If the title weren’t already taken, it’d be tempting to think of Quentin Tarantino’s new movie - indeed, his entire career - as “Infinite Jest.’’ Inside the fevered junk-pop particle accelerator that is this director’s brain, moments of power and banality, meaning and absurdity, all collide into each other, creating movie mash-ups as brilliant as they are pointless. You take a Tarantino film seriously at your risk, which is why “Inglourious Basterds’’ is his greatest risk yet: a rollicking action-comedy about - wait for it - the Holocaust.
Inglourious Basterds
Vengeance is theirs: In Tarantino’s outrageous Holocaust history, the ‘Inglourious Basterds’ fight back
This isn’t new ground, really. As with any historical calamity, the urge to view it from all sides - including farce - grows with time, and World War II has been mined for shock-comedy since at least “The Producers’’ in 1968. There’s a tiny germ of an idea in “Basterds’’ and it’s the same one that propelled last year’s “Defiance’’: How about a movie where the Jews fight back?
Where “Defiance’’ was a dramatic slog hamstrung by its faithfulness to history, though, “Inglourious Basterds’’ is just the opposite: a manically playful revenge fantasia made from the spare parts of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns and strapping World War II action flicks like “The Great Escape’’ and Enzo Castellari’s 1978 “The Inglorious Bastards,’’ from which Tarantino has mangled his title and much of his plot.
Does it work? On a scene-by-scene basis, “Inglourious Basterds’’ is prime, if well-worn, Tarantino - the hard-boiled men and women, the tense, smart dialogue scenes that go on forever, the spurts of violence that erupt to wipe the board clean so the cycle can start again. Yet it’s also his weakest film yet, in part because the director’s playing close to the fire this time, and he’s scared of getting burnt.
The nominal star is Brad Pitt as Lieutenant Aldo Raine, leader of the Basterds, a (mostly) American squadron of Jewish GIs in occupied France whose mandate is to kill, scalp, and sow terror into as many Nazis as possible. Pitt’s doing one of his comic character turns here - he plays Raine as a macho hillbilly who wouldn’t be out of place in a Coen brothers movie. It’s fair to say, though, that “Inglourious Basterds’’ is stolen fair and square by the Austrian actor Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa of the SS, the Jews’ worst enemy in France.
Waltz is a slender actor with a long, playful face - he makes Landa a lethal imp whose one flaw is his ego. He gives an almost obscenely delightful performance: The colonel has vowed to capture the Basterds but he keeps getting sidetracked by the immense pleasure of watching himself do so. He’s the star of his own movie.
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