Angry, indulgent, amusing, disappointing

Rating: 6/10 (21 January 2013)

Quentin Tarantino's eighth feature is a meandering rescue and revenge tale set in an overtly racist pre-Civil War Deep South. It concerns the slave Django (Jamie Foxx) and his bounty hunter emancipator King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), building up wealth by whacking lawbreakers, before setting their sights on plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who's keeping Django's wife (Kerry Washington) as a "comfort girl".
There is a fantastic performance from Waltz, who starts off playing the flip-side of his verbose Nazi Hans Landa, but then actually develops emotionally throughout the narrative - a rare arc for a Tarantino film. Foxx looks the part, although he's too soft-spoken. The words are written like they should be fired off like a six-shooter, but he sings them soulfully. Samuel L. Jackson, all bent limbs and glaring eyes, transforms remarkably into the sycophantic Stephen, the crow on Candie's shoulder; which brings us to the real revelation, DiCaprio, playing against type as the caricatured boy-emperor, ignorant and excitable, vicious as a child pulling the legs off insects.
Once Django and Schultz arrive at Candieland the film moves from Jeremiah Johnson-style landscape wandering to an enclosed, nightmarish theatre piece. The effect is quite disconcerting. (It's just a pity that the film then emerges from the Big House, escapes, returning for another ending.) As usual, Tarantino's dialogue, when it works, is lyrical and amusingly precise.
The film's problems are a matter of discipline. There is an unusually high quota of dud moments, like when a mob of white supremacists argue endlessly about the eye-holes in their hoods. It's a one-line joke stretched to five minutes of screen-time. Later, a climactic shootout turns out to be a pre-pre-climactic shootout, bridged with a horrifying cameo by the auteur himself, bizarrely adopting an Australian accent, sounding like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Indulgence can be a part of the pleasure of Tarantino's films, but sometimes it is to their detriment.
With its movie theatre setting, Inglourious Basterds was a film about film; about the depiction of good and evil on screen, and our relationship with heroes and villains (the cruellest character in that film was also the most seductive). Seeing the eyes of Eli Roth glowing red with the blood of his foe was troubling, because it made us question the pleasure we derive from watching evil punished. Django is more simplistic, building a cast of ogres mostly too dumb to rationalise their bigotry, unquestionably deserving of being chopped down. We desire a release. We are given it. The effect is briefly thrilling, but it's also a bit banal.