Basterdized

The epic, overstuffed Inglourious Basterds is WWII through a Tarantino lens.

by Sam Adams

NO GUTS, NO GLOURY: Eli Roth as "The Bear Jew" and Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

[ City Paper Grade: B ]

Once upon a time … in Nazi-occupied France,” begins Quentin Tarantino’s World War II epic Inglourious Basterds, and you’d do well to remember that preamble. Where most movies approach the “last good war” with reverence and sometimes sanctimony, Tarantino sees it as an opportunity to play with the biggest icons the 20th century has to offer. It’s history as filtered through Jackrabbit Slim’s.

Tarantino’s boldest invention — apart from the movie’s topsy-turvy conclusion — is a squad of Nazi-killing American Jews known as The Bastards, led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a drawling Tennessean with American Indian blood and a penchant for scalping his kills. (The titular misspelling, incidentally, is never explained, and Tarantino has declined to illuminate it, although one wonders if it might just be an end-around copyright claims stemming from Enzo Castellari’s like-titled 1978 spaghetti Western.) The Bastards’ methods are propagandistic; they kill with a theatrical flourish, the better to strike fear into the hearts of Nazis across Europe. One, nicknamed “The Bear Jew” (a seriously bulked-up Eli Roth), bashes in their brains with a Louisville Slugger; the movie introduces another, a German defector who killed several high-ranking SS officers on his way out, with a Superfly font and backstory narration by Samuel L. Jackson.

As should be clear by now, Tarantino is more interested in tailoring the WWII movie to fit his preoccupations than the other way around. There are disparate narratives that spin off and rejoin each other, multilayered references to cinema past and present, long discussions punctuated by sudden violence; he even manages to satisfy his foot fetish by having an errant high heel play a pivotal role in the climactic sequence. He’s playing the same games, only with more expensive toys.
The Bastards’ story eventually intersects with that of a dashing, ice-blooded SS officer named Hans Landa (Christophe Waltz) whose specialty is hunting down fugitive Jews, and Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish girl who escapes his clutches and ends up owning a movie theater in occupied Paris.

The parties converge on Shoshanna’s theater for the première of Nation’s Pride, a hyper-violent piece of German propaganda which seems to be little more than an endless succession of shots of Allied soldiers being blasted apart by gunfire while a Nazi war hero (Daniel Brühl) holds them off single-handed from a clock tower. What Pitt’s character calls the “car-pay rouge” will be flooded with the Nazi high command, making it an irresistible target for the Bastards — and for Shoshanna, who is determined to avenge her family’s death at Landa’s hands.

Inglourious Basterds runs more than two and a half hours, but it still feels incomplete, or at least unfinished. The opening sequence, which begins with a sheet being pulled across a laundry line to suggest the opening of a curtain, is a masterful set piece, a duel of words and wills between Landa and the French farmer who is hiding Shoshanna’s family under his floorboard. But when Tarantino tries the same trick again later, drawing out a conversation between a Nazi officer and three undercover spies, the necessary frisson never materializes. In Death Proof, his half of Grindhouse, Tarantino felt free to indulge himself, but the movie’s bifold structure put a check on its length, and its overtly unserious posture put a check on any thoughts of grandiosity. Basterds is hardly serious, but it’s weighty, even ponderous at times, and it suffers from trying to overstuff into an already bulging package. It’s too much and not enough all at once.

Inglourious Basterds | Directed by Quentin Tarantino. A Weinstein Co. release. Opens in area theaters Friday.