Django Unchained

Few today will remember the uproar caused in some communities eighteen years ago because Quentin Tarantino planned to lauch an ultraviolent gangster flick, Pulp Fiction, on Christmas day.  A scene in which John Travolta accidentally shot a young man in the face in the back of a Chevelle petrified the audience in my hometown of Bismarck, North Dakota.  My brother and I, reacting to the abrupt and absurd turn, hunched over laughing in hysterics.

Roger Ebert once described Fellini as a master of juxtaposing the sacred and profane.  Given that the scene began with a conversation between Mr. Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson about divine intervention, I suspected Mr. Tarantino was off to a good start.  “Aw man, I shot Marvin in the face,” words delivered casually as if Vincent Vega forgot extra postage, are forever burned into my mind.

Two decades later and eight more features, Mr. Tarantino has earned a seat at the table of great directors.  Django Unchained, which takes its title from a 1966 Sergio Corbucci film starring Franco Nero (an expected cameo), is a mashup of spaghetti westerns, slavery and revenge chic—a genre he seems to be using to give every disenfranchised group their due.

A charmingly verbose stranger purporting to be a dentist, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), liberates a slave, Django (Jamie Foxx) from a chain gang run by the Speck brothers, Ace (James Remar) and Dicky (James Russo).  Dr. King Schultz is not, however, who he seems to be.  He vows to help reunite Django with his wife, Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington).

Their ruse: Infiltrate various plantations in the antebellum South posing as mandingo fight enthusiasts—a plot element undoubtedly inspired by the abhorrent 1975 exploitation film.  This lends to the despicable nature of the film’s main villain, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).  The hilarity of a former dentist going to clean up a dingy-toothed fellow named Candie is not lost on me.  Doubly so that Dr. King is a white man liberating a slave… and they’re looking for the only slave this side of the Mason-Dixon line that speaks fluent German.

Like its predecessor, Inglourious Basterds, the film’s opening sequence places Quentin Tarantino’s loquacious script in the capable hands of Christoph Waltz to set up an elaborate deception, making purposeful use of Elmore Leonard-esque dialogues.  The director’s verbal digressions (he’s as much a motormouth as his characters are) usually serve purely to establish character depth, most notably in the gratuity debate in Reservoir Dogs (in his next life, Mr. Pink was reincarnated as a mediocre waiter) and the foot massage debate in Pulp Fiction which concludes with the meta-aside, “C’mon, let’s get into character.”  However, here the ornately crafted diatribes also serve as a diversion to help further the ruse.

The director couldn’t resist all his former amusements, though, particularly with casting choices.  Fans of the Dukes of Hazzard will be amused by Tom Wopat as a U.S. Marshal, as will fans of Miami Vice and Nash Bridges at the sight of a barely recognizable Don Johnson playing Big Daddy, an amusing yet detestable plantation owner.  And of course no Tarantino film would be complete without Michael Parks, Tom Savini and at least one Carradine (Robert, in an uncredited role as a tracker).  But their thunder is stolen by Mr. DiCaprio whose man-child face seems to actually work in the role of Candie, a racist Francophile who doesn’t seem to know that Alexandre Dumas was black.  The best jokes in the film come at the expense of cretinous racists, especially a ten-minute argument between a proto-Klan group, the Regulators, that drags on so long it’s sublimely comical—and proffers an explanation for the Ku Klux Klan’s pointed hoods.

The greatness of Django Unchained, however, comes not from its nods to Corbucci and Leone, its prodigious reliance upon Ennio Morricone compositions, its deliciously evil villains, blood-spattered vengeance or comic inserts (though an early scene in which the newly freed Django picks an outfit to pose as Dr. King Schultz’s valet is endearingly funny).  It’s around the edges and in the corners where Mr. Tarantino has learned the difference between sharing one’s love of trivia versus sharing one’s love of cinema.

When Django and Dr. King Schultz travel to Daughtrey, Texas, to confront Sheriff Bill Sharp (Don Stroud), they sit down to have a beer.  The cinematographer Robert Richardson and editor Fred Raskin (replacing the late Sally Menke, who edited all of Mr. Tarantino’s prior works) assemble a sequence of images that revel in the simple act of pouring a beer and scraping the excess foam off with a straight razor.  In addition to melding conventional setups with high grain inserts and smash zooms that tell the ninety-seven year history of motion pictures (using, ironically, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the starting point), Mr. Tarantino remains faithful to the medium of film.  He refuses to migrate to digital, or use gimmicky 3D or High Frame Rate cinematography.

I was once a very harsh critic of Mr. Tarantino, the video store clerk turned auteur, who seemed to be preoccupied with the inventiveness of his in-jokes and visual quotations of scene compositions from other films.  Recently I saw a restored print of Pulp Fiction and realized that it took me some time to accept his collage-style filmmaking as an art unto itself.  He’s mastered how to reassemble  the better elements of (usually) lesser films into an original, engaging narrative that only retains the basic inspiration of some film or another that he admired—e.g. Lady Snowblood (Kill Bill), The Killers (Reservoir Dogs) or the dance scene from Godard’s Bande à part (Pulp Fiction).

Inglourious Basterds and now Django Unchained are brothers from the same mother—a mature Quentin Tarantino who seems less dependent on the winks and more confident in his own storytelling ability.  And what a story it is, borrowing further inspiration perhaps from Melville:

He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

…except Django isn’t consumed by his rage.  Reunited with his beloved Broomhilda, his fury ends with a dance.

Bonus: Normally I cringe at directors who insert themselves or, worse, their children into the picture so as to stroke their ego. Quentin Tarantino’s cameos generally ridicule this affectation of self-importance. But here he has quite literally sacrificed his image for the amusement of the audience. It’s the greatest director cameo I’ve ever seen… and that includes Godard’s snitch in À bout de souffle and Ridley Scott’s hands playing facehugger in Alien.

Django Unchained • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 • Running Time: 165 minutes • MPAA Rating: R for strong graphic violence throughout, a vicious fight, language and some nudity.