Amazing formally, and with a moral complexity that will work on you from within

Rating: 9/10 (13 January 2013)

Django Unchained (2012)
(A second take at the bottom after seeing it again six months later.)
What a wild, imaginative, provocative, beautiful, disturbing, excessive, nuanced movie.
Is it a masterpiece? Maybe. Or yes, absolutely, as long as you can stomach some of the bloody mayhem. In terms of the core qualities of any "great" movie there is no argument here. The story is well told, filled with turns, believable in a fictional way, and entertaining. The acting is superb (or at times incredible). The photography and lighting and editing--the visual basics--are all excellent. The sound and soundtrack (including odd and wonderfully varied anachronistic popular songs) take you by surprise with their validity.
The movie is overtly original in that Quentin Tarantino way that is firmly rooted in classic movie-making. It refers to older styles openly, including the ridiculously bold red lettering of the opening credits which are a little like the orange-red lettering of the first widescreen color movies in the mid 1950s. The music at times invokes spaghetti westerns, and the broad landscapes echo that (and in fact the cowboy theme takes us very close to these 1960s movies which Tarantino so loves).
So, yes, this is a great movie in all these ways.
Can you address the content more directly here? Is this movie about morality, about slavery and justice, about love and walking through fires to achieve it? Yes, of course it is all these things. But, many ask, does it tell the right story about these things? The first answer is, who cares? The director can say what he likes, right? Well, maybe maybe not. He can, of course, but he has to face the music of his critics because in fact movies are not just about cameras and storytelling conventions. They take on meaning, they move people to think, they cause palpable reactions.
And so I'll come to the defense of the movie in the simplest ways. First of all, the ambiguity of the main character, the white bounty hunter played by Christoph Walz, is balanced and provocative and without real judgement. He's a cold blooded killer on the path of righteous judgement, a kind of John Brown revolutionary with a hankering for wealth, which he never gets to spend. Likewise the other lead, the black slave played by Jamie Foxx, is both victim and filled with bloody vengeance. It isn't automatically easy to justify everything, but it makes sense on some level, too.
I realized when it was all done that the movie pulls off something I hadn't quite seen before--the real horrors of slavery. I think Tarantino "gets away" with it because his style is so exaggerated and unreal. The hyper-fable approach makes it possible to be comic and horrifying. If a movie just went ahead with a straight on with torture and brutality to show how bad slavery was, almost like a documentary, it would be unbearable, almost unforgivable. But here we see the worst kind of injustices as part of an approach that at other times forces you out of total verisimilitude, and you cringe and hate it but you go with the flow.
Don't mistake things. This is one bloody cruel movie. To make people blow up with more guts and blood than usual so that it's like a comic book death does not make it less bloody. Blood will soak some scenes like graffiti art. And sound effects are used with amazing clarity to emphasize aspects like people's guts flying through the air--or, in a totally opposite way, to hear the searing sound of the ash on a cigarette as someone takes a puff. It's that kind of up and down, deeply thoughtful movie.
See it? Of course, if you can stand a little over-the-top violence. It's morally sound, it's exciting and funny and fun and moving. It's beautiful. It's comparable in many ways, formally and in terms of content, to "Inglourious Basterds." If you liked that, you'll like this. I thought it amazing through and through. Masterpiece? Why not?
Second take: I had a slightly less overwhelming impression this time. It's still a masterpiece of filmmaking, for sure, but some of Tarantino's decisions--what kind of bloody excess, how much to say derogatory words, how to push and pull the plot--seemed slightly contrived. As if his style was forced on the movie, rather than used to further something within the movie. I also watched Inglourious Basterds again recently, and found I still am perfectly amazed by that movie. For now, it's the better of the two (and they have a lot in common structurally, and thematically). Anyway, the rest of what I felt goes. Especially the necessary revulsion. Necessary. A terrific movie.