django good or bad ?

Rating: 8/10 (17 May 2013)

A lot of people thought they knew what to expect from Django Unchained, his director, Quentin Tarantino, who is finally able to make his tribute to spaghetti western, a genre he has been mimicking since a few movies (Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds)Now, around the movie, a current topic is "As Tarantino gone too far with Django and slavery ?". Such an issue is understandable as the history of the USA is plagued by the ghosts of racism, and also because the movie is a big hit considering Christmas is usually the worse time of year for R-rated movies. Django is one of the few Hollywood blockbusters who really is about ideas, messages and themes, and not a movie featuring superheroes crossovers, licensed merchandise or more of the same generic action thriller and/or romantic comedy. The spectator here is expected to think, and because the movie is touching a very sensible issue, some people were obviously going to think "Is what I am watching racist or insensitive?". In my opinion, no. A movie telling the story of a freed slave becoming a hardened bounty hunter and fighting a slave owner for his wife can qualified by a lot a thing, but racist is not one of them. Tarantino's movie were always controversial, and this one wasn't going to be any different. Although it is a sound reasoning that slavery should not be use in a movie for the silliness of it, it that really what Django is about ? Mindless and silly action wrapped around slavery ? Tarantino is widely seen as this adolescent and eccentric movie geek making movies out of other movies he liked, and so people assumed there is all there is to it. Kill Bill is still seen as this crazy gory flick, but is, on the contrary, a very emotional movie fueled with a true passion for its genre where the climax of 3 hours of screen time is a 20 minutes dialogue about a relationship gone bad between two deadly assassins. A long, meaningful dialogue about responsibility, parenthood and pop culture references. So, what is the spaghetti western genre and what does he do with it ? Spaghetti western was about taking the clean and gentle iconic cowboy and transforming it by confronting him to the much more darker reality of the wild west. In "The Good, the Dad and the Ugly", the hero with no name played Clint Eastwood left his accomplice for dead in the desert multiple times, even though he is the "Good" in the title. (Conveniently, the famous hero with no name in spaghetti westerns will later be referred to in later movies as Django.) So, all is Tarantino is finally doing is repeating the process by using the iconic figure of the cowboy and using it in the most shameful time of American history. Tarantino barely hides the fact that he transform a Caucasian hero into an African-American one just so the spectator can notice how we lack similar characters in today's culture. The movie has a lot of hints about what the realisator wanted to do with slavery, such as the obvious scenes where a slaver's blood is spattered in a cotton field or when the ultimate evil the heroes face is a manipulative and dangerous house slave. Tarantino is not arming the memory of slavery at all, he is magnifying it with a comic book-like exaggeration the ugliness and the atrocities of the pre-Civil War era, so the spectator can feel empathy for the hero and the other African Americans. If anything, Tarantino is keeping the memory of slavery alive.
This is why Django Unchained is a great movie. Not only it is a well directed and intelligent movie about a sensible issue, Tarantino also made a glorious tribute to a genre he loved and will be an instant classic.