Quenten Tarrantino’s Inglorious Basterds is a movie about a war that never happened. Once upon a time, in Nazi occupied France (so the title card goes), America dropped a crew of Jewish-American G.I.s behind enemy lines with one purpose, and one purpose only: Killing Nazis. These men, dubbed the Bastards (I doubt the Germans would spell it wrong) were incredibly good at their job—so good, in fact, that Hitler himself knew of their exploits, met the survivors who left with swastikas carved into their foreheads, and feared the morale-altering power their names held over his men.
Half of Inglorious Basterds, the half advertised on TV, has to do with Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his men, who seem to subsist on Nazi gore and grim determination alone. It is more or less what you expect—no matter what you were expecting. Tarrantino fans will likely be pleased by the epic swelling of dialog before any real violence, arch characters, and spaghetti western sentimentality, including an Ennio Morricone score lifted from other movies. Tarrantino detractors will likely say that there is, as usual, too much talking, that the violence is cartoon-like in its sheer glee and vehemence, and, maybe, that he has taken up one of the most significant events in the span of human history as pure exploitation entertainment—no heart, no brains, all testosterone.
When a jacked up Eli Roth, playing a Louisville Slugger toting soldier known around Germany as “the Jew Bear,” takes said weapon to the head of a Nazi while giving an emphatic, nails-on-chalkboard play-by-play, I’m inclined to fall in line with the detractors. I don’t think “bear” when I see Eli Roth, and after having been so well built up in one of Tarrantino’s spectacular-as-usual dialogs between captor and captive, I felt a bit let down.
But Roth, who was my major question mark going into Basterds, tones it down for much of the movie, where he is tucked away in the background. Actually, the Bastards themselves are in the background for much of the film, which, of course, if not just a black comedy about Nazi-killin’ Jews. In fact, we don’t even begin with the Bastards. Tarrantino starts his film on a farm in rural France, where a dairy farmer is suspected of hiding a family of Jews.
It’s also a movie about movies, and a movie about people who love movies, but at this point, it isn’t surprising when he lifts some technique from a different director or has one of his characters declare their adulation for one film or another, be it Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry or the work of Leni Riefenstahl. You may, however, be surprised at what Tarrantino decides to do with World War II, and that goes beyond dropping six Jewish-American soldiers in behind enemy lines to collect Nazi scalps. Inglorious Basterds doesn’t so much play with history—it rewrites history. And that’s not even the most fascinating part.
