Uncle Tom's Day of Anger

Rating: Null/10 (3 February 2013)

Tarantino at his most epic (as said by some) defeats for me the whole point.
Overlong and sloppily put together, the film mainly suffers from Tarantino's specific philosophy, or lack of one. He is a writer first, writes frothy scenes of some tension but never pays mind to the submerged undercurrents of soul, the actual life that give rise to the tension, and then separately pulls visual skin from several places to dress his short sketches, films, music, cool tidbits of pop culture. At its best, this can create a narrative energy that carries you along, it's infectious in short spurts.
This time, he has delivered the sketches in the form of the western he has long threatened to make, in this case Italian. I have seen most of the spaghetti westerns he takes from, probably all. These differed from their American counterparts in a key way—the stories were not about a clean sweep of destiny from one coast to the other, because Italians wouldn't know Kansas City from Santa Fe, which liberated them to do a sort of abstract comic opera of the West.
Films like Django were all about the visual sketch and archetype, entirely about the image of the man dragging the coffin. The sensibility goes back to centuries of comedia dell'arte, an appreciation for mannered masked life, episodic gaffe and irony, countered in the films with the rustic simplicity of the western. Being a writer first, few of Tarantino's episodes are visually thought out, the effect is nothing like Good Bad Ugly or Grand Silencio, where wry humor or absurd violence is chiseled to rise out of silence with the cicadas.
In tandem with this is my main complaint.
By all means, have the frothy patter, it's Tarantino's staple and one he is good at. But he is simply unable to visually integrate his wordplay with images, just can't do it, probably he doesn't even think it is an issue, or it's how movies work. In the film, you have individual scenes anchored on the spot in some kind of bartering going on, and wholly separate visual interludes, usually a montage of cool music video shots played over to music of his choosing.
These are entirely independent of anything, sloppily slathered from the outside; blood spraying on cotton, slow-motion riding and shooting. It's such a sloppy way to make a film, sloppy like the man we see in interviews. There is not a single image here I will carry with me. Which wastes Waltz and Jackson putting on an excellent show, and to a lesser extent Foxx.
And of course, all filmmakers reach out and borrow, Tarantino's problem is that he borrows fashions and what is incidentally attached to it, never the inner logic, the notion of life a certain way that on the outer level is the image we see.
Let me illustrate this in the film. Django being a slave, in order to freely go about in the slaveholding South he has to be in disguise, Dr. Schultz tells him to pick out his costume and character. The rough-hewn ex-slave picks a frilly Little Lord Fauntleroy costume, and we get the silly image of him on horseback.
How about instead of Fauntleroy for a quick snicker, Don Quixote? And borrow with the costume the logic of self-deception, and patiently mold and weave this through the film. Foxx in his pointy beard, and sculpted intense face does look the part, a black Quixote on heroic adventure. Schultz as his Pancha, an educated Pancha who 'writes' him into the story.
I'm just throwing ideas. Instead of simple scattershot amusement, something that more deeply involves. And take this in a million directions. And visually distort truth, and fool with Southern chivalry and have us question the heroism. How about a Broomhilda as Dulcinea who doesn't know anything about him, but goes along because it means freedom? How about this as love, meeting someone that sets you free?
I'm not saying this will be deep because in itself the theme is something, or it references a respectable work. It can be deep, in the sense that you more deeply involve more of us in the viewing. Tarantino has grown, but only the size of his canvas—a small view stretched to epic length.