Inglourious Basterds (2009) Review
9/10
An SS officer visits a dairy farmer in occupied France in 1941 and wants a glass of milk, then a conversation, then the family hidden under the floorboards. The 9 is for a film built almost entirely out of talking, in four languages, in which the violence is brief and the dread is continuous. Five long chapters, each structured as a scene in which somebody is trying to find out something and somebody else is trying to survive being asked.
The point I withhold is for the Basterds themselves. The title characters are the thinnest thing in the picture, a squad with no interior life and about two distinguishing traits between them, and the film keeps having to leave them to find its actual story.
Tarantino has always loved to talk, and here the talk is a loaded gun on the table. I spend most of the film with my shoulders up around my ears, waiting to see who reaches for it. This is the most disciplined he’s ever been, and I find that discipline thrilling.
The Farmhouse Is a Lesson
Landa arrives, sits, asks for milk, discusses the farmer’s daughters, switches to English on a pretext, explains his own methods in a metaphor about rats, and orders his men to shoot through the floor. Twenty-five minutes, one table, almost no camera movement.
Everything in it is doing double work. The switch to English is a courtesy and also the move that lets Landa speak in front of the hidden family without their understanding, which the audience realizes several beats before the farmer does.
The tension comes from the audience knowing more than one character and less than the other. We know the Dreyfuses are down there. We don’t know whether Landa knows, and the scene is constructed so that every polite question could be either innocent or a demonstration.
Robert Richardson shot the sequence across a real farmhouse in northern Germany and a soundstage at Babelsberg, duplicating the location lighting on the stage so the two would cut together invisibly across the whole scene. It’s the least showy technical achievement in the film and the most demanding.
Sally Menke cut it, and her contribution to Tarantino is easy to underrate because it’s invisible by design. A twenty-five minute scene at one table has to breathe, hold, and turn at exactly the right moments, and the pauses in this sequence are as carefully placed as the dialogue.
A long dialogue scene needs an information gradient. Somebody has to want to know something, somebody has to be concealing it, and the reader has to sit at a different level of knowledge than at least one of them.
Then let the surface stay polite. Landa never threatens anybody in this scene. He compliments, he sympathizes, he apologizes for his French. Every courtesy tightens the screw, because the audience can see the purpose it serves.
The device to steal is the language switch. Find a legitimate reason for your characters to change tone mid-scene, so that the change is both plausible and tactical. It gives you two audiences inside one conversation.
Christoph Waltz Was Unknown
Tarantino had reportedly considered abandoning the film because he couldn’t find an actor who could play Landa. The part requires fluent German, French, English and Italian and a quality of amused menace.
Waltz was fifty-two and working mostly in German television. He won Best Actor at Cannes, then the Golden Globe, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and became internationally famous at an age when that generally stops happening.
What he does is play a man who enjoys his work as a technical problem. Landa isn’t a fanatic and the film is clear about it. He tells us he’s called the Jew Hunter and that he doesn’t care for the title, and he catches people because he’s good at it and being good at things is pleasant.
That reading is more frightening than fanaticism. A believer can be argued with. A talented professional who’s indifferent to the content of his talent is available for anything. That’s why his final scene, negotiating his own future with the Americans, is completely consistent.
The performance is also very funny, and the comedy is what makes it work. Landa is delighted by his own cleverness, produces an enormous comedy pipe, exclaims at a strudel. Every one of those moments is charming, and the charm is the instrument, because a man who can charm a room can also empty it. Waltz is the reason this film sits at a 9 for me. No villain I can think of enjoys himself this much without tipping into camp, and the strudel moment makes my skin crawl while I’m grinning at it.
Two Films Running in Parallel
There’s a Shosanna film and a Basterds film, and they’re of unequal quality. Melanie Laurent’s Shosanna escapes the farmhouse, runs a cinema in Paris under a false name, and is maneuvered into hosting a premiere for the German high command.
Her material is the spine. It’s cause and effect, a clear objective, a real moral weight, and a plan built from what she owns. That’s a building full of nitrate film. Her plot and Landa’s plot are the same plot approaching from two directions.
The Basterds are a different tone entirely. Brad Pitt is doing a broad comic accent, Eli Roth is swinging a bat, and the squad works as a rumor spread among German soldiers more than as characters. That’s defensible as a design and it leaves the title characters as the least interesting people on screen. The film knows it. The best Basterds material is the basement tavern chapter, which works because it’s structured like the farmhouse: a conversation, an information gradient, and a British officer who orders three drinks with the wrong finger.
Parallel plots need to be about the same thing, not merely to converge in the same location. Shosanna and Landa are both operating on the premise that identity can be concealed and detected, so their strands argue with each other from the first scene.
Where a strand is weaker, use it for a different purpose. The Basterds supply the film’s comedy and its brutality, which insulates the Shosanna material from having to carry either, and that division of labor is deliberate. The mistake to avoid is giving equal weight to unequal threads. This film runs the weaker one shorter and louder. That’s the right call, and it’s still the thing you notice.
Burning the History Down
Hitler dies in a cinema in Paris in 1944, machine-gunned in a balcony while a nitrate fire consumes the audience and Shosanna’s face is projected onto the smoke. That’s a considerable thing to do and the film has been criticized for it. The charge is that rewriting the Holocaust into a revenge fantasy is a frivolous use of the worst thing that ever happened. I think the film has an answer and that the answer is the point of setting the climax in a cinema. The instrument of destruction is film itself, the nitrate stock in Shosanna’s projection booth, and the audience being killed is an audience watching a propaganda picture. Cinema is both the weapon and the target.
So the film is arguing about what movies do. It’s a film about people who watch films, made by a director whose entire sensibility comes from watching films, and it ends by asserting that the medium can be used to kill the thing that used it. Whether that’s a serious idea or an adolescent one is a fair argument, and it’s not frivolous.
I’ll take the fire over a history lesson. Seeing Shosanna’s face projected onto the smoke while the room burns is the most satisfying piece of movie revenge I know, and I don’t think it cheapens anything. It’s a movie lover’s fantasy about movies, it’s shameless about it, and I’m with it all the way.
What It Cost and What It Proved
Seventy million dollars, three hundred and twenty-one million back, Tarantino’s highest grossing film until Django Unchained. It premiered at Cannes in May 2009 and opened in August, taking thirty-eight million in its first weekend.
The commercial significance is larger than the numbers. This is a subtitled film. Real portions are in German and French, the dialogue scenes run to twenty minutes, and the structure is five discrete chapters. It took three hundred million dollars anyway. Tarantino’s stated position at Cannes was that he doesn’t consider himself an American filmmaker. The multilingual casting follows from that, and it’s the single decision that makes the film work, because the plot depends entirely on who can understand whom.
It received forty-nine awards from a hundred and two nominations. Waltz took nearly every acting prize available that year, and the film lost Best Picture to The Hurt Locker. The title comes from a 1978 Italian war picture by Enzo Castellari, misspelled on purpose and attached to a film that’s not a remake of it. That’s the whole Tarantino method in one gesture: take the packaging of disposable genre work and put something entirely different inside it.
Language is a plot mechanism. Once characters can’t understand each other, every scene acquires a second layer for free, and no amount of dialogue polish substitutes for it.
The commercial lesson is worth holding onto. A film with subtitles, twenty-minute conversations and a chapter structure took three hundred million dollars. That means the received wisdom about what audiences will tolerate is usually wrong about the ceiling.
What it’s right about is competence. Audiences will follow difficult structure when every scene is individually gripping. They won’t follow it as a favor.
Should you watch Inglourious Basterds?
Yes, and watch the farmhouse scene twice. Once for the dread and once for the mechanics, because it’s a self-contained lesson in how to run a conversation where one person is hunting and everybody at the table is being polite about it.
It’s a 9 because nearly every long conversation in it is as tense as a shootout, and because Waltz gives a performance I’d rank above anything else in a Tarantino film. It isn’t a 10 because the title squad is a cartoon parked inside a much better movie, and I feel the gear change every time Pitt opens his mouth.
