Django Unchained is Tarantino Unrestrained, a film that simultaneously
displays the very best and worst of this filmmaker. After rewriting the history
books with the audacious climax of Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has now
turned his attention to slavery, using American cinema's most iconic and durable
genre to explore the most shameful period in the country's history. Having
allowed the Jews to turn the tables on Hitler, this second historical fantasia
follows a freed slave who turns bounty hunter and wreaks bloody vengeance
against plantation owners in the Antebellum South. It's a volatile premise, and
there's certainly something bracing in the idea of one of the most singular
auteurs in American film engaging with the subject of slavery in his typically
forthright manner.
The problem is that Tarantino isn't really engaging with
America's slavery past because Django Unchained doesn't really take place in
America. Every film Quentin Tarantino has made from Kill Bill onwards has
existed in Tarantinoland; a place slightly removed from the real world and governed
by the rules of film genre. Django Unchained follows the pattern of the films
that have preceded it by acting as a showcase for Tarantino's stylistic verve
and indulgent monologues before climaxing in carnage, but rarely digging
beneath the surface to find some human emotion. It's no coincidence that
Tarantino's last recognisable 'real world' film (Jackie Brown, the only film
he has adapted from someone else's material) is still, I think, his best work.
Django Unchained is far from Tarantino's best, but in its
opening hour it looks like it might get there. In its favour, the first half of
the movie gives the spotlight to Dr King Schultz (Christopher Waltz), a
dentist-turned-bounty hunter who frees Django (Jamie Foxx) from his chains and
hires him to help locate the Brittle Brothers, a gang of outlaws he has been
fruitlessly tracking. Waltz is the perfect actor for Tarantino, so at ease with
the director's verbose dialogue and such a pleasure to watch as he uses his
superior intellect and verbal skills to manipulate every negotiation to his
advantage. His loquacious civility is a perfect foil for the silent steeliness
of Foxx's performance, whose Django often seems as bemused by the white man
riding alongside him as everyone else. Tarantino gets plenty of comic mileage
out of the incongruity of this partnership, and the opening hour contains some
of the director's best visual work, with potent images such as a Klan raid at
night or blood splattering onto cotton being skilfully photographed by Robert
Richardson.
Unsurprisingly, Tarantino doesn't soft-pedal the racism in
any way. Many of the southerners Django rides past simply gape open-mouthed at
the mere sight of a "nigger on a horse" while others respond more
aggressively, but Tarantino makes them all buffoons, playing up their ignorance
and incompetence for comic effect. These characters are habitually dumbstruck
by Schultz's verbal dexterity (even a word such as "ascertain"
prompts the response "Speak English!") and the Klan raid is halted by
the riders complaints about the eyeholes in their hoods, with the man whose
wife made the hoods leaving in a huff. In fact, Django and Schultz don't
encounter any racists who carry a genuine threat until they reach Candieland.
Regrettably, this is also where the film stalls and never recovers.
Candieland is the plantation run by Calvin Candie (Leonardo
DiCaprio), whose favourite pastime is watching two black slaves fighting to the
death. He currently has in his possession Django's wife Broomhilda (Kerry
Washington), and in order to get her back Schultz comes up with a plan that
involves them posing as Mandingo experts and offering to purchase one of
Candie's fighters. It's a needlessly convoluted approach that adds nothing to
the film but a lot of repetitive talk. DiCaprio is miscast in the role – he can't
express the character's sadism and menace when it counts – but he appears to be
having a lot of fun as the moustache-twirling villain of the piece. What struck
me about halfway through the long Candieland sequence was the realisation that
I wasn't having fun, and hadn't been for some time. Django Unchained is 165
minutes long, but what matters is not how long a film is but how long it feels,
and the film feels bloated and sluggish, like a rough cut in need of another
pass in the editing room. Scenes are allowed to drag, cuts disrupt the film's
rhythm, and even some of the musical choices feel like temp tracks awaiting
further tinkering from the director.
It's a shame Tarantino couldn't have cut off some of the
film's fat (his own risible cameo would be a good place to start) and instead
exploited the rich potential in some of his supporting characters. As Candie's
wizened and toadying manservant Stephen, Samuel L. Jackson gives the film's
most startling performance; a fascinating portrait of subservience and
malevolence that eventually marks him out as the film's most interesting antagonist. I was
hoping Tarantino would give the talented but perennially underused Kerry
Washington a meaty role, but she's nothing more than a damsel in distress here,
and even after Django rescues her she takes no part in the final revenge,
waiting patiently outside for her man. Broomhilda strikes me as the first
totally nondescript female character Tarantino has ever written, and in a film
about the uprising of the downtrodden black man, it seems like a missed
opportunity to not give her at least one strong moment.
But the biggest disappointment of Django Unchained is that
the film ends in the only way Tarantino seems to know how, with a bloodbath
that suggests the director is trying to one-up his previous efforts. The
climactic shootout is long and messy, with blood spurting out of multiple
wounds and splashing up against the white walls. Tarantino directs Django's
bloody vengeance against the white oppressors with obvious glee, but in doing
so he makes the film seem ever more cartoonish and undermines the seriousness
of the white-on-black cruelty he attempts to depict in a more sombre tone. The
violence in Django Unchained isn't shocking or cathartic, it's just numbing and
puerile. Tarantino has made another film that satisfies all of his own urges –
referencing his favourite films, including his favourite music, starring his
favourite actors – but again I find myself being disappointed in his
determination to make a film that fits neatly within the filmography he has
become obsessed with rather than daring to engage with something bigger than
movies. Django Unchained could have been a bold and shocking examination of American
history, but it's just a Spaghetti Western that has been badly overcooked.