Friday Films: Inglourious Basterds

I’ve been a Tarantino fan for a long time, ever since I saw “Reservoir Dogs” when I was probably way too young to watch it. “Pulp Fiction” came next, and then “Jackie Brown” and “Kill Bill” when I got to college. There has always been something so appealing about his style, the aesthetic of grabbing disparate parts from a lifelong immersion in popular culture and shaping them into something coherent and over-the-top and referential that they become so much greater than the sum of their parts. The combination in “Kill Bill” of kung fu, samurai, and western films produces something completely unrecognizable because it is such a loving and meticulous pastiche. So I was pretty intrigued to watch “Inglourious Basterds,” Tarantino’s World War II epic, to see how his style translated.

The movie is, like all of Tarantino’s films on some level, about the movies it draws from. But where Tarantino’s interests in film are more obliquely referenced in his other movies, here the film is used very literally as a weapon against fascists. There’s a moment relatively early in the movie where Brad Pitt, as the leader of the “Basterds,” tells a Nazi officer that “watching the Bear Jew beat Nazis to death is the closest these boys get to going to the movies,” and this link between violent entertainment and movies just grows throughout the film.

“Inglourious Basterds,” like a lot of Tarantino’s movies, is told in chapters; it opens in the French countryside, with a Nazi known as “the Jew Hunter” (nicknames are big in this movie) seeking a family that has gone into hiding. The opening minutes of the movie are so tense, with such a sense of mounting dread, that it’s completely engrossing. It was like the first few minutes of “Kill Bill,” where you knew exactly what was going to happen, and that makes it worse. You’re waiting for the gunshot. Christophe Waltz, who won the Academy Award for his portrayal of “the Jew Hunter,” earned it based on this scene alone: he plays it so sane, so methodical, but with this undercurrent of psychosis that is completely convincing. At the end of the opening chapter, the family’s daughter escapes to Paris, where she opens a cinema.

Meanwhile, the Basterds, an all-Jewish squadron led by a redneck named Aldo Raine, work their way across occupied France, killing and scalping Nazis. Their ultimate goal? Well, Hitler of course. But along the way, they inspire fear and become legends; there’s the “Bear Jew,” who beats Nazis to death with a baseball bat, and a German who enlisted in the Nazi army solely to kill his commanding officers. They eventually become involved in “Operation Kino,” a plot to destroy the Nazi leaders during a film screening, and work their way to Paris. They don’t know, however, that the cinema’s owner, hell-bent on revenge, is planning to do the same thing during the high-profile premiere of “The Nation’s Pride,” a film celebrating a Nazi sniper who killed two hundred enemy soldiers.

I won’t spoil anything of the film’s climax in case you haven’t seen it, but this write-up would be incomplete if I didn’t mention the last lines. Brad Pitt’s character, after carving a swastika into a Nazi character’s head (a way to make sure his past will always stay with him), looks down and says, “I think this may be my masterpiece.” It’s difficult to not hear Tarantino in that line, commenting on this movie. It’s the culmination of years of movies about violence and revenge and movies, and I can see how the director would consider this his finest work. And you know, I just might agree with him.