Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio
Rating: 9 out of 10
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is everything fans of the writer/director have come to expect: violent, offensive, and uncomfortably funny. It is also an important and brutal film about America’s uneasy relationship with slavery and racism.
The second film in what Tarantino calls his “revisionist history” period, Django Unchained begins in the dead of night with German dentist-turned-bounty-hunter, Dr. King Schultz (another brilliant performance from German TV star, now Tarantino favorite Christoph Waltz), stopping a couple of slave traders taking their bloody and bound “property” through the backwoods of Texas. Schultz is looking for one specific man--Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave whose previous owners are wanted for murder.
Schultz, who sees the parallels between what he does and slavery (“I trade bodies for money.”), nevertheless finds the idea of and the people connected with slavery abhorrent. He is the film’s reluctant moral core even as he admits that purchasing Django--despite his intention to give the man his freedom--will allow Schultz to make money by identifying and killing his bounty.
Eventually, the two find Django’s previous owners and, while Django earns his freedom, the former slave shows a natural marksman talent, making him a perfect partner for Schultz, who feels a strange responsibility for the man he once, albeit briefly and for a singular purpose, owned. That partnership grows into a friendship as Schultz agrees to help Django find and buy freedom for his wife, Broomhilda--a former house slave who was so brutally punished for an escape attempt that her scars only make her acceptable for the job of providing men “comfort.”
She is owned by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a charming and giddy man who treats black people like dogs and commodities, seeing no issue with fighting them for his own amusement while pondering why they don’t rise up and kill their owners. Schultz and Django hatch a plan to make them the welcome guests of Candie’s southern plantation (appropriately named “Candie Land”) and, hopefully, through a fair amount of subterfuge, buy Broomhilda her freedom.
With Django Unchained, Tarantino has made, what in modern times and on paper, must have seemed like an impossible film. It's unflinching in its portrayal of America’s relationship to slavery. Even in the film’s most absurdly hilarious moments--there’s one in particular involving a discussion of KKK masks--there’s an underlying heartlessness and cruelty that makes the laughter awkward and frightening. While the film is never uncomfortable with itself, it wants its audience--no matter their race--to feel uneasy. Unlike historical dramas, Django holds a mirror up to the audience, not allowing them to take a scholastic approach to slavery and the backwards ideas that allowed it to happen.
By being so entertaining, Django makes the audience complicit in the history, in the brutality. In this way, Tarantino has pulled off something amazing--a film that deserves more than cult status, one that should be studied and talked about. One that could have been a masterpiece.
And then Tarantino got self-indulgent.
Sadly, the last 20 minutes of Django devolve into a revenge fantasy. This is all the more disappointing because these waning moments begin with a stunning and powerful scene between Candie and Schultz--two men who have vastly different relationships to slavery but have both used it as a means to an end. It could be argued that given the fact that Django is intended as a throwback to spaghetti westerns that Tarantino’s choice to make the main character something just short of a superhero in the final frames could be excused. But, given what comes before it, I would have preferred an ending that was less bloody and not as neatly wrapped up.
Django Unchained is and will continue to be a controversial film. It can’t be easily categorized or discussed. There are few heroes and some of the monsters are easier to like. It is a challenging and violent film that won’t be for everyone, but wrapped not-so-tightly in Tarantino’s signature dialogue and humor, is a conversation about our past and what it says about our humanity.
