To the comprehensive list of Holocaust films, you can add something decidedly different. (video)
Brad Pitt leads the band of Jewish soldiers in Inglorious Basterds.
To the comprehensive list of Holocaust films, you can add something decidedly different.
Brad Pitt leads the band of Jewish soldiers in Inglorious Basterds.
The latest – and best – movie from Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill) picks up where Michael Chabon’s fantastical novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union left off, but instead of postulating a Jewish state in Alaska, Inglourious Basterds posits a World War II in which Jewish guerillas and civilians are the guiding forces behind history.
The film’s title refers to an outfit set up by the U.S. government and led by the non–Jewish Southern Lieut. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). The unit consists of the toughest Jewish soldiers available who are sent into German-occupied France with one goal: to sow terror by killing and scalping as many Nazis as they can.
They soon succeed beyond their wildest dreams, not incidentally driving Adolf Hitler (Martin Wuttke) to paroxysms of anger and despair. Meanwhile, Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a young French Jewish refugee from the countryside who’s living under an assumed name in occupied Paris, has a plan of her own to seek vengeance on the Nazis.
That only scratches the surface of an audacious, darkly funny and suspenseful film, one which brings in a whole passel of provocative characters, both real and imagined, most notably Nazi Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels (Sylvester Groth); Bridget von Hammersmark, (Diane Kruger) a German actress, à la Marlene Deitrich, who’s working with the Allies; Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), the basterd nicknamed “The Bear Jew,” and Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), also known as “The Jew Hunter,” the SD officer assigned the task of tracking down and stopping the basterds.
Waltz, a little-known theatre and film actor, deservedly won the best actor award at the Cannes film festival for his expert portrayal of Landa, a “cultured” linguist who suggests television’s Lt. Columbo, if that detective was an evil man who used his charm to subtly trip up and expose his enemies.
On every level, from the acting to the cinematography to the intricate screenplay, Inglourious Basterds shines as an example of first-rate filmmaking. (The film’s title is a deliberately misspelled translation from the German, a symbolic calling card left by the “basterds” to confuse their enemies.)
Tarantino still proffers his trademark movie references – to German, French and American films – but for once they’re perfectly integrated parts of a whole, not standalone distractions. Nor does he pander to the audience, as he has in the past.
Inglourious Basterds is a scrupulously sober, rueful examination of the necessity for extracting retribution, but one that never glorifies the violence committed in the process. That’s a remarkable balancing act, since even Edward Zwick, in Defiance, his fact-based story of the Jewish partisan Bielski brothers, felt the need to resort to a rabble-rousing Rambo-like climax.
There is one atypically gleeful – and amazing – scene in the movie, the ultimate “what if” scenario revolving around Jewish vengeance (to say more would spoil the surprise), but even that is carried off with responsible, witty aplomb.
Perhaps it takes a non–Jewish filmmaker such as Tarantino to completely avoid Jewish stereotypes – that bold, powerful Jews exist in the film’s created world is a given – but Inglourious Basterds subverts the obvious expectations and portraits inherent in most bad – and good – Holocaust movies.
Raine’s men, for example, are treated as equals and not as support to his considerable exploits – they’re avenging the murder of their people, after all. But more significantly, Inglourious Basterds evokes a “reality” that so many Jews, understandably, wish had existed during World War II, a world in which Jews, as in the State of Israel, could have taken charge of their own destiny without being beholden to non–Jews who, mostly, were indifferent to their fate.
Remarkably, and utilizing all the cinematic skills at his command, Tarantino has given us a taste of what such a world would have been like.