Inglourious Basterds - the inthenews.co.uk review
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Friday, 14, Aug 2009 12:01
The wait was worth it as Lewis Bazley is swept up by an unmistakeably Tarantino take on the second world war that's his best work since Pulp Fiction.
Directed by Quentin Tarantino, out August 19th in cinemas, starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Diane Kruger, Melanie Laurent, Michael Fassbender, running time 147 mins.
In a nutshell.
Hilarious, intense and bold - a triumph.
What's it all about?
Having witnessed the execution of her family at the hands of 'Jew Hunter' colonel Hans Landa (Waltz), Shoshanna Dreyfus (Laurent) flees to Paris to start a new life as the manager of a cinema, all the while plotting revenge.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Pitt) and his group of Jewish American soldiers - the titular 'Basterds' - move through Nazi-occupied Europe in a bid to collect national socialist scalps before being conscripted into a plot to bring down the Nazi high command.
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Who's in it?
The Americans, you already know, with Brad Pitt putting on his best Tennessee drawl, Eli Roth wielding a baseball bat with intent and Mike Myers putting false teeth and public school vowels to good use as a British officer. Hunger's Michael Fassbender and National Treasure actress Diane Kruger are a fine double act, but the show belongs to Christoph Waltz and Melanie Laurent, the former conniving and charismatic as the 'Jew Hunter', the latter beautiful and wilful as the vengeful Shoshanna.
As an example...
"Facts can be so misleading while rumours, true or false, are often revealing." - Hans Landa
"Each and every man under my command owes me 100 Nazi scalps - and I want my scalps!" - Lt Aldo Raine
"If this is it, old boy, I hope you don't mind me going out speaking the King's... " - Lt Archie Hicox
Likelihood of a trip to the Oscars
Tarantino's best chance of a best director Oscar since Pulp Fiction and the screenplay's too indulgent to lead to a best picture nod, QT might just be clutching a little gold statuette in honour of his writing next year.
What the others say
"By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavour that's new for the director." - Todd McCarthy, Variety
"Not enough scalps. While it's good and there are fun elements it's rather dialogue-led than jam-packed with action." - Baz Bamigboye, Daily Mail
So is it any good?
A good ten years in the making, in which time Tarantino's announced the plan to Kill Bill and finished the job - as well as proving that he and Robert Rodriguez would do well to remember that their worship of a dead genre isn't shared by the rest of the world - it's no surprise that Inglorious Basterds feels overlong, confused and incapable of meeting our expectations.
Yet as Lieutenant Aldo Raine (a low-key Pitt) delivers an agonising punishment to a ruthless foe and remarks: "This might be my masterpiece", it's not to hard to agree with the writer/director's opinions thinly veiled behind that bloodthirsty quip. Even if its liberties with the truth, dense structure and too-talky script mean it's not necessarily Tarantino's masterwork, it's certainly his strongest and most entertaining film since Pulp Fiction.
The trailer campaign - even the title - has been misleading, with Pitt and the rest of the Basterds appearing only in sporadic bursts of ultra-violence and those hoping for Tarantino's 'war movie' could be disappointed. There are certainly outstanding set pieces on show, notably a Basterds ambush in flashback, Laurent and Waltz in an electrifying encounter with a ghost from the past and Fassbender's bounder Brit blowing everyone else off the screen as a simple rendezvous goes horribly wrong. But the strength of the film, especially when the depth of competing plot strands risks total audience bewilderment, is in the performances and Tarantino's endlessly quotable, whip-smart dialogue.
With characters speaking in their own language and subtitled - take that Valkyrie! - the multilingual cast seem emboldened and willing to throw themselves into their work. Fassbender is superbly cast as a charming commando based on Graham Greene, Kruger sexy and stern as a German movie icon and Laurent has ensured a busy few months for her agent with Hollywood offers sure to roll in.
The film received an 11-minute standing ovation at Cannes - though subsequent reviews were split between the reverent and the snootily disdainful - and while much of that applause would have been proffered for some of Tarantino's finest work behind the camera, Christoph Waltz is the undoubted star of the show. Richly rewarded with the best actor prize in the south of France and deserving of a best supporting actor nomination at the Oscars, the German veteran was born for the role. So much so that Tarantino and producer Laurence Bender were mere days from scrapping the film when they found this brilliant 53-year-old, fluent in English, French, German and Italian and with even more tricks in his acting locker. His work as the cultured, civilised face of evil Hans Landa is extraordinary, channelling Olivier's Richard III, Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter and even Heath Ledger's Joker in a star-making performance that entrances as much as it repulses.
Readers of this site in recent weeks might have seen my lengthy complaint over being forbidden from expressing what I thought of the film, lest a nonsensical embargo be broken. What exactly Universal were worried about, I'm even less sure now, as from its spaghetti western opening to its stunningly claustrophobic cinema-set climax, this is Tarantino's best work in over a decade. The soundtrack is as curious and affectionate as ever, the characters are so rich yet pulpy that they seem to have leapt from the pages of a Boy's Own novel. The lush, literate cinematography, (the by-product of a life immersed in film with a new European slant), owes just as much to Douglas Sirk and Fritz Lang as it does to Sergio Leone, Wolfgang Petersen and Richard Attenborough, and Tarantino's self-confessed desire to die with a great and noteworthy filmography behind him has never been more evident. His boldness allows him to insert a David Bowie song into a film set in 1944 without hesitation; his endearingly geeky love of cinema means each and every character is either a nod to a cinema icon or one of his own creations; and his intuitive understanding of audiences means the truth somehow becomes less important than our wish for an explosive, melodramatic ending.
"Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France," the film opens and while two critics at the screening I attended seemed genuinely uncertain whether Tarantino's version of events was historically accurate, this is undeniably a fairytale, just a gloriously violent, endlessly quotable, uniquely Tarantino yarn.
It might not be his masterpiece but it's still a frequently stunning example of cinema as wish fulfilment that proves the wait was worth it.
9/10
Lewis Bazley