Summary:
With the help of a German bounty hunter, a freed slave sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal plantation owner.
My Thoughts:
The first Tarantino movie I ever saw was “Kill Bill Vol. 1”, and as soon as that movie was over I knew I was a Tarantino fan. Whatever it was Tarantino was doing in “Kill Bill”, I wanted more of it; a lot more. Soon after watching “Kill Bill Vol. 2” I worked my way through Tarantino’s earlier films (“Reservoir Dogs”, “Pulp Fiction”), and I fell head over heels in love.
Tarantino’s style is often replicated but never duplicated. He’s a film director that is obsessed with films; his movies have numerous references and homages to other directors, films, and even whole genres; he’s a director that has been able to flit back and forth from historical fiction to dramatic mob anthology to violent revenge flicks with ease. If I were being honest, the lowest score I would give any of his films would be a 3.5/5 (that film being “Jackie Brown”- the least Tarantinoy Tarantino film); I think Tarantino is like the pop-fiction modern day version of Orson Welles (comparisons could be made to any auteur- Tarantino’s overly eccentric persona just reminds me of Welles); just don’t get in his way, let him do his thing, and chances are good that he’ll deliver a masterpiece.
“Django Unchained” is part Blaxploitation, part spaghetti western, part revenge epic, and 100% Tarantino. While “Django” isn’t my favorite of Tarantino films, I still wholeheartedly believe it’s a five star movie. It’s intense, emotionally moving, exquisitely written and directed, and wonderfully acted; it’s also a film I can watch again and again and never grow tired of. Django’s journey is not for the light of heart; it has moments of horrible brutality and heartbreak, but it also has great moments of triumph. Those moments of triumph are elevated by the amount of work that went into crafting the characters of Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz, “Alita Battle Angel”) and Django (Jamie Foxx, “Collateral”), whom quickly becomes one of the most dynamic protagonists of all of Tarantino’s films.
Broomhilda in the Dragon’s Lair
After a German bounty hunter named Dr. Schultz purchases Django from group of slave traders, he asks Django for his help in tracking down the Brittle brothers, with whom Django has had prior dealings. After tracking down the Brittles, Dr. Shultz promises to give Django his freedom; when Schultz asks what Django intends to do with his new freedom, Django responds that he plans to find his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington, “The Last King of Scotland”) and buy her freedom. Schultz proposes that Django help him as a bounty hunter through the winter, and then together they will search for Broomhilda. When they finally track her down, they find she’s been sold to a ruthlessly brutal plantation owner named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, forthcoming “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”). Masquerading as a pair of Mandingo traders, the two venture forth into the draconian realm of Candieland, where they meet Candie’s African American house runner whenever he’s away, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson, “Unbreakable”).
This is, in my opinion, Tarantino’s most epic film to date. While I absolutely love “Inglorious Basterds” (it might be my favorite of his films), that movie jumps back and forth from character to character; it’s almost an anthology film in the way it flits from story to story, but when the stories converge in final coalescence at the end it all works together like a beautifully woven tapestry. Django is a much more straightforward story. It primarily follows two men and the journey they take together; we watch them learn about one another, grow closer, and ultimately become friends, but through that journey we also watch a man as he comes to realize his worth. It’s a wonderful story of redemption as well as one of warranted vengeance, true romance, and heroism even in the face of pure evil.
When our story begins, Django is an uneducated slave in a shambling chain gang. He is like many slaves would’ve been back in the days of slavery; physically fit, mentally unfit. When Dr. Schultz meets Django, however, he doesn’t treat him as if he is an inferior being, for he knows that the circumstances in which Django finds himself are beyond his control. His outlook- that all men are, in essence, created equal- shines through every interaction he has with Django, though we are quick to learn that just because Schultz values life, doesn’t mean he isn’t afraid to take it.
Schultz is one of Tarantino’s most complex characters, mostly because of value he ascribes to life and the ways he’s able to justify taking it. There’s a scene when Schultz shoots someone down ‘like a dog in the street’, another where he shoots a father in front of his son… but somehow we never loose track of the fact that Schultz fights on the side of what is right. His methods might be swift and brutal, but the people that he kills are outlaws, murderers, and slave traders, and the way that Tarantino paints these cretins of society makes us practically cheer when they get their just desserts.
The roughest scenes in this film could easily be compared to some of the more brutal scenes “12 Years a Slave”. Slavery is uglier than sin, and in order for the full relief of the redemption to be felt, the full weight of the ugliness of slavery needs to be displayed. There are countless whippings, beatings, murders, and derogatory terms; nothing about this film is easy, but nothing about slavery was easy either. The brilliance of Tarantino, however, is that he knows how to use this to his advantage in his storytelling. The people he shows are so vile and evil that we want nothing more for Django to rip them apart, so when that finally happens, we as an audience want to stand up and cheer.
“I like the way you die, boy.”
Blaxploitation films like “Shaft (1971)” or “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” are the main inspirations for how this film deals with violence; Blaxploitation films often showed African American people being horribly oppressed, and finally rising up to deliver the vengeance they deserve. Django follows the same formula- it shows us horrible events so were rooting for Django to get revenge.
What makes it easy for us to root for Django as he obliterates countless people is the way that Tarantio approaches violence. When we see people being oppressed, the violence is more real, more brutal- we hear bones snap and watch blood spill from the lacerations in their skin; we see the pleasure that the slavers get from inflicting pain; the violence is sickening. So, when we compare that violence to the incredibly over the top violence that Django deals out, it feels almost cartoonish, but not in a bad way. Django’s bullets are so powerful that they send bodies flying and blood spraying across rooms. Whenever someone gets shot it’s like the elevator doors in “The Shining” has opened up and let loose a river of blood; the screen is just soaked in a crimson flood. It’s so over the top that it immediately changes the viewer’s relation towards the violence- in an instant, that violence can go from abhorrent to hilarious.
Then there’s Tarantino’s writing. If I had to pick a top three films Tarantino has written, it would probably be “Pulp Fiction”, “Inglorious Basterds”, and “Django”. His characters, as I’ve commented on before, are all incredibly complex, but really it’s his dialogue and his sense of comedic timing that keeps me coming back. Tarantino is a poet when it comes to profanity; I know some people are offended by language, but in my opinion, unless you’re screaming “F*ck you” directly at me, I could care less about profanity; it’s not doing me any harm unless I let it offend me.
Some of the best parts of this film are when Tarantino just makes fun of racists. I absolutely love the scene where the KKK members all struggle to figure out the eyeholes in their hoods. Don Johnson (“Brawl in Cell Block 99”) saying “I can’t see f*cking sh*t in this thing!” might be one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen; I still crack a smile just thinking about it.
There are also great characters that change the feeling of the whole film. Had Samuel L Jackson not played Stephen, the intelligent servant of the Candie household, this film easily could’ve been looked at only as a black man getting revenge on white man story, but that’s not at all what this is. This is a story of fighting against man oppressing man, not only white man oppressing black man. It takes on another level of meaning; it makes it so that it’s more relevant to today’s time, showing that no matter who you are and where you are there will always be someone that oppresses another person, and the only just thing to do is fight back, even if that means certain death.
(SPOILERS)
I think that the reason I love Schultz’s character so much is because of his inability to let the dragon lie, so to speak. Schultz and Django make their way into the belly of the beast and upon discovering the bones strewn about the dragon’s lair (Candie ordering the dogs to eat the escaped Mandingo), it becomes apparent just how evil the he is. It becomes apparent that if Candie were allowed to live, that would be a worse injustice than if they were to have abandoned their mission completely. Schultz knows he can’t walk away when someone like this roams the earth, and so he does the only he possibly can do: he sacrifices himself for the betterment of mankind. It’s a beautiful moment, and it’s made even better when Django finds Schultz’s body lying in the stables later, and says to him, “Au revoir, my friend.”
Until we meet again.
Verdict:
It had been probably two years since I had watched this film, but I find that I love it as much now as I did when I first walked out of the theatre seven years ago. This is probably Tarantino’s roughest film as far as violence and overall content goes, but it’s also one of his more rewarding films. I feel like I could talk about what makes Tarantino great forever (I didn’t even get to talk about all the awesome whip-zooms in this flick), but I’ll settle for saying that he’s one of the best working directors today. In fifty years, when other auteur directors like Dario Argento (“Tenebre”), Robert Altman (“Short Cuts”), and Roman Polanski (“Rosemary’s Baby”) are all but forgotten by everyone but the cinephiles, I predict Tarantino’s name will live on as a household name, like Hitchcock (“Rebecca”) or Welles (“The Other Side of the Wind”).
My prediction may be wrong (I, for one, certainly hope people remember Argento). But God only knows, and only time will tell…
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