Excessively violent, even for Tarantino...but a blast!

Rating: 8/10 (27 January 2013)

Is it even a remote possibility that one day, Quentin Tarantino will make a film which does not involve scenes of grotesque violence? We all doubt it. It seems as if every film he makes now is a gauntlet thrown down to his next piece of work, setting a new standard in terms of graphic violence. Django Unchained is the perfect example. Not content with close-up shots of Nazis having swastikas carved into their foreheads, Tarantino opts for an absurd amount of gory CGI- embellished shooting scenes in the Western, which is really a collage of different genres rather obviously thrown together. Perhaps it is the director's penchant for combining very dark and real subject matters with a splattering of comic violence and humour that makes his films so successful and enjoyable. They are also, however, becoming more and more artistically indulgent. The ludicrously violent last half hour serves no purpose other than to shock audiences and amplify the violence in 60s Westerns, with which Tarantino doubtless wasn't satisfied as a kid. It should be noted that these most explicit scenes follow the demise of the film's two best characters, Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio. The former plays a remarkably human, funny and cynical German bounty hunter. The best scenes are those in which he is conversing with the surprisingly despicable DiCaprio, a psychopathic plantation owner utterly absorbed in his own self-importance. I couldn't help thinking that parts of his performance were just extensions of Tarantino's disturbed personality.
Tarantino and Waltz, however are a perfect match of director and actor. They really are on the same level as Tarantino- L. Jackson and Scorcese- De Niro. As in Inglorious Basterds, the latter provides brilliantly funny and articulate dialogue amidst the gratuitous violence and controversy. Despite the presence of a more famous and popular actor, Jamie Foxx, playing the lead role, the eccentric Austrian steals the show as he did in Inglorious, which had Brad Pitt in the leading role. His charismatic European charm highlights a deficiency in American cinema in the past decade, which has been dominated by predictable American heroes and foreign villains. DiCaprio, for that matter, is a wonderful villain. Clinging onto the last strands of his power soon to anyhow be destroyed by the Civil War, he contradicts himself in so many ways, looking for a justification for the atrocities he is committing. That justification is boredom- with too much power and too much money, he cannot resist dabbling in the brutal (exemplified in two nauseatingly graphic scenes.) Samuel L. Jackson has a sinister turn as the slave master of Candyland, DiCaprio's plantation. He is perhaps even more despicable than his master, carrying a scheming authority over the other slaves in the plantation and even a hold over his master, despite his exaggerated subservience.
Despite my criticism (which is always going to happen when I watch Tarantino), Django is a thoroughly enjoyable film. The horrifically awkward subject matter is dealt with head on, an approach which Tarantino and the actors must be given enormous credit for doing. It is, at heart, an underdog-hero story and a love story, which are pervasive themes in American cinema. Foxx is low-key in the first half, very much second fiddle to Waltz. He grows in confidence though, helped by some wonderfully-timed lines in the script delivered with a little of his own malice. There is a very funny scene which completely takes apart the KKK, appropriately exposing them as a bunch of incompetent rednecks. Scenes like these go some way to help detract the shock of the violence and provide comic relief. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of another film that deals with this chapter of American history in such depth and detail. Tarantino knows that tweaked history is always going to be an incredibly popular genre and as in Inglorious, the result is edgy and controversial. But most of the best films are.