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Quentin Tarantino continues his quest to fight history's great oppressors by way
of the movies in Django Unchained.
Inglourious Basterds conjured up a squadron of tough Jewish-American
soldiers who took Nazi scalps and chased down Hitler with the help of a French
Jewish theater owner, a British film critic turned lieutenant and a
Allies-affiliated German movie star. Django Unchained doesn't literally bring
the forces of cinema to bear against slavery in the same fashion, but it does
use tropes of Spaghetti Westerns and exploitation films to build the character
of a former slave who learns to shoot and eventually faces down the residents of
a plantation in order to retrieve his wife. There's something inarguably rousing
about Tarantino's exuberant revisionist history, about the way he rewrites
wretched eras in the past so that those who suffered are able to have their
bloody revenge.
And yet, Django Unchained and
Inglourious Basterds are my two least favorite works in Tarantino's oeuvre,
not because of their concepts but because of their expansive, unhurriedly
indulgent qualities. Don't get me wrong — he's still able to offer up scenes set
to music that are the cinematic equivalent of a velvety slice of rich
cheesecake, he has a facility with and takes an unbridled glee in dialogue in a
way that's unequalled among filmmakers working today, and he comes up with
unforgettable characters that feel intensely modern but also like they've walked
out of some long forgotten but incredible film. It's possible that no one does
momentary pleasures like Tarantino, and Django Unchained has no insignificant
amount of instances of sheer enjoyment, from an introductory sequence in which a
scene-stealing Christoph Waltz as Dr. King Schultz liberates the titular slave
(Jamie Foxx) from traders to one in which Django rides onto an estate to some
anachronistic hip-hop.
But the film also comes across like a rough cut that was never looked at as a
coherent whole, and some segments that start off as promising become
interminable while others feel entirely unnecessary. There's no pressure on or
expectation for Tarantino to please anyone other than himself, and the film
feels overstuffed with ideas that should have been pruned. That sense of fun
needed to power something this outsized wanes before the film reaches its
ending, two hours and 45 minutes later — it's not a feature that you want to
last forever, but one that seems to take it for granted that you feel that way.
There's a good movie inside Django Unchained, maybe even a great one, but it
hasn't been carved out of the lopsided excess.
Django Unchained begins two years before the Civil War in the wilds of Texas,
where German dentist-turned bounty hunter Schultz pulls up alongside a line of
slaves being transported across the state. He hates slavery, but needs the help
of Django in order to identify a trio of murderous brothers who once worked on
the plantation from which he came, and so he buys the man with a promise to free
him and give him a share in the reward once the deed is done. Cheerful, eloquent
and dryly funny — "If there are any astronomy aficionados among you," he tells a
group of slaves suddenly facing the possibility of freedom, "the North Star is
that one" — Schultz gets many of the best lines, and the segment in which he
takes Django under his wing and shows him the ropes of being a bounty hunter are
outrageously enjoyable, as they enact a Southern Western, face down an angry
town from the confines of a bar, venture onto a plantation owned by Big Daddy
(Don Johnson) to find their targets in a confrontation that splatters blood
across the cotton growing in the fields, and face down the Klan in a scene
that's pure Mel Brooks.
Waltz and Foxx are terrific together, the verbose, flowery Schultz balancing out
the taciturn Django as he shakes off his former identity as a slave (just as he
casts off his blanket in extravagant slow motion, bearing a scarred back) and
becomes a confident force to be reckoned with. But the film slows its pace to a
crawl as the pair travel to a giant Mississippi estate owned by Calvin Candie
(Leonardo DiCaprio) called, naturally, Candyland, where they come up with a plan
to buy back Django's wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). Samuel L. Jackson is
there too, playing a canny house slave named Stephen even more concerned with
enforcing the power structure than his owner seems to be.
If the first part of the film is Schultz's, the second is Django's, but he's
competing with big, talky performances from DiCaprio and Jackson that diminish
his presence in comparison, as Tarantino lets a pair of scenes at a club and
later at a dinner spin out endlessly like a virtuoso playing his instrument past
his audience's threshold of enjoyment and, eventually tolerance. The film is so
in love with certain elements, like DiCaprio's monstrous preening, his sister's
(Laura Cayouette) exaggerated Southern belle simpering and Jackson's toadying,
that the suspense of the ruse that's being played gets lost in the clutter. By
the time the film ends, and then ends a second time, it feels exhausted, not
electric.
Django Unchained is filled with film geek touches, including a cameo from Franco
Nero, who played the title character in the 1966 Spaghetti Western Django, music
from Ennio Morricone, the presence of both Russ and Amber Tamblyn in a town
scene, and Zoe Bell and Tom Savini playing two of a group of trackers. They're
classic Tarantino — but the film's not short on auteurist touches. It's an
unfortunate example of a director disappearing so far into his own vision that
he's lost interest in taking a step back and looking at it in its entirety.
For viewers who already share Tarantino’s love of genre, “Django Unchained” is
-- at least for its first two hours -- enormously satisfying. Waltz, who won an
Oscar for his depiction of a depraved Nazi in “Inglourious
Basterds,” plays the good guy here to similarly potent effect, and DiCaprio
tucks into his character’s effete venality with scenery-chewing relish. But
colorful characters and performances can only mask thinly schematic
underpinnings for so long. Eventually Tarantino resorts to his usual fall-back
position, which is to bathe everything and everyone in sight in gunfire, gore
and geysers of blood. “Django Unchained” goes out on a furious tide of
retributive carnage, with its rapacious fops and spitting, slack-jawed yokels
learning -- seemingly for a good 30 minutes -- that payback’s a stone bummer.
Catharsis is all but impossible in the face of Tarantino’s own notorious
self-indulgence: His love of a good bloodbath finally negates the admittedly
exaggerated but brutally vivid truths he’s evoked. There’s an infectious,
unfettered fearlessness to “Django Unchained” that makes it enormous fun to
watch, but even the most soaring ode to liberation can benefit from some
restraint.
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