INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009)

As far as opening scenes go, Inglourious Basterds couldn’t aim any higher for perfection. Its 20-minute opening sequence is a masterclass in tension, starting with a picturesque, pastoral landscape in rural France. A farmer, Perrier (Denis Ménochet), sweat-stained from a long day’s work, watches on as SS vehicles gradually approach his simple yet elegant home atop a hill. But his exertion has only just begun, as he finds himself caught in a standoff with the incredibly intimidating Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), an SS official who has been tasked with finding Jewish people in hiding in France.

Landa, who takes pride in his unofficial nickname of ‘The Jew Hunter’, immediately takes control of the interaction and commands the attention of Perrier and his family, who are powerless to stop him from making himself at home in their residence. As this scene unfolds, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary interaction, and I’m not only referring to the gravity of this moment for the French farmer being questioned. The editing and cinematography on display here are simply phenomenal, whereas moments that might seem forgettable in any other movie are incredibly impactful.

It’s here that Inglourious Basterds can tap into what Quentin Tarantino was so desperate to capture in this film: a master of filmmaking in his element. The artistry here is sublime, amplified tenfold by the two incredible performers imbuing something as simple as a look with great importance. While many of these shots are gorgeous to look at, the editing is even more striking, where tension is constantly built up and squashed down throughout this lengthy conversation.

As it becomes clearer as to what this meeting is about, there’s an incredible tone shift heralded by a zoom-in on Landa’s face. Christoph Waltz’s ability to deliver a deadpan look of total inhumanity is laudable, just as Ménochet is equally brilliant in portraying a good man trying his hardest to do the right thing, but gradually coming undone under the glare of his monstrous guest. It’s as if this moment, which leads to Perrier confessing that he has a Jewish family hidden under his floorboards, marks the dawning of an entirely new scene. In keeping with this idea, the film’s score swells to a tragic, almost triumphant tune as Landa’s men empty their guns’ ammunition into the floorboards of Perrier’s home, just as the helpless farmer breaks down in tears.

On a first watch, it slowly becomes obvious that this isn’t just a conversation, or even an interrogation, but a power play between both men. Perrier puts up a brilliant act as someone who has nothing to hide, but this façade gradually slips in an incredibly tense sequence that feels unbearably long at points. On subsequent watches, it’s obvious that Landa had this entire conversation mapped out in his head. After comparing Jewish people to rats, Landa’s questions to Perrier about the unfair ways human beings treat this species are all hypothetical. This mirrors their conversation as a whole, with the Nazi official gradually guiding the French farmer to a pre-determined point.

This transforms this entire conversation into a work of theatrics for Landa, adding a layer of moral outrage to such a tense and brutal scene. Unlike most Nazis, he is not an ardent proponent of this ideology, instead admiring Jewish people for their survival abilities, since this offers him a challenge in trying to uncover them. Nazism is simply the ideal vehicle for his sadism. With an antagonist who possesses such an enormous capacity for evil and an opening sequence that’s one of cinema’s most impressive, Inglourious Basterds seemed poised for greatness from the get-go.

Tonally, what comes after this riveting scene, after one of the family members in hiding, Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent), flees to safety, couldn’t be more different. Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), the leader of a group of Jewish soldiers, most of whom are Jewish-American, essentially emerges as the primary protagonist of this film, despite how episodic Inglourious Basterds is in flitting between its principal cast. Aldo is portrayed with an accent designed to invoke laughter and clipped, harsh intonations. His crew, the ‘Basterds’, have a simple task: killing Nazis. For as excellent as the film’s opening scene was, it could have easily led to Tarantino using that awareness of his mastery behind the camera to create a dour, self-aggrandising look at a historical tragedy.

Instead, he opts for something far less self-important on the surface, but which ultimately reveals the legendary filmmaker’s arrogance. This segment of the story prides itself on being a comedic farce that takes gleeful delight in seeing the corpses of Nazi soldiers brutalised in stomach-churning scenes featuring heads being scalped. Such scenes aren’t nearly as effective as the movie’s opening, not just because there’s no drama here in this childlike obsession with sadism, but because most of these sociopaths we’re following don’t have Shoshanna’s harrowing background. If she were to engage in such brutal acts against high-ranking officials, it would be a welcome revenge fantasy, similar to Tarantino’s subsequent feature film, Django Unchained (2012), on the subject of slavery in the American South.

But Aldo and most of his crew have no personal involvement with the horrors of Nazi Germany and don’t appear to possess the slightest hint of empathy. The premise is simple: they are Jewish, they despise what’s happening to members of their religion… and that’s it. A Nazi is a Nazi to them, whether he’s a young soldier who accepted conscription to avoid being penalised or a high-ranking officer who takes pleasure in the dehumanisation and slaughter of Jewish civilians. In a film as farcical as this one, morality shouldn’t have to be complex. But when its paper-thin approach is fused with a tone that finds pleasure in following reprehensible human beings under an utterly banal guise of being ‘the good guys’, it is an insult to the victims of these real-life horrors and the gravity of the film’s opening scene.

Tarantino was able to course-correct this major flaw in Django Unchained, with the eponymous protagonist of that film never delightedly bathing in the blood of slave-owners, but instead pursuing a noble quest that just so happens to contain the bonus of involving many of these disgusting figures being killed. In Inglourious Basterds, the only member of this group that we know has experienced oppression at the hands of this authoritarian state is Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), but even then, his state-sanctioned torture only occurs after he murders over a dozen Gestapo officers. This might be a clear abuse of power, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the atrocities that we know this regime committed.

With no apparent stakes and a sociopathic mob at the helm of this storyline, Inglourious Basterds quickly loses track of what it wants to be with its unfolding jumble of tones and plotlines. All of the tension and venom of this film’s subject matter has been pried free. As just one point of comparison between Aldo’s storyline and the opening scene, when Landa asks Perrier to explain who he is and what he does, his delight in his given nickname is terrifying. When Aldo asks a similar question to an SS officer about himself and his crew, this act of self-congratulation on Tarantino’s part is designed to let us know how badass these men are and how fun it’s going to be to watch this soldier get torn to shreds. Too much time is spent insisting on how cool all of this ultra-violence is, rather than organically building up a plotline that, despite its grim subject matter, is thrilling to watch.

There are the bones of a phenomenal miniseries lurking in this overstuffed film, whose ambition is not nearly as impressive as it seems at first glance. While the plot moves forward at a welcome pace, we don’t go on a journey with any of these characters. We don’t see Shoshanna learning to survive in Nazi-occupied France, like how she was able to rise from a girl with nothing and no one to be the owner of a cinema, co-run with the man she loves and trusts more than anyone else. Almost every scene she’s in is too tied to the film’s plot for there to be room for notable characterisation.

As for this story, it involves various factions attempting to intercept the premiere of a German propaganda film at Shoshanna’s cinema, which will be attended by many high-ranking Nazi officials, including Hitler himself. Much of this could not have occurred without Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), an annoying, fawning German war hero who pines after Shoshanna and simply will not take no for an answer. Fredrick is an effective glue holding this flimsy plotline together, but his continued presence in Shoshanna’s life means there is little time to explore this heroine’s psyche. The only moment of emotional resonance involving this character after the opening scene occurs when Shoshanna runs into Landa again. Although this scene strikes the tense and tragic notes that made the movie’s opening so memorable, there are very few other interesting ideas being expressed or characters being explored throughout Inglourious Basterds.

Shoshanna wants to kill Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest of the Nazi elite—no surprise there. But that means she experiences no doubts. So what is there for the character to do? Like with the entirety of this movie’s principal cast, there’s enough for the experience to not feel empty, but that does little to cover up the lack of opportunities for emotional investment here. Inglourious Basterds feels like Tarantino’s version of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), where both films are rather messy, brilliant at points, pretentious at others, and could be improved with a bit of refining.

But while Magnolia brilliantly used its larger-than-life ethos to tackle the pain of being alive and the joy that can be found in seizing the day in all its tortured glory, Tarantino’s efforts here are far too self-congratulatory for Inglourious Basterds to be anything other than a shiny object for the filmmaker to marvel at and use to rest on his laurels. Aside from how irresponsible and ugly it is to have such an attitude in a film centred on historical atrocities, it is remarkably incurious about the gravity of these events and the suffering they contained. When Lieutenant Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and General Ed Fenech (Mike Myers) show up as two British officers with consciously pompous accents, any sense that this movie will take the Holocaust seriously is thrown out the window, just as it becomes a foregone conclusion that its characters will have any depth.

All of these disparate characters are mildly entertaining, but the overall effect of the film places an unfair burden on its technical brilliance to carry it through to the end. Aside from its excellent opening scene, the other lengthy sequence in this film also does a lot of the heavy lifting here towards Inglourious Basterds’ shades of brilliance. Both fans and detractors of this movie can probably already predict what scene this is, with it occurring in an underground bar that sees the Jewish American heroes, Archie, a German actress-turned-spy and a group of Nazis all converging in this quaint location. What starts as a whimsical interaction between drunken German soldiers gradually leads to a feeling of dread, where, just like this film’s opening, it is obvious that the sequence will end in bloodshed.

The pacing here is phenomenal, with ample room for the actors to make use of this scene’s excellent plot developments and turns of phrase. Tarantino might not utilise his boastfulness wisely throughout most of this experience, but the way he uses a game of ‘Who am I’ to parallel the plot of King Kong (1933) with the transatlantic slave trade is a masterstroke. The character making this connection, Dieter Hellstrom (August Diehl), is a phenomenal creation, using his foreboding presence to cast a dark cloud over this espionage mission. Such moments of screenwriting excellence are unfortunately too few and far between in this overstuffed comedy-drama, which quickly moves on from this scene to regain its underwhelming characterisation.

It’s a clever choice on Tarantino’s part not to make the high-ranking Nazi officers pure brutes. Showing them as being refined and cultured in some respects makes their inhumanity all the more worthy of contempt by turning them into farcical caricatures. The Nazis’ obsession with maintaining their horrific yet genteel social order is exactly what makes these unique situations the sympathetic characters are pitted so dangerous. Whether it’s Archie with Hellstrom, or Shoshanna — and later Aldo— with Landa, the terror in these chance meetings hinges on not taking the risk of blowing one’s cover by being impolite.

Archie tries to maintain a distance between his compatriots and Hellstrom, quickly turning the encounter into an icy one. In the same vein, Shoshanna technically has the freedom to shun Goebbels, just as Aldo can choose not to respond to Landa. Yet in each case, they risk exposing themselves through these indiscretions. These make for incredibly frustrating scenes where our characters are effectively trapped, even if there is no physical threat (beyond an implied one) looming over them. This can be found not just in the film’s opening scene, but even in Fredrick’s obsession with Shoshanna. Just as superior officers expected to be treated with enough respect to ensure they were never dismissed or ignored, Fredrick is so entitled that he thinks he is deserving of Shoshanna’s time whether she wants to pay him any mind or not.

This has the potential to be a brilliant critique of how even a senselessly barbaric regime like Nazi Germany still tries to uphold a pleasant veneer, tying into the ‘banality of evil’ concept that was posited about Nazis who defended themselves by insisting they were merely carrying out orders. Unfortunately, this idea isn’t explored deeply enough to draw out this critique, since it’s lost amidst the general silliness of Inglourious Basterds. Although there are rare moments where it is impossible not to get wrapped up in the fun that can be had with a story that cares so little about its subject matter, the overall experience here is unabsorbing.

It’s no surprise that Tarantino struggled with this movie’s screenplay for many years, creating three finished scripts and even considering devising it as a miniseries before settling on this finished product. This decade-long process culminated in the director’s decision to use World War II, and specifically the backdrop of Jewish suffering, as his playground to create his version of a Spaghetti Western:

“That will really be my spaghetti Western but with World War II iconography. But the thing is, I won’t be period specific about the movie […] It’s about filling in the viscera.”—Quentin Tarantino, writer-director.

Also unsurprising is the pride that Tarantino takes in this film’s opening scene, which in 2015 he said was his favourite scene that he had written. And though the rest of the film fails to live up to that fantastic intro, the filmmaker’s talents are not lost here. Inglourious Basterds looks amazing, with great shot selections, cinematography, and editing choices. And there is certainly potential for a better end product in this film of deranged misadventures.

What’s missing is the appropriate format to imbue these characters with more sincerity and craft a more emotionally resonant story. Tarantino’s self-indulgence and boastfulness are not always unwelcome, but unlike his follow-up film, this movie fails to appropriately indict the ideology and regime it depicts. It smugly insists that its intricate plotting and zany antics do not just excuse lacklustre characterisation, but make Inglourious Basterds a masterpiece. In the end, it’s one of the director’s weaker efforts.

GERMANY • USA | 2009 | 153 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • GERMAN • FRENCH • ITALIAN

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Quentin Tarantino.
starring: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, Mélanie Laurent, August Diehl, Julie Dreyfuss, Sylvester Groth, Jack Ido, Denis Ménochet, Mike Myers, Rod Taylor & Martin Wuttke.