Inglourious Basterds

Winner of the 2010 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (for Christoph Waltz), nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (for Quentin Tarantino), and Best Original Screenplay.

When I heard that Quentin Tarantino was making a World War Two movie in which Brad Pitt plays a redneck soldier leading an elite team in a guerrilla warfare mission to kill Nazis, I had a certain image in my mind of what that would look like. Tarantino managed to make a completely different movie than I had imagined, but without going against his trademark style. I was expecting a Tarantino-ized version of The Dirty Dozen. Instead, I found an opening scene in which he quite masterfully channeled Sergio Leone - The Good The Bad And The Ugly transported from the Civil War era west to Nazi occupied France. Tarantino has a real eye for genre, and a natural talent for mashing together the best elements of several genres (especially marginalized ones) to create a film that is greater than the sum of its parts.

I can't begin to imagine the challenges that this film, with its constant switching of languages back and forth from English to French, to German, to Italian, must have presented to its director - particularly to a director as dialogue-obsessed as Tarantino is. How difficult it must be for a director to determine the quality of a performance that is being given in a language other than the director's native tongue! I have to believe that Tarantino was helped immeasurably in his task by the brilliant performance given by Christoph Waltz, a relatively unknown Austrian actor who shifts effortlessly between the four languages, delivering his lines in each with entirely natural-sounding accents (as he would have to, given the scenes in which he is required to point out the flawed accents of other characters). But the strength of Waltz's performance does not boil down to a simple fluency in languages and a talent for accents. Waltz inhabits his character, an SS officer nicknamed "The Jew Hunter," with every detail of his performance - every word he says, every facial expression, every laugh, every movement, is delivered in exactly the way in which his character would deliver it. Even when you know that he is about to do something horrible, you can't help being fascinated.