Inglourious Basterds: Brilliant, Brutal Revisionism

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a movie made for two very particular crowds. The first crowd consists of cinephiles, and the second is the type to sit in front of a computer screen all day, their finger on the post button and their goal to be politically incorrect for the sake of it. Typically, such a film would be either hopelessly conceited or vapidly inflammatory - and sometimes it is those things - but it deserves to be anything it wants to be, because in the hands of a director like Tarantino, the skill that Basterds demonstrates is utterly undeniable. Set during World War II, this movie is a simple one, a rowdy shoot-em-up about a group of Jewish-American soldiers plotting vengeance against Nazi Germany in the form of an attack on a high-profile screening of the Krauts' latest propaganda film. It plays fast and loose with historical fact in occasionally shocking ways. It shamelessly flaunts its homages to cinema like obtrusive household decorations. Some of its violence is wince-worthy and graphic in worryingly self-aware ways. Many of the jokes and visual gags in this movie will be very off-putting to some, and it wears the Inglourious moniker like a badge of honor. Still, in spite of all this, Inglourious Basterds remains an absurdly intelligent and fluidly flowing story, a smooth ride through some rough subject matter that makes for one of the smarter movies I've seen in recent memory.

For as famous (or infamous) as Tarantino's excesses can be, when Inglourious Basterds isn't making a scene, it's actually a remarkably restrained and tense movie. A silence you could cut with a knife, a terse and secretive glance from one character to another, and this movie does the one thing its bombastic action sequences can't - perfectly set the table for such perversely violent delights as bloody swastikas carved in the foreheads of captured Nazis or blowing Hitler's finest to kingdom come with sticks of dynamite discreetly concealed under the pant legs of Allied operators. And for as much as Inglourious Basterds is about history, it's just as much a movie about the history of cinema itself, and a self-aware one at that. This movie celebrates both its setting and its medium, wildly successfully on both fronts because of its eccentricity and willingness to let these aspects be just that, and nothing more - aspects in service to a bigger story. Its simplicity is just another one of its many charming elements. The groundwork of Inglourious Basterds is built entirely on a handful of attractively satirical characters and their benevolent terrorist plot, and the funny thing is that it works largely because of this simplicity.

As far as prologues go, Inglourious Basterds contains perhaps the greatest and most well-directed of them I've ever seen in a movie, a perfect introduction to Christoph Waltz's superb performance as the villainous Nazi officer Hans Landa. Known as The Jew Hunter, Landa is charismatically terrifying, and between his surprising intellect, mild manner, startling eccentricity, and provocative charm, Landa has become a rightfully lauded villain in both cinephile and moviegoer circles, surely one of the most engaging villains I've encountered to the extent of my memory. He's intelligent, delightful, and menacing, oftentimes in the same breath. The Basterds themselves are fun enough, indifferently brutal American soldiers who do one thing and one thing only - kill Nazis. Well, three things. Kill Nazis, steal the title of a 1978 film of the same name, and have a laugh about it later. The crazy thing is that between a layered villain and a group of hilariously stereotypical soldiers, they do it remarkably well.

The direction of this movie is terrific in every aspect, both big and small. Even the tiniest details of this movie can suddenly become impossible to ignore, and Inglourious Basterds flows smoothly like a sweet, unusually shaped river. I love how subtly funny it can be. Sometimes, it's completely unhinged; otherwise, it's weirdly and even attractively restrained. The whiplash is gorgeous and cheeky, intentional and ironic. This movie is restrained enough to seem disorganized initially, only to fall in place later in some truly methodical ways that aren't too unlike putting a puzzle together. This is a film that gets better with each consecutive viewing. Inglorious Basterds is extremely patient in every way, and one may wonder what happened to all the pieces and elements it tosses up in the air - until they all start to fall in place. This movie is more of a drama than an action movie, and it's a long-sufferingly patient drama, at that, like only the best conspirator can be.

On the one hand, I can understand that many would be caught off-guard, annoyed, or even outright offended by this movie. On the other, Inglourious Basterds remains an ingloriously funny, deftly-plotted, perfectly paced, and brutally indifferent history book burning that is among Tarantino's finest films. Even if it does take many, and I mean many creative liberties with historical fact, its love for both history as well as cinema is undeniable, and the thinly-veiled homages to both virtually unceasing. For all of its excesses, the one area where it exercises restraint is precisely the one where it needs to. Inglourious Basterds is a lot of things, but its greatest virtue is its surprising and long-suffering patience. Rewatching it for the fifth time or so, I was still surprised at how methodical it was. Of course, it's ultimately a movie about committing little more than a terrorist attack against Nazi Germany, and yet it has the self-restraint of only the most experienced militants. As it turns out, good things come to those who wait-unless you're a German soldier, in this case.

Inglorious Basterds - 10/10

Proverbs 25:21-22