To be honest, I have never really been a fan of WWII action films. For me, the genre seems just a little too played out. Once I’ve seen one brave soldier save a fellow soldier from an enemy camp, running toward a helicopter as explosions go off in the background, I’ve seen them all.
Thankfully, this could not be any less true for the new movie, Inglorious Basterds (2009), written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. The film takes place in Nazi occupied France in 1944 and follows two parallel plotlines, each independently fighting for the same outcome (though completely unbeknownst to each other). The first plotline follows Emmanuelle Mimieux (Mélanie Laurent), who as a teenager (when she went by her real name, Shosanna) narrowly escaped death when the rest of her family was shot by Nazis while in hiding. Three years after the incident, we find Emmanuelle living in Paris as the proprietor of a local cinema. How she got here is never explained, but trust me, when the plot starts, we don’t really care.
One day, as the young woman is outside of her theater, a German war hero (Daniel Brühl), who has recently made a movie about his heroic victory in a battle against the Russians, requests that the premier of his movie be shown at her cinema. Knowing that many important Nazis, including Hitler himself, will be in attendance, the young woman decides she will exact revenge by burning down the cinema, taking the Nazis inside along with it.
At the same time the film follows a group of Jewish-American soldiers led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). The group’s sole business, as Raine puts it, is killing Nazis. And killing Nazis is what they do best. When word reaches the group of Hitler’s appearance at the film premier, they too decide that they will infiltrate and blow up the cinema. What is great about these two plots is how unknowingly-intertwined the two are and how the film plays off of this.
One of the biggest breaths of fresh air this movie offers to an otherwise stale genre is how the conflict presented is not completely one-sided. We of course show very little sympathy for the Nazis, this is a given. Yet, they are still portrayed at times as brave in the face of danger and seem to be fighting for a cause they believe in. (The exception is Hitler (Martin Wuttke), who is entirely too funny to be taken seriously.) The would-be protagonists of the story, the Basterds, are hardly better than the Nazis. They are a brutal bunch who almost never take prisoners and who bludgeon, beat, stab, shoot, and scalp every Nazi they encounter. Tarantino’s direction style (like in many of his movies) ensures that the camera never shies away from the violence onscreen. The effect of the gore, such as the frequent scalping that takes place, is to show the irony that the Basterds, who seek revenge against the Nazis’ heinous violence, are often just as violent. In the shot where Lt. Raine is introduced Tarantino even goes as far to fit the frame around Pitt’s face in such a way that his hat and hair resemble Hitler’s classic comb-over and his mustache appears thin beneath his nose. At the same time, however, we find ourselves rooting for them none the less.
In addition to the interesting take on the protagonists, the film also has a lot of great actors going for it. I was particularly impressed by Mélanie Laurent, whose facial expressions are captured perfectly by Tarantino; and by Christoph Waltz, who plays the movie’s intelligent and ruthless villain all too well. Brad Pitt, B.J. Novak, Eli Roth, and Omar Doom (all Basterds) provide a lot of comical entertainment throughout the film, which truly is hilarious at times.
Tarantino, overall, did a great job with this film. The cinematography was very interesting to watch. His use of rotating camera angles and low lighting at times of stress helps the audience to share the unease that the characters on film feel. He pays a lot of attention to expressions—at times letting characters who are involved in a conversation remain mostly cut out of the shot in order to emphasize the reactions of third party observers. He also does a tremendous job with color motifs throughout the film. The use of red is particularly strong in scene in which Emmanuelle stands in front of a window in her red dress, with matching lips and nails, as the red Nazi flag sways in the background. In the scene, the power that the Nazi flag holds as a symbol is transferred to the Jewish girl who plans to overthrow those who nearly killed her. This may be one of my favorite scenes in the movie, just based on how beautiful it is.
The last thing I want to mention is the score. It sounded like music typical of the 40’s and 50’s, but with a Western twist. These scores, which are reminiscent of scenes from Tarantino’s earlier films Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 (2003, 2004), are successful in transforming what could be a typical war movie into the more devil-may-care, Nazi-killing thriller that is Inglorious Basterds.
The movie, like most, does have some down falls. There are a few scenes that are too long, and although they aid in character development, they ultimately fail to move the plot and keep the audience interested. Tarantino also used a narrative to introduce characters and past events at the start of the movie, which was fun and interesting to watch, but let it die off toward the end. Overall, however, the movie is very well done and excellently entertaining. It is as crazy as its director, to be sure. The ending is sure not to disappoint, and the performances put on in four different languages is sure to impress most audiences. This is a movie definitely worth seeing, if not for the cinematography, acting, and plot, at least for the B.A. action.
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