Django Unchained
★★★★
(2012)
The humble Western flick has seen quite a revival in the last few years. Although we always suspected film geek darling and overly chatty controversy magnet Quentin Tarantino would dip his beak into its legend rich waters sooner or later, his self-proclaimed "Southern" takes the genre and mashes into a gloriously bloody supremely entertaining Technicolor pulp. Where Inglorious Basterds felt a little sluggish and stilted in between delivering a knockout intro and a few other boiling hot scenes, Django Unchained's 165 minutes pass by loudly and briskly. A frequently funny and often shocking Western transposed to a tonally uneven comment on the Southern American Slave trade has already offended many who claim that Tarantino's giddy love for cinematic violence and his homage heavy scripting is no base to set a top the depiction of a holocaust.
To a certain extent they are correct of course but perhaps this critical friction only happens in the film world when we naturally attempt to make a distinction between entertainment and art when the content is a serious and horrific truth. Tarantino makes no apologies for wanting to shock and entertain at the same time, after all he's been making successful films for 20 years now which hinge on his frantic insistence that a paint box is still a paint box no matter what the canvas. His decision to set the film in a time and a place which would almost guarantee controversy is brave and interesting more than it is offensive or misjudged but he's not a history teacher is he?
Christoph Waltz is wonderful as Dr. King Schulz, a dentist turned bounty hunter in the years before the American Civil war who frees our titular slave (Jamie Foxx) in order to help him track and kill the notorious Brittle Brothers. The men responsible for the torture of and sale of Django and his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). A startling introduction once again to an old world made new by the now expected Tarantino genre bending. The pair head off together to collect a multitude of bounties, to hone Django's skills as a gun slinger and eventually are led into the path of a despicable racist Southern aristocrat named Calvin Candie (a fantastic performance from Leonardo DiCaprio), Broomhilda's new owner.
The film does sing more frequently than his previous efforts, the dialogue is rich and tense, there are lashings of Peckinpah's balletic slow motion ultra violence and Tarantino sets it behind geysers of over saturated splattering red blood. It's filled with John Fords landscapes and Ennio Morricone's music but the director of course takes mostly from his own beloved films, the ones which will make cinephiles either shrug or wince. Sergio Corbucci's Django and Richard Fleischer's Slave trading boxing film Mandingo are certainly the main story influences here and the director uses them with his brash trade mark bravado.
DiCaprio is great here as is Samuel L Jackson's hunched "Uncle Tom" servant Stephen. The pair's relationship is laced with poison, hatred and an odd respect for each other. Foxx plays it cool, evolving through the film into a formidable quiet hero, with a penchant for flashy blue silk outfits. Waltz again is on top form returning after his oscar winning role in Basterds. Overwhelmingly, there is much to like about Django Unchained and it is seriously entertaining but all of the work is nearly lost when the director inserts a coda before a second ending which features himself as an Australian trader. It's an unnecessary indulgence which halts the natural ending of Django.
Much like Inglorious Bastards it often feels blurred through Tarantino's kaleidoscopic and eclectic view finder brain. The very brain which hindered my enjoyment of the latter at his indulgence but this is a film which is gripping, enthralling, shocking and miraculously funny even in the shadow of its controversial subject matter. There is technically thrilling cinematic violence present here often butted up against shocking realistic violence towards Afro American slaves which is often unwatchable. Should the director have drawn a harder line in the sand?
Django Unchained's uneven but affecting portrayal of history is often muddled and the offense some have taken to it is glaringly unavoidable but offense aside, it does have its pleasures for fans of film. They come in the form of its performances, its kinetic camerawork and its often jarring but beautiful soundtrack. As a piece of work regarding slavery however, perhaps its shot at becoming a catalyst for a more honest and open dialogue of a dark period in history is nothing more than the directors most brash egotistical over reach yet.
