‘Inglourious Basterds’
4 out of 5 Stars
Stars: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Melanie Laurent, Diane Kruger
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Rated R for strong graphic violence, language and brief sexuality.
Running Time: 153 minutes
“Inglourious Basterds” is as idiosyncratic and attention-grabbing as its title. The intentional misspelling is the sort of gimmicky flourish from Quentin Tarantino that polarizes opinion about him.
The writer-director often goes overboard with eccentricity, but that also is the source of his originality. The ultimate film geek, he worships the medium and abhors banality even as he reworks motifs from previous movies in his creative choices.
His World War II revenge fantasy, set in occupied France, is the quintessential Quentin quirk-a-thon. But besides being original, violent, outrageous, arbitrary, dialogue-heavy and postmodern — as you expect in his oeuvre — this one is also riveting from its start to its finish. For more than 2 1/2 hours, Brad Pitt hams up a vicious hillbilly character, Adolf Hitler brays and giggles like a cartoon maniac, and Jewish soldiers cut the bloody scalps off Nazis without remorse.
Yee-haa!
Put away your history books. Forget tight storytelling and damn the unresolved plot points. Extended, suspenseful individual scenes stand alone as genius — often because of the mesmerizing performance of Christoph Waltz as the story’s chief antagonist, SS Colonel Hans “the Jew Hunter” Landa. Sequences of Landa toying with victims over glasses of milk and strudel are unforgettably chilling.
Able to escape from Landa’s clutches, for reasons that aren’t made clear, young Jewish Frenchwoman Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) loses her whole family to Landa’s bullets before changing her identity to run a Paris cinema. Eventually, a planned world premiere at her theater brings together the entire Reich high command, including the Fuehrer. They make a tempting target for the vengeful Shoshanna, German double-agent/actress Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) and a small special force of Jewish Nazi killers called the “Basterds” led by 1st Lt. Aldo “the Apache” Raine (Pitt).
Unknown supporting players — with great faces! — shape a deliberately anachronistic period piece that puts legendary silent film star Emil Jannings in the same universe as David Bowie’s ubermodern soundtrack selection, “Cat People (Putting Out Fire),” played at full volume.
Tarantino references traditional Hollywood war pictures, stripped-down Italian genre fare of the 1960s and ’70s (including Enzo Castellari’s semi-related “Inglorious Bastards,” correctly spelled), the French New Wave, classic German cinema and grindhouse kitsch. In a delicious nod to cineastes, celluloid is literally the lethal weapon that vanquishes evil.
But you don’t need a film school degree to find “Basterds” gloriously cool.
