with his last, Death Proof) it turns out to be a non-event for most people. I mean, at least it was a spectacular non-event."

So far, the reactions to Inglourious Basterds, his atrociously-spelled WWII epic, have run from hot approbation (especially from the American press in Cannes) to Peter Bradshaw’s 1-star review in The Guardian. Playing catch-up, I had no idea which side of the fence I’d come down on, but two and a half hours of jackboot violence and dodgy accents and history rewritten didn’t sound especially appealing. The trailer was a turn-off too.

Well, the movie won’t be to all tastes – the violence is (self-consciously) gruesome, the scenes play long, the revisionism is outrageous… But Tarantino is a prodigiously talented filmmaker, and if you put yourself in his hands he’s going to show you a good time.

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That letting go involves agreeing with Tarantino that movies are more important than real life – at least for the 153 minutes it takes to experience the film. For that spell in the dark, anything goes.

Inglourious Basterds begins with the words: “Chapter 1. Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France…”

The allusion to Sergio Leone is immediately echoed in the score, which mixes up Ennio Morricone’s greatest hits. We don’t complain that Leone played fast and loose with the history of the American West, and Tarantino assumes the same poetic liberty tackling WWII. This isn’t the war as it was, it’s the war as it should have been.

The first scene is a long, long dialogue scene between SS “jew hunter” Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and a French farmer who is harbouring a family under his floorboards. By any normal standards the sequence is far too long – you can’t open a war movie with 20 minutes of talk, surely? – but it’s so well written, so well acted and directed, it’s absolutely riveting. Even the silky, elegant way Landa drinks not one, but two glasses of milk becomes integral to Tarantino’s wider design. Before this sequence is over we will have a powerful antipathy to this creature: Waltz/Lando becomes the man we love to hate.

Inglourious Basterds: Diane Kruger

And having reminded us how hateful the Nazis were, Tarantino then introduces his Basterds, an entirely fictitious unit of blood-thirsty German-hating Jews led by Tennessee hillbilly Lt Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). When Raine tells his men they each owe him 100 German scalps, well, he isn’t talking metaphorically.

What’s surprising, though (at least, it was to me), this Dirty Dozen idea is far from the dominant strand in Tarantino’s narrative tapestry. Raine and his men (including Eli Roth and Til Schweiger) don’t get much more screen time than Melanie Laurent as Shosanna Dreyfus, a rare Jew who escapes from Lando, or Daniel Bruhl as the German soldier who romances her outside the Parisian cinema she owns and operates, and which becomes the film’s key location in the second half.

Watching Inglourious Basterds, it's glaringly obvious how dependent Tarantino is on words.

Michael Fessbender also gets a couple of long, juicy scenes as an English officer (Lt Archie Hicox) dropped behind enemy lines to engineer a plot to blow up Goebbels (Sylvester Groth). He’s chosen because he’s a German film nut: his contact is a famous German movie actress who is actually a spy of the Allies (Diane Kruger). In this film, the cinema is everywhere.

Watching Inglourious Basterds, it’s glaringly obvious how dependent Tarantino is on words. Most war films feature lengthy action sequences… Exteriors… Battles… In this film, after the opening shots we barely see a landscape again. Everything is interior. Each scene is constructed as a kind of verbal tennis match, sometimes drawing on exterior, physical effects (the ominous echo of a baseball bat thwacking against the wall of a tunnel) but still, predominantly a battle of wits, a duel in which each speaker seeks to draw out an advantage on his interlocutor, and then press home the point to victory.

Inglourious Basterds: Mélanie Laurent

Granted, there is something claustrophobic about this insistence on the construction of conversation – sometimes the movie feels like a screenwriting masterclass, and you wish he’d just get on with it. But let’s face it: Tarantino is a master. Inglourious Basterds proves it again and again. Like Shakespeare, he can spell it any which way he chooses.

Inglourious Basterds Reviews

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