A Film Artist at the Top of His Game

Rating: 9/10 (20 March 2014)

Quentin Tarantino's wickedly original farce "Django Unchained" does for slavery what his "Inglorious Basterds" did for World War II. Namely, it rewrites history as it SHOULD have been, not how it actually was. In "Basterds," we got to see Hitler and his murderous minions taken out well ahead of schedule by a motley group of allied assassins. In "Django," we get to see freed slave Django Freeman doing pretty much the same to just about every racist white villain unfortunate enough to cross his path. In short, "Django Unchained" goes beyond mere historical revisionism to historical wish-fulfillment fantasy and helps to lay the foundation for a new genre in the process.
As "Django Unchained" opens, the title character is part of a group of chained slaves en route to auction. However, before they can get there, Django is freed by a loquacious, silver-tongued German man (played brilliantly by the scene-stealing Christoph Waltz) who is appalled by slavery and who asks Django to partner up with him as a bounty hunter. In addition to tracking down and killing wanted fugitives, the two make it their mission to rescue Django's wife (Kerry Washington) from bondage to an infamous plantation owner, played by Leonardo DeCaprio in one of his finest performances to date.
Django actually began life as a character in a series of spaghetti westerns dating back to the mid 1960s and, indeed, Tarantino has included many spaghetti western tropes in his film, even though most of the movie takes place in the pre-bellum South. This Django is "very loosely based" on the earlier one, seeing as how the original, played by Franco Nero (who makes a cameo appearance in this film), was not a black slave but rather a white Union soldier.
There's no denying the purgative effect of seeing Django delivering some frontier justice to all those slave owners and white oppressors who deserve everything they get at his hands. But Tarantino has never been one to see the world in black-and-white terms, nor as a simplistic conflict between evil and good. There's a highly disturbing scene, for instance, where Django, determined not to blow his cover as a black slave trader, allows another slave to be mauled to death by dogs, a scene that shows Tarantino will even risk alienating Django from the audience if that means staying true to his vision. The director has clearly come to play, and he has no use for cleanly delineated lines between right and wrong, not when a person's very survival is at stake. The world he is showing us is simply too brutal, too unforgiving for such moral niceties to have much sway.
As an artist, Tarantino is clearly at the top of his game here, blending a host of seemingly contradictory elements into a seamless, eclectic whole. He mixes acerbic humor with hyper-stylized violence, and places flawless period piece detail against a soundtrack filled with contemporary songs, some already released and some written directly for the movie. Tarantino isn't afraid to linger long over his scenes, letting the audience savor every last juicy line of dialogue he's placed in the mouths of his characters. For the writing is always the best part of any Tarantino film, and he doesn't let us down here.
And that's probably why the actors seem to be having the time of their professional lives in this film. While Jamie Foxx is taciturn and tight-lipped (as any hero - or antihero - of the West should be), Waltz, Di Caprio and Samuel L. Jackson, as the ultimate sycophantic house slave (often playing the Fool to DiCaprio's Lear), go head-to-head in a no-holds-barred war of verbal gymnastics. The writing and performances are so much fun on their own, in fact, that Tarantino's dazzling visuals sometimes seem like just an unusually tasty dessert designed by the chef to top off the meal.
Tarantino clearly lives and breathes cinema, and thus he has populated his canvas with a vast array of familiar faces from movies and TV, past and present, some in very minor roles: Don Johnson, Walter Goggins, Russ and Amber Tamblyn, Bruce Dern, Don Stroud, Jonah Hill, James Parks, and Tarantino himself.
The filmmaker's latest opus may not be for every viewer, but if you're looking for an iconoclastic work that has little regard for propriety and good taste and is not afraid to venture out into previously uncharted territory, then "Django Unchained" is the movie for you.