The scope of Inglorious Basterds makes it too intimidating to try to review in one go. Besides, I want to see it again and have some time to process it. It is magnificent, and one of the most controlled pieces of film-making I can recall watching. But at this point, just a few reactions. The opening scene, Chapter 1, is just breath taking. Evoking Westerns, particularly Once Upon a Time in the West, a dairy farmer chops wood in rural France. A German colonel stops by and asks to be invited inside to talk. What follows is riveting. Every gesture, every word of dialogue, the framing of every shot works to build tension. Then, near the end of the film, in the projection room, there is a shot so heart-achingly beautiful that you desperately want to press rewind and watch it over and over.
This is a film dominated, more so than any other by Tarantino, by dialogue. The moments of action and violence are really very few. Some of the dialogue is very funny, but the dialogue is designed much less to show how clever Tarantino is than often seems to be the case. It is not the one-liners, or even the monologues (remember Buscemi or Walken), so much as the interplay of actors feeling each other out, and slowly building to cathartic violence.
Christoph Waltz is sensational and steals almost every scene he is in. But Melanie Laurent comes close to being as good. I could take or leave Brad Pitt, but almost all the acting is impressive.
Regrets? I had a few. There is so much dialogue that the soundtrack, usually an integral part of any Tarantino film, plays a much smaller part here. Large parts of the film are nothing but conversation, and there are even moments when Tarantino re-uses snippets of sound from his previous films. Only the use of Morricone at the beginning and Bowie at the end are inspired. And a few seconds of bloodlust (not the violence itself, which was fairly muted, so much as the reaction of the protagonists) here and there were jarring and could have been cut. But this is a damn fine movie and one that I am sure will reward repeated viewing.
I’m not jumping up and down with manic joy, but this is one mighty fine piece of entertainment. It’s a comic-book worthy work of revisionist history/cinema; as thin as celluloid but oh what gorgeous celluloid. Less a pastiche of war films than a film about movie-going and movie-making, Inglourious Basterds is a bloody enthusiastic celebration of the cinema. I liked Waltz as well but his performance may be a jot too giddy (the actor appears to be having more fun than the character); Pitt worked perfectly well for me and received a lot of laughs in the nearly full theater I attended. I don’t want to get all Gene Siskel on Tarantino’s butt, but if this film is a success (and signs suggest it will be a modest-plus success), I will profer its success will unleash Spielberg’s mechanical shark to take a jump over Holocaust narratives. That all being said, I’m not itching to see it again.
A comment on AintItCool that spoke to me: [spoilers]
“Loved how the mythology of cinema played a huge role in the film, thematically. That penultimate moment, just after Shosanna has shot Zoller twice in the back, when she turns to watch the unspooling movie, seeing a sad, torn Frederick Zoller playing himself, bearing the weight of all the lives he’s taken from atop the tower he’s perched upon. And she softens, for a moment, thinking that she’s just had a glimpse into the tortured soul of the sincere young man who lays dying ten feet away, leading her to walk up to the prone soldier, touching him…. only to have him lift his gun and shoot her three times. Brilliant. She was suckered in by the myth of the moving image. It’s what Tarantino’s been suckering us into for nearly two decades now. Can’t wait to be suckered in by QT’s mythology again.”
I just saw this, and I agree it’s a terrific film. More fun than I’ve had at the movies in a while.
I hope to have lots more to say later, but for now I want to respond to the AintItCool thingy. I initially thought Shosanna was a sucker for Fredrick’s sorry mug up there on the screen, but the thought bothered me, and I’ve been trying to get around it. She’s out for Nazi blood. We all are. And Goebbels’s film is not meant to portray Fredrick as tortured. He’s meant to be unambiguously heroic. The crowd cheers every time Fredrick guns down another American soldier. Fredrick carves a swastika in the floor to pass the time. The Basterds (and Shosanna, though not a member, is surely a contender) carve them in foreheads. Why? So no Nazi can ever hide his true identity. Shosanna hasn’t been fooled by the film but by Frederick who had, moments before forcing his way into the projection room, given her a line about how he “can’t watch this part.” Yeah, her heart is broken by the image of the beautiful, heroic soldier (script says so). But I think she’s also quite conscious of the entire apparatus of myth-making. She’s in a projection room, fer Chrissakes. No, I think that without a swastika carved in his forehead, Fredrick momentarily fools Shosanna into thinking he’s just a decent guy caught up in Goebbels’s propaganda machine.
Well, anyway it’s more complicated than what AintItCool suggests.
(john says: “script says so”)
CONTINUING SPOILERS
bah. shoshanna doesn’t approach frederick until frederick makes a moan, at which time she realizes he’s alive and her tender womanly heart beats faster. she’s known all along that he’s a sweet though horrible kid, but, also, strangely, this is a moment in which his childishness is less present to shosanna, because generally-so-sweet frederick has pushed himself roughly into the room. nazi pushing themselves roughly into rooms = red lights and alarm bells. the whole movie has, in fact, been coaching us to interpret german’s violence always as a harbinger of horror — which sure enough it proves to be this time too.
heck, this is a nice film but also kind of who-cares, you know. the first scene sets us up to look for a film we are not going to get, except maybe for the cowboy element, which is reprised only in the scalping theme. (nice interview with QT on fresh air here.
i’m sure quarantino has no problem whatsoever with unlikelihood and i’m sure all the various implausibilities work to some extent towards comic outcomes, but the ramshackle band of jewish-american boys led by brad pitt as a coarse red-neck moron look pretty damn pathetic, so much so that, apart from one or two, we basically never see them again.
yet, the next scene shows them as veritable powerhouses. they are stopping the nazis! they are derailing the juggernaut! the nazis are terrified!
nice to see hitler scared and desperate but whatev.
basically, the little inglourious subplot never did it for me, especially once shoshanna resurfaced with a movie house and then i knew what the movie was really about!
i’m going to let you guys discuss the synergistic compounded interreferentiality of movies-within-movies. me, i’ll just say that, as i watched the riveting sequences of young frederick blowing away americans, i could not but think of spike lee’s miracle at st. anna’s, which, mutatis mutandis, is probably a movie that would have moved goebbels. i’m being facetious. but there is shooting in a picturesque european village and maybe just maybe some whatever heroism.
and i think this is the sum total of what i have to say about this film. except for the black character who came out of nowhere but whatever.
I think he arrived via the projection room (not to mention Tarantino’s love for all things blacktacular). I wondered where the hell Samuel L. Jackson came from, but that’s another conversation. I did watch this for a second time a few weeks ago, thinking I would meditate on form and blah, but I really enjoyed it again, particularly the scene in the basement tavern. Still, I think Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and the Kill Bill films to be superior (if that at all matters).
samuel jackson is in this film?
still, less facetiously, revisionist history, especially when done so well, is always worth a conversation oo you. here’s a conversation starter: why brad pitt? why the southern accent? why brad pitt and the southern accent?
Why Brad Pitt? I like Brad Pitt. I think he’s talented, but I suspect he was hired because he was game but also because he would bring home the money. He’s popular in America, but he is huge overseas. It was a smart move and a clever business decision. Tarantino could go off and cast anyone he wanted once he had Pitt on board to secure the funds and international interest (beyond Europe). Southern accent? Well, Pitt is from Oklahoma and provided a pretty reliable Mississippi delta accent for Benjamin Button, but I think the redneck hillbilly approach to his character is supposed to heighten the ironic contrast (and therefore the “funny”) between Lt. Aldo Raine and his merry band of Jewish counter-terrorists. As for said Nazi killers, the cast included Eli Roth (director of numerous carnivalesque horror films) as “The Bear Jew”, the wonderful Samm Levine (who was a featured player on “Freaks and Geeks” among other smaller roles in movies and television), Paul Rust (a member of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater), and B.J. Novak (who produces, writes and plays the role of Ryan on the American version of “The Office). These are not unknown entities to many. The reason they are not on screen more than you might have thought is that they serve as a sort of narrative MacGuffin in the film, no?
Holy shit! Hyperlinks in our comments? What are we, the Times?
I actually didn’t like Pitt, or his accent, but Aldo Raine was a real guy–a southern actor, and war veteran–and I gather BP was given very explicit coaching to capture Raine’s pahr-TECK-yew-lurrrr drawl.
I have to rewatch this. I actually think it was up to more than that intriguing mash-up of exploitation/revenge-film and historical revision, and more than mere mirror-hall referentiality, ‘though it’s both of those for sure. There was something very intriguing about its exploration of ethics… but first time ’round I thought it might have been more ambitious than successful.
That said, it was engrossing and often very entertaining, and those couple of sequences–the opening, and the basement (that Jeff noted)–hoo wee.
Actually, Aldo Ray, the actor, was born to an Italian family in Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania, studied briefly at UCBerkeley before settling down in northern California (outside San Francisco). Soon he was making films with George Cukor! He played a redneck or two late in his career before throat cancer got to his sexy, gravelly voice, but he also acted in a couple of blacksploitation films, a British thriller, John Wayne’s Green Berets, Riot on the Sunset Strip, other genre flicks, etc. He also did some voice work in The Secret of NIHM. I’m guessing whoever taught him how to capture his pahr-TECK-yew-lurrr drawl probably worked with Pitt as well (but that whipper-snapper was actually born in redneck country so who knows). Ray’s son played Leo Johnson in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
There you go. Never trust the New Yorker.
Well, he did serve in the war.