Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino's characters love to talk, and throughout his films, they talk at length about the ethics of tipping, the implied meaning of a foot massage, and the concept around Superman's identity. The dialogue is often profane, often funny, and more often than not, revealing, giving new dimensions to the characters and taking the plots in unexpected directions.

Inglourious Basterds features a lot of talking and enough pop culture references to feel like a Tarantino movie, but there's something else at work. Instead of going just for laughs, the dialogue goes for tension and suspense. Each sentence is another turn of the screw. 

Inglourious Basterds is a funny movie. Like Pulp Fiction, it is a surreal, pop comic world of quirkiness, absurdity, and violence - but it's also incredibly tense and uneasy and not just in the moments of unexpected gore.

Hitchcock postulated the bomb-under-a-table-theory: a bomb that explodes unexpectedly is a surprise, but a bomb, under a table, that the audience is waiting to see go off, is suspense. Tarantino understands this theory, and it's at play throughout Inglourious Basterds. The violence in Pulp Fiction was often a surprise, but here, the drawn-out dialogue keeps us uneasy because we know a bomb, literal or metaphorical, is about to go off; we just don't know when or how.

Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France

Our story begins in Nazi-occupied France as SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) investigates a farmhouse that might be hiding a Jewish family. Landa already knows the family is there, but he takes sadistic delight in a drawn-out interrogation with the farmer hiding them before his men murder the family. There's one survivor, Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), who escapes. 

Years later, she lives in Paris under an assumed identity and runs a movie theater. She unintentionally draws the romantic interest of Private Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), a German war hero who thinks it'll impress Shoshanna if the premiere of the propaganda film he's starring in is held at her theater. 

Meanwhile, Jewish American commandos known as "The Bastards," under the command of Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), have their own mission. They've been operating behind enemy lines for some time, slaughtering nearly every German soldier in their path, and when they find out several high-ranking Nazi officials will attend the premiere of the new movie in Paris, they see an opportunity.

I can't define it, but I know it when I see it

Inglorious Basterds, like Pulp Fiction, is harder than expected to categorize. Yes, it's technically a war movie, but there are no great battles featuring clashing armies and unambiguous heroics. Nor does it feel like a men-on-a-mission behind-enemy-lines story in the mold of The Dirty Dozen or The Guns of Navarone; despite what the pre-release marketing reflected, Raine and the Bastards are a rather small part of the overall plot, a mere piece in the larger story that focuses more on Shoshanna and her revenge as well as Landa and his machinations.

Consider the scene where Zoller brings Shoshanna to a luncheon with Goebbels. When Landa joins in, we wonder: does he recognize Shoshanna? The way he talks to her, the words he chooses, how he commands her to try the strudel and wait for the cream, that can all be read either way. Maybe he does know it's her, and he's toying with her, or maybe he's just naturally sadistic and enjoys talking at length and commanding other people. His good-natured, smiling persona masks a ruthless, self-serving monster, and the dichotomy is unsettling.

"I did have something else I wanted to ask you, but right now, for the life of me, I can't remember what it is," Landa tells Shoshanna at the end of their meeting. "Oh, well, must not have been important." In any other context, that line is innocuous, but Waltz has it drip with slimy, smarmy, genuine menace. Shoshanna is understandably shaken by the encounter.

With all the disguises, spy work, and subterfuge, one could call it an espionage or even a caper thriller about getting all the appropriate pieces in the correct place to pull off a big job. Shoshana uses Zoller's efforts to woo her to her advantage while Landa comes perilously close to revealing whether he knows who she really is. At the same time, the Bastards work with a double agent actress (Diane Kruger) and a British officer (Michael Fassbender) to infiltrate the theater.

But there are also elements of Westerns, particularly when it uses the music of Ennio Morricone and depicts Mexican standoffs, and there are traces of film noir, mainly with Shoshana who schemes, manipulates, and plots just as well as any of the genre's classic femme fatales (and she knows how far the right dress and shade of lipstick will get her).

"Each and every man under my command owes me one hundred Nazi scalps."

I've already talked about Landa, this bizarre conceptual choice of a villain who somehow works, and Shoshanna, who with her hardboiled nature and goal of revenge feels like the most grounded figure in the story, but the other prominent characters are just as memorable. They're an eclectic mix of plausible, weird, and unlikely.

Raine, with his strong southern accent and joy in massacring Nazis, is practically a live-action cartoon, demanding his men bring him Nazi scalps. When he recruits a German prisoner, imprisoned for killing officers, Raine explains, "When it comes to killing Nazis...I think you show great talent. And I pride myself on having an eye for that kind of talent. But your status as a Nazi killer is still amateur. We all come here to see if you wanna go pro."

There's also Hickox, the British film critic turned army officer whose knowledge of Germany through its cinematic output impresses Churchill but ultimately proves lacking in the field, and there's Bridget, the German actress assisting the Basterds who needs to put on the performance of her life when she is questioned by Landa.

"I think this just might be my masterpiece!"

With all the pop culture references, flights of fancy, dark humor, verbose dialogue, and near cartoon levels of splattery, blood-soaked violence, this is the work of the same man who brought up Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. 

In other words, Inglorious Basterds feels exactly the kind of war movie we'd expect from Tarantino: brash, audacious, irreverent, witty, surreal, and shocking. It will make you laugh, gasp, wince, and hold your breath.