Review: Django Unchained (2012)
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Don Johnson, Leonardo DiCaprio
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Country: USA
Genre: Drama | Western
Official Trailer: Here
No reason to mince words: Django Unchained is a masterpiece of awesomeness, birthed in that wacked-out brain of Quentin Tarantino’s and hurled at the screen with equal parts breathtaking beauty and unflinching severity, at once underscoring its repulsive origins and then its gleeful subversion of them. Let’s face it – no white guy would ever or should ever attempt to mount a slavery revenge fantasy but QT, who has always seemed to both identify and operate on a psychic wavelength with urban cultural norms, and for whom this material comes straight from the gut. This film – set in the Deep South, at the height of the slave trade, in the mode of a classic Spaghetti Western – may, odd as it sounds, be Tarantino’s most personal. Django Unchained represents a blissful fusion of all things Tarantinian, forcefully expressing both his passion for cinema and his identification with the African-American plight, both of which have been woven into his work from the beginning, but never so explicitly gelled until now.
Django Unchained represents a blissful fusion of all things Tarantinian, forcefully expressing both his passion for cinema and his identification with the African-American plight, both of which have been woven into his work from the beginning, but never so explicitly gelled until now.
From the beginning, Tarantino was all about expressing the pulp fun of the cinema experience. In the last decade, however, he has developed into a seasoned purveyor of hyperstylized violent revenge fantasies that fuse genre conventions with the purposeful sleaze of post-modern Grindhouse. The Kill Bill films melded chop-socky with Western accents, Death Proof molded its dominant femme fantasy in the shape of a Grindhouse Western, and Inglourious Basterds gave the WWII era a spaghetti bath. While those films dabbled heavily in genre immersion, in retrospect they function as primers for Django, which goes full-tilt into the Spaghetti Western aesthetic but gives it a blunt-force injection of funk. It’s like Leone on Ecstasy.
I’ve been a QT fan since the beginning, but while I’ve certainly appreciated his splashy dissertations on genre, I can identify with those who find it difficult to engage with them. Fun as they are, most Tarantino films are about nothing but themselves. It’s one reason I’ve always recognized Jackie Brown as the standout of the Quentin oeuvre, because it maintains the groove but explores theme and character with more depth and purpose. Most Tarantino films are surface masterworks, but Jackie Brown is equally masterful after you crack the garish shell. Django Unchained is like Quentin’s grandest synthesis of form and theme, existing purely in an artificial cinematic world but telling a story that resonates beyond the screen, with characters we care about and genre tropes that are driven by legitimate thematic subtext. It may well be the film QT has always been trying to accomplish.
We first meet Django (Jamie Foxx) chained, part of a group of slaves just purchased, walking through an atmospheric forest en route to the next plantation. Out of the shadows and into the moonlight rides Dr. King Schultz, with a loquacious proposition for the dimwitted slave traders. Schultz is played by Christoph Waltz, who, for the second straight QT film, generates one of the most memorable opening sequences in recent memory. After kick-starting Basterds on a note of grand-scale menace (in a scene so good, the rest of the film, quite frankly, couldn’t meet its standard), Waltz this time sets us on a more rollicking path, and the film lives up to the early promise, blazing a trail through the racist South and literally spraying the blood and guts of slavery all over the cotton fields.
Django Unchained is like Quentin’s grandest synthesis of form and theme, existing purely in an artificial cinematic world but telling a story that resonates beyond the screen, with characters we care about and genre tropes that are driven by legitimate thematic subtext.
Schultz frees Django and sics the rest of the chain gang on their captors. He’s a bounty hunter, out to collect a bounty on Django’s former owners, and he wants Django to help him identify them. But that’s merely the beginning; like all Tarantino films, Django Unchained is dense with material and unfurls like an epic novel (Tarantino could honestly publish his screenplays as novels and make a mint). The bounties are only the tip of the iceberg – the real story of the film is Django’s quest to reunite with his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from whom he was separated when he was sold. She, too, has changed hands, now under the ownership of the vicious, evil Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, in an OMG kind of brilliant performance), who has made a name for himself by boasting the best “Mandingo fighters” in the South. Django and Schultz infiltrate “Candie Land” to rescue Broomhilda…it sounds like a cartoon, doesn’t it? It sort of is, in that playful, over-the-top Tarantino way. But there is so much more going on underneath the broad narrative strokes…so much depth, which is a little surprising, given QT’s last decade of output.
Performance, in a Tarantino film, is like a gift of open expression, allowing actors to go gonzo like they always dreamed but were never permitted. Waltz is an absolute treasure that QT unearthed and should never relinquish from his grasp. It’s great to see him play a hero – as rumored, he is essentially a lead, at least for the film’s first two acts – while not losing a beat from the cadence he finds in QT’s legendary dialogue. DiCaprio is on a different plane here, sinking his teeth into a role that is so completely un-DiCaprio and loving every second. Not unlike Waltz in Basterds, DiCaprio uses charm as the misdirection before he lets his vitriol fly, thus making the sense of danger all the more lethal. I’d say he’s a shoo-in for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, except he will have stiff competition from yet another standout, Tarantino favorite Samuel L. Jackson. As Candie’s loyal assistant Stephen, Jackson gives his best performance in years, finding the rhythms of a dyed-in-the-wool Uncle Tom who is every bit as evil as his owner. Foxx plays it straight as a necessity for the story; it’s not until later that he gets to join in on the groove, and it’s fun when he does.
“Groove” is a perfect word to describe Django Unchained, because Tarantino has never been more in sync with his disparate thematic obsessions. The love story between Django and Broomhilda is tender in ways both glimpsed and suggested; QT plays with theme in subtler ways than he ever has before. The father-son relationship between Schultz and Django is moving too; no Tarantino film has ever been as interested in the plight of flesh-and-blood characters. After spending the first phase of his career exploring dialogue and the second phase exploring kitsch genre conventions, Django represents Tarantino’s auteurist evolution, as he fuses the best elements of both earlier phases, using the dialogue as accent and the kitsch as flourish, but allowing his story and characters to drive the narrative. We are witnessing QT’s artistic maturation, and I can’t wait to see what he gives us next.
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