Inglourious Basterds is a piece of bravura filmmaking, a scrumptiously over the top revenge fantasy that melds high comedy with tragic melodrama for pure hypnotic effect. I’ve never enjoyed a Tarantino movie more.

Inglourious Basterds begins in German-occupied France with the introduction of Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a Jew-hunting Nazi who executes an entire family hiding beneath the floorboards of a small cottage, minus a lone daughter, Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent), who narrowly escapes. Shoshanna flees to Paris where she assumes a new identity and sets herself up as the owner/operator of a movie house popular with German soldiers.

Elsewhere, U.S. Army Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) has been put in charge of a company of select soldiers whose mission is not simply to harass and harry the Nazis, but to strike the very fear of God into them. Raine’s men (including director Eli Roth, B.J. Novak and Til Schweiger) are composed entirely of Jewish soldiers known as “The Basterds,” who engage in guerilla style sneak attacks, beating their enemies to death with baseball bats and then removing their scalps as mementos. (This is the sort of war film Sam Peckinpah would have been proud to make.) Naturally, the Germans become appropriately agitated.

When the unfathomable opportunity arises to take out all the leaders of the Third Reich at once, the Allies jump at the chance, pairing Raine’s squad with the adored German actress and undercover secret agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) and British film critic turned soldier Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender). As Col. Landa and Lt. Raine are drawn toward an inevitable confrontation, an even greater collision is poised to occur as Shoshanna, hungry for revenge, sets her own wrathful vengeance in motion.

Director Quentin Tarantino has always been a polarizing figure, always been at the very center of the debate as to where homage ends and plagiarism begins. This film won’t be ending that debate anytime soon. Inglourious Basterds, an unrecognizable remake of an Italian film of the same name, is the cinematic offspring of a threesome between a period war film, a 70’s sploitation film and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Though comprised of several chapters that don’t initially appear to belong together, this is probably Tarantino’s most linear film yet.

The American bad boy of cinema is one of the most distinctive directors working today. He has imitators, but no peers. Hit or miss, his films are always unmistakably his own. As a filmmaker, he is so polished that he must actually work hard to appear raw. His films are always extraordinarily entertaining—self indulgent to be sure, but undeniably entertaining nonetheless. His latest is no different.

It has been said that Tarantino is in love with the sound of his own voice, that he enjoys nothing more than to place a handful of his idiosyncratic characters around a table and let them talk for inordinately long periods of time. But when they are given such words to say, can you blame them? While Tarantino’s predilection failed him in Deathproof (not because the writing was bad but because it violated the rules of the grindhouse genre), it is mesmerizing here. Tarantino’s script positively purrs. His language is milk and honey one moment and venomous antifreeze the next, containing not a drop of sentimentality. His plot doesn’t generate razor sharp tension—he accomplishes that with his words alone.

Tarantino has once again created characters who refuse to be overlooked or forgotten. Brad Pitt’s over-the-top mannerisms and appalling southern accent creates a (mostly) intentionally cartoonishness which works… eventually. Of all the Basterds, he alone is allowed this revelation. The remainder of the men are painted with broad, stereotypical brushes. We don’t ever get to know them. They are not the Dirty Dozen with back-stories to endear them to us or convenient handles for our sympathy. They are Jews there to butcher Nazis and that’s all we need to know about them. The one Allied solider who is given lavish time is Fassbender’s Lt. Hicox, a walking mix of preening Anglo arrogance and chiseled good looks. How amazing is Fassbender, that an actor of his stature and appearance could be such a chameleon, staring in 300, Hunger and now Inglourious Basterds and not be readily identified in any film.

Tarantino also continues a tradition he started with his earliest films, creating devastatingly strong female characters (does anyone create stronger?), especially that of Shoshanna who comes face to face with oblivion and turns into an relentless wraith of vengeance as a result. But she is not an automaton; beneath her cold, resolved exterior beats the heart of a terrified and wounded child.

None of these characters, however, are even remotely as interesting as that of Col. Hans Landa. Christoph Waltz, in his first English speaking film, is absolutely spellbinding, breathing life into a true villain for the ages. We love to hate him, a multi-dimensionality that is not exactly humanizing, but does grant him a certain autonomy from his own abhorrent wickedness.

Yet even Landa is not the star of Basterds. That coveted place belongs to cinema itself. Tarantino litters his film with dozens of pop cinematic references, some overt and some obscure. Sometimes he is elucidating a moment; other times he is simply showing off. The cinema has never been just an entertaining diversion for Tarantino—it has the power to create and to destroy and he proves it here more than in anything else he’s ever made. Basterds is a film in which the climax takes place in a theater, in which movie stars and film critics play pivotal roles and in which film literally saves the day and perhaps ends a war.

Like the brilliant but troubling Leni Riefenstahl, the actress and filmmaker who immortalized Adolf Hitler in Triumph of the Will and is invoked throughout Basterds, Joseph Goebbels has created a film of unadulterated hero worship, Nation’s Pride, an ode to carnage on a colossal scale about an episode of extreme violence made respectable by soft filters and key lights. The film, about the heroics of lowly private (Daniel Brühl) who in real life has taken a touching interest in Shoshanna, is an attempt to distil the jingoistic essence of Nazi Germany into a singular piece of high art. The gory irony then is that film is both literally and figuratively a combustible material that, in the end, turns on it creators and consumes them. Just as a holy God wreaked vengeance on the Nazis for violating the sanctity of his Ark of the Covenant with their unmitigated hubris in Raiders of the Lost Ark, so too does Tarantino give us an ending in that same epic vein—full of larger-than-life wrath, a sort of wish fulfillment judgment day.

Tarantino gives us exactly what we want, a revenge fantasy we can feel good about. After all, if you can’t find satisfaction in killing Nazis, where can you find it? If this is immoral, it nevertheless reflects the audience’s (and I dare say the director’s) own dark and perverse desires. Ultimately, the film abandons reality for an alternate history in which the audience gets to remotely participate in the wartime denouncement they’ve always dreamed of seeing. Tarantino sees no disconnect in any of this. He feels no obligation to treat the Nazis any differently than he would any other characters he’s written over the years and he obviously feels no obligation to history either. This stance—which will disturb some and thrill others—is just the sort of balsy, audacious, foolhardy posturing that makes Inglourious Basterds one of the year’s most magnificent and controversial experiences.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.