Inglourious Basterds

At the Cannes Film Festival, when Austrian actor Christoph Waltz stepped up to the podium to accept his best-actor prize for playing an SS colonel in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, he cut through the usual bluster of the ceremony with a direct and touching declaration. His voice choked with emotion, as he addressed his director, Quentin Tarantino. “You gave me my vocation back,” he said. From Tarantino’s point of view it was a fair trade. “He gave us our movie back.” Tarantino insisted that he would not have made INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS had he not found the right actor to play the pivotal part of Hans Landa. Tarantino elaborated, “I knew Landa was one of the best characters I’ve ever written and probably one of the best characters I will ever write.” He auditioned numerous actors, but while most of them were perfectly competent, “they didn’t get my poetry,” he said. “I literally had to consider I might have written an unplayable part.”
This may sound like the bravado of a garrulous auteur who’s not known for understatement. But there is a good case to be made for Colonel Landa as the ultimate Tarantino creation. More than a quotable motormouth, this is one surprisingly multifaceted cartoon villain: a genial sadist, an oppressively polite interrogator, a hyper-articulate polyglot whose verbal dexterity is his scariest weapon. Brad Pitt, as the leader of an American Nazi-killing brigade, is the head “basterd” and the marquee name, but it’s Christoph Waltz, as many critics noted, who owns the film. (Dennis Lim)