He Said, She Said: Inglourious Basterds
By Caroline Thibodeaux
September 8, 2009
She said...
When a new Quentin Tarantino film opens, it's always an event. It doesn't matter whether the movie's any good or even if it's entertaining at all. The writer-director takes his time delivering his projects, often crafting his offerings over years at a time. Between his leisurely pacing and a partnership with the Weinstein Company that has lent itself from time to time to seeing his films open later than originally planned - Tarantino has the ability to whip up the curiosity of his waiting audience, fans and critics alike. They will and they do wait for it and usually, they come away satisfied. Tarantino is more than an auteur. He's one of the few living directors whose actual name has lent itself to the designation of a film-making and screenwriting style. In this day and age of information/entertainment anywhere, everywhere and all the time, his status as a cinematic icon precedes him, deservedly or not. His filmography is studied and analyzed in numerous History of Cinema, screenwriting and filmmaking courses all over the world. And by all accounts he intends to keep adding to the program of study.
The latest addition to the syllabus is Inglourious Basterds – an alternative history WWII revenge drama that pays simultaneous homage to Spaghetti Westerns, Blaxploitation and French New Wave. In a cheeky shout out to Aldo Ray, star of numerous WWII Macaroni-Combat films - a sub-genre heavily influenced by the Spaghetti Western - IB stars the one and only William Bradley Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine, the leader of a crack team of Jewish soldiers out successfully spreading fear and hunting Nazi scalps throughout war-torn Europe. This group's plan to kill Hitler and end the war is paralleled by the efforts of Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish farm girl who ends up the proprietor of a small cinema in Paris after escaping her family's massacre. She has the same objective in mind. Tarantino injects himself so thoroughly into this film and in such a loving and humorous way, I almost expected him to make a cameo appearance and deliver a speech involving dead Nazi storage. All the way from the line "I'm French. We respect directors in this country." (This line must have killed during the film's premiere at Cannes) to his main conceit – that WWII could be ended by showing a movie – not for a moment was I allowed to forget that I was watching a QT production. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
IB is an engaging, infectious romp stuffed with QT's requisite wordy, expansive dialogue, hammy yet eventually appropriate work by Pitt and a revelatory performance by veteran actor Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa. I didn't buy Pitt's opening monologue/address for a minute, but his sing-song hillbilly patter sets the stage for much of what comes later and serves to get the ear and brain readjusted to Tarantino's writing style – a style that features scenes that go on much longer than most films. (Each scene actually feels like its own one-act play.) I ultimately understood what Pitt was trying to do by the second and third acts and his work gets stronger and funnier as the movie unwinds.
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