Django Unchained
(USA, 165 min.)
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio,
Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson.
Nothing says “Happy Holidays” quite like a night of blood-splattered
violence. Django Unchained, the new
film by Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction,
Inglorious Basterds), is a fun escape
from all the happy elves and candy canes of the holiday season. Django might be Tarantino’s most
ultra-violent film yet, but it’s his most festive one, too, as it paints the
town red with the blood of racist white folks in a bloody rampage of revenge
and retribution.
Django is freed from the slave
trade thanks to a bizarre deal made by an eccentric German dentist named Dr. Schultz.
Schultz is played by Christoph Waltz, who makes his second collaboration with
Tarantino after winning an Oscar for playing Col. Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa
in Inglorious Basterds. Schultz is
every bit as gleefully deranged a character as Landa was, and Waltz is just as
colourful and larger-than-life here as he was in Basterds.
Schultz, after blowing Django’s
previous owners to smithereens, tells his new employee that he is actually a
bounty hunter and that his next prize is a foe from Django’s past. Django agrees
to help get the man, dead or alive, in return for his freedom. Django likes the
taste of retribution, though, which lingers after he helps Schultz put a bullet
into the man who wronged him. Payback feels good, even empowering, and Django
graduates from accomplice to partner-in-crime as he helps Dr. Schultz move from
town to town and claim bounty upon bounty. As the men traverse the dusty Wild
West, they encounter a string of racist southern white folk who have a keen
disdain for men like Django. The white people aren’t accustomed to seeing a
black man ride a horse, nor are they in the habit of seeing one ride alongside
a white man.
A series of episodes introduce a
roster of Tarantino’s flavourful characters that trade gunfire with Django and
Dr. Schultz. Among the detours of Django
Unchained is a riotous interlude involving a bumbling troupe of Ku Klux
Klansmen (led by Don Johnson), which lets Tarantino undermine the gun-totin’
rednecks that drove America’s long history of racism. The N-word hasn’t been
spouted so frequently since Tarantino’s 1997 crime caper Jackie Brown, but Tarantino’s characters have a knack for
accentuating the belittling offensiveness of the word. These are some repugnant
white folks that Django and Schultz are hunting down.
The slimiest of the slave
drivers, however, is the owner of the ironically named plantation Candyland.
Monsieur Calvin Candie (who is not the least bit French) runs a mean business
of man-to-man wrestling in which his slaves fight to the death in a bare-knuckle
brawl. Candie is played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who gives a cartoonishly
villainous turn and clearly has a lot of fun playing against type as the sleazy
revolting baddie. In addition to the grisly blood sport, which serves as saloon
entertainment, Candie owns a notorious cotton farm that houses Django’s long-lost
wife, Broomhilda (played by Kerry Washington, Jamie Foxx’s onscreen wife in Ray). Django and Schultz converge on
Candyland towards the midpoint of Django
Unchained—the film has a bit too much exposition—and hatch a convoluted
plot to procure Broomhilda from Monsieur Candie.
In spite of the slow start—Django Unchained almost feels like two
different films fused together—the assault on Candyland is a magnificently
tense act. The film explodes in a glorious showdown, which, in true Tarantino
fashion, is a hyperbolic, if not operatic, throwback to the good old shootouts
from the heyday of B-movie westerns. The climax of Django Unchained probably includes the most graphic onscreen
violence that Tarantino has ever showed his audience, save perhaps for the showdown
at the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill:
Vol. 1. Like the blood-spattered Bride’s yakuza dance with the Crazy 88’s,
Django’s standoff with the Candyland crackers is ultraviolent fun.
The film drags on a bit too long
after the Candyland shootout, though, and the film’s running time becomes its
main detractor. Django Unchained
might have been an even greater film if Tarantino simply had Django and
Broomhilda shoot everyone and eat the white cake before he cut to black.
However, the final turn of the film brings some of its most entertaining
moments (at least two shots brought applause from the audience), not to mention
the strongest turn in which Django finally gets to act freely.
Some of the unevenness could be a
by-product of the fact that Django is
Tarantino’s first film
that wasn’t cut by his long-time editor, the late Sally Menke. Fred Raskin puts
the film together quite well, though, so Django
is still a stylish affair even if it lacks the rhythm and pace of Menke’s work.
Other tech credits are good too, especially the costumes by Sharen Davis and
the production design by J. Michael Riva. Django also features the best soundtrack yet for a Tarantino film, which includes some original songs. The star of Tarantino’s film is, as
always, the screenplay, and Django
Unchained is another of Tarantino’s coarse and clever scripts, which is
rife with an encyclopedia of film references and the often-unattainable life
that seeps into a film when it’s penned by someone with such a passion for the
art form.
It is, admittedly, a bit uncomfortable
to watch Django Unchained without
noting that Tarantino is using America’s history of slavery as bloodspot. The
film does have a lot of fun subverting American mythology, though, and it gives
the western genre its strongest African America gunslinger in some time. Likewise,
the film delves into stereotypes with a knowing wink, which is captured best in
Samuel L. Jackson’s scene-stealing turn as Candie’s now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t
manservant Stephen, who is all smiles and “yes’suhs” in public, but then
sipping brandy and calling the shots behind closed doors. (One can only imagine
what greatness might have occurred had Tarantino adapted The Help.) Django feels a
bit different than the Nazi-hunting of Inglorious
Basterds, perhaps since it has a more obvious political element, but it’s
all done with such a flagrant nod to cinephilia that one can’t help but cheer
for the eccentricity of Django’s blood-soaked emancipation.
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Django Unchained opens December 25th
from Alliance Films.
