Inglourious Basterds review

Prompted by "Fury", the new and apparently very violent WWII film starring Brad Pitt, I'm posting this old review of what now looks like a movie from a gentler era.

Inglourious Basterds 

Quentin Tarantino is a man in love: with words, with writing, with films, with gleeful depictions of violence. Restrained and measured he is not. Just as Brad Pitt, his star in “Inglourious Basterds” (18), has the looks but not the temperament of a leading man and therefore prefers to ham it up as a character actor, so Tarantino has the talent of a top-class writer and director but prefers to ‘pulp fiction’ his work and throw it down-market with wanton extravagance. At worst, the work is crass; at best, it’s exhilarating. “Inglourious” is probably his best yet. I say this freely admitting that I’d expected to dislike the film on principle, the principle being: how can someone with no grounding in the realities of war – no grounding in any reality perhaps, other than film-making - have the cheek to pitch his geek tent in the middle of Jewish suffering and World War II? What business does he have there? His business, as always, is to have fun with the motive of revenge. One of the ‘chapters’ of the movie is called “Revenge of the Giant Face” and features the line: “this is the face of Jewish vengeance!” The unifying story strand, moreover, concerns a band of predominantly Jewish American soldiers (the ‘Basterds’, led by Pitt’s character) whose purpose is to avenge European Jews by brutally and joyfully killing as many Nazis as possible in occupied France. These two storylines, and a third representing British involvement, are capped by a re-writing of history so flagrant that the whole movie becomes almost a comedy of revenge. Revenge, of course, is not really an option for us ordinary mortals, least of all for those of us seeking to live by Biblical standards of behaviour. If there’s any revenge to be dealt out, a higher power is required: “‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’, says the Lord” (Romans 12:19). Though “Inglourious” is of course a secular film, it aligns itself rather surprisingly with this hierarchy. Mere revenge ends badly, grimly tripped up by trivial circumstance. Only actions that seek, however dimly, to align themselves with divine justice are allowed to result in some form of poetic justice. Another surprise in this film is that the violence is subordinate to the words. And the words are superb. The dialogue set-pieces alone are worth the price of admission, as is the award-winning performance of Christoph Waltz playing a ‘Jew-hunter’, the silkiest speaker of them all. What violence the film does show is (for the most part) quick and to the point and, while graphic, also obviously fake. If Tarantino is going to set the world to rights with the kind of verve he shows here, and if his most indulgent point of artistic preciousness is his refusal to explain the eccentric spelling of the title, then he can have his private joke and good luck to him. As he writes in “Inglourious”: “I think this just might be my masterpiece.”