From slave to bounty hunter

Rating: 7/10 (4 February 2013)

With a film that's part a throwback to the black exploitation films of the Seventies and part a homage to the ballet violence of Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino has given us Django Unchained about a newly freed slave turned bounty hunter under the tutelage of Christoph Walz.
When this film opens poor Jamie Fox as the title character is part of a group of slaves chained up and heading for the auction block. But it turns out to be his lucky day as traveling dentist Christoph Walz wants to make a private deal because Fox can identify three brothers who are wanted. Walz is a bounty hunter with abolitionist tendencies and he makes short work of the slavers and has a paper making Fox his legal whom he immediately frees.
Fox agrees to become Walz's partner, but he's got some conditions of his own like finding and freeing his wife who was deliberately sold separately from him. They do a good season's work and then go on the mission for Kerry Washington, Fox's wife. She's on a Mississippi plantation owned by Leonardo DiCaprio.
If DiCaprio's character were around today he'd be a charter member of the White Citizen's Council. He takes white supremacy as a simple matter of fact.
DiCaprio got deserved raves for his performance. But the most intriguing role in the film for me was that of Samuel L. Jackson who plays the head of the household servants. Seeing Jackson in his part took me back to early Nineties when I saw a production of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard with the character of Piers who was a servant and who totally identified with his employers. And the aristocrats who employed him just think of him as part of the furniture. There's a lot of Piers in Jackson's character with a nasty racial component that smacks of Uncle Tom.
Quentin Tarantino saw a lot of those films that starred people like Richard Roundtree, James Brown, and Fred Williamson back when I was a lot younger in creating Django. He also took careful note of how Sam Peckinpah staged his violent scenes in such things as The Getaway and The Wild Bunch.
Still it's the players that make this one work, DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson most of all.