Inglourious Basterds was one of the more pleasant movie-going surprises I've had in quite a while. I was not expecting much from this other than a lot of darkly gratifying Nazi murder fantasy sequences. Boy was I wrong.
What I got instead was a very smart, very subversive pseudo-European film (about 2/3 of the movie is told in subtitles - which is much preferable to English spoken with bad German and/or French accents). Tarantino's script audaciously re-imagines the conclusion of World War 2, with movies and movie theaters playing a large and not totally metaphoric role in these proceedings.
The performances here are excellent. Brad Pitt is always solid when he has a character with a flake (warning: his role is quite a bit smaller than you would glean from the onslaught of promotion surrounding the movie), but the real stars are Christopher Waltz as the duplicitous Nazi investigator Colonel Hans Landa, and Mélanie Laurent as the vengeful Jewish survivor Shosanna Dreyfus. Both performances are nuanced and intense. Waltz in particular is fantastic, combining comedy and terror in an exhilarating and not altogether unsympathetic way. I'm sure it helps that his director here is Tarantino, who has always had a knack for marrying the two extremes, as well as building and drawing out tension.
Speaking of tension, there is a fantastic, protracted conflict in a French basement bar that ranks up there with any of the director's former set pieces (think of the overdose scene in Pulp Fiction, the ear severing in Reservoir Dogs, the penultimate theft in Jackie Brown), as well as a terrific climax inside an ornate French movie theater, where nothing turns out the way you think it will.
Nothing turns out the way you think it will - you can say that again. Tarantino takes extreme liberties with history, but this suits the nature of the film, which is that of a highly stylized, highly challenging comic book about the fall of the Third Reich. Certainly not your typical summer movie, I can imagine the same audiences who went to see the 2nd Transformers film being highly vexed by the amount of dialogue in the film, and the amount of time they will have to wait between murders (there's a couple gratifyingly brutal ones in there, but overall I would say the movie is far less violent than you would imagine).
While I was disappointed with the last few Tarantino offerings, Inglourious Basterds delivers the goods. Weighing in at 2 hours 30 minutes, for me the movie flew by and I was sad to see it end.
jD
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