Spoilers. If you haven’t seen the film yet, go find a way to do it.
Christoph Waltz steals the show and gets all the accolades for his performance as SS Colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds and deservedly so.
But when I rewatched the movie, Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine, direct descendant of the Mountain Man Jim Bridger, part Apache, and scalper of Nazis, utterly entranced me. Intoxication probably played a role in being so transfixed. If you try to figure out his performance I recommend it.
I’m convinced that Brad Pitt set out to do some kind of bizarre avante garde performance, and creates one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever seen.
Throughout the film, he is somehow both completely sincere and and seemingly on the verge of cracking up at any moment. I sincerely can’t tell if he’s deliberately being goofy and making a caricature or giving a completely genuine effort to embody an odd character. He’s a simple man, and yet very smart, but unlike Landa, feels no need to convince everyone how smart he is.
He’s doing everything at once somehow. Full of opposite traits and yet somehow embodying both at the same time. He’s chewing the scenery and yet absorbing and charming and enigmatic. He looks like he’s on the verge of breaking character at any second and somehow projects unwavering sincerity.
The character himself is something of an enigma. Mission focused and good at his job, constantly at risk of death, and yet still not taking life seriously and not giving a fuck. Having fun with it. Creating a collection of nazi scalps.
The scene that most exemplifies this is when the Basterds are impersonating an Italian film crew when trying to get past the security at the theater and encounter Hans Landa. Landa knows something is up and he’s toying with them, and Raine knows this and knows they’re caught and likely dead soon. The only possible way he might get out of this situation is to convincingly play his role and hope.
But he doesn’t. He doesn’t even try to give a shit. He knows there’s no way his horribly accented Italian can possibly pass. “Bawnjerno!” He knows he’s blowing it and he’s completely screwed and likely dead. But he can’t even conjure up one fuck to give. He looks around like he’s bored, like he’s just waiting to see what happens next.
Later, when he’s negotiating with Landa, Landa is trying to emphasize respect between long running mutual adversaries. Landa is clearly used to being the smartest person in the room, and he respects Raine as an opponent and an equal and really wants acknowledgment of that mutual respect. Raine blows this off and Landa is wounded.
I can’t tell if Raine is fully aware of what’s going on and what Landa wants and plays dumb…or more accurately disintersted in playing Landa’s game. Or he’s just genuinely interested in moving past Landa’s social gestures to get to the point. Both are entirely plausible. And if it’s the former, is it just a way of outsmarting Landa and throwing him off his game or he just genuinely has no respect for any nazis no matter what or both?
Both the character of Aldo Raine and Brad Pitt’s acting are both separately ambiguous here. The character’s motivation itself is ambiguous, and Pitt’s portrayal of Raine’s mindset are ambiguous. I know that kind of sounds like nonsense, but watch the performance closely and tell me you don’t see what I mean.
There are moments when I think Pitt is pulling some sort of practical joke on the audience the whole time and laughing at us in his head and almost winking to us, and yet I also feel like he’s a fully realized character that Pitt thought a lot about when creating and is putting sincerity and sophistication into an odd character.
I’m not generally a big Tarantino fan, but this is his masterpiece. He pulls an incredible performance out of everyone. There isn’t a moment of screen time that isn’t captivating.
The interplay between Landa and Raine is interesting throughout. In the final scene, when Raine murders Landa’s accomplice, Landa is genuinely shocked. They had a deal. Landa is a man of honor - he keeps his word. He the respect he have to Raine as his equal/opponent made him assume that Raine would also keep his word. But Raine was flexible and does whatever he wants at the moment.
But he doesn’t kill Landa too, even though he could’ve probably without too much consequence. After all, while Landa brought an end to the war and spared the Basterds, only a few people knew that. Landa, the Basterds, and some OSS general on the other end of the radio.
But Raine acknowledges what Landa did to end the war and has enough - respect? decency? - not to kill him.
Or maybe he just wants to ruin this happily ever after scenario that Landa has set up for himself, allowing him to live, but always marked and shamed for the rest of his life, instead of the pretend double agent hero status that Landa had created.
The film itself deliberately makes metacommentary about the feeling an audience receives in triumphant violence. We’re supposed to be disgusted as Hitler and Goebbels laugh at the violence on screen at the theater and yet moments later we ourselves react in a similar way upon watching the Nazis get gunned down and burned alive in front of us.
And so I don’t think the final scene, when Raine creates his masterpiece, is meant to be triumphant justice. Raine hated Nazis so deeply that he didn’t feel them worthy of being treated with honor. So we have an honorable nazi betrayed and multilated by a dishonorable good guy. And yet, ultimately, Landa got off easy, just not as easily as he “earned” through his clever plan.
The mutilation isn’t meant to be a happy ending. The film sort of thematically forces you to feel dirty for seeing it that way and cheering it on. It’s an amazing ending that leaves a sophisticated audience uncomfortable and not quite sure how to feel.
If you have the movie available ( unfortunately the only streaming option I can see is Showtime, but there’s on demand and rentals and other ways), watch Pitt’s performance closely and tell me what you think.