The most subversive thing about Inglorious Basterds isn't its scenes of Nazis getting scalped or clubbed to death with a baseball bat by Jewish-American vigilantes--or even the fact that Hitler himself gets his in Tarantino's jaw-dropping finale. Instead, it's how flawlessly measured the film's rhythms are and how little of the long-but-doesn't-feel-it runtime is actually occupied by the sort of rah-rah blood-and-guts action that the film's ad campaign aggressively suggests.
The opening scene is an extended conversation between Christoph Waltz's brilliantly played Nazi officer and a dairy farmer hiding Jewish neighbors under his floorboards that switches purposefully, yet effortlessly, between French and English. When this casual, ostensibly polite interrogation yields abruptly to torrential gunfire, it's a precisely inserted punctuation mark, standing in for the brand of dramatic, Oscar-y histrionics that Tarantino has consistently avoided like the plague and that, no doubt, Waltz's Col. Hans Landa would find entirely embarrassing. It's as stunning, in its way, as the more literally explosive climax that Tarantino is methodically working toward from the opening credits on; and, rivaling Uma Thurman and David Carradine's heart-to-heart near the end of the second Kill Bill installment, it's the most effective use to date of Tarantino's famous flair for dialogue.
At the same time, the most surprising thing about Inglorious Basterds as a WWII/Holocaust movie isn't its "irreverent" attitude toward the facts and specificities of history--that was assumed from the project's genesis--but rather Tarantino's active engagement with histories both political and cinematic, personal and global. In fact, the final point may be that, as an American born long after the end of World War II, it's difficult and perhaps fruitless to attempt to neatly extrapolate fact from fiction, celluloid battles from their real-life equivalents. Maybe, Tarantino supposes, there's as much to learn from The Dirty Dozen and The Great Escape as from dutifully faithful historical accounts--and more than from recent reenactment drills like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. No, the power of cinema didn't bring down the Third Reich or end the second World War. But it just might prevent the third one.
