Django Unchained

Django Unchained – Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is reasonably entertaining, but it is not an advance or improvement on the spaghetti Westerns that the film imitates. Indeed, if anything, the spaghetti Westerns to which Tarantino pays hommage were more exciting, more vividly violent, and cinematically more impressive – in the original Django, the title character lugs around a huge, muddy coffin containing a Gatling gun and someone gets his ear ripped off which, if I remember right, is then, eaten. Tarantino’s film is fundamentally disappointing because he doesn’t do anything particularly inventive or meaningful with the genre form that he is adapting. In Tarantino’s best films, the director achieves powerful effects from warping Kung Fu movies and film noir into something that transcends those genres. Pulp Fiction’s spiral structure embodies the sense of destined doom always tremulously present in film noir. The second part of Kill Bill somehow mashes together a Kung Fu movie with a Bergman or Antonioni-style portrait of a failed relationship. But, unfortunately, nothing so interesting occurs in this picture which is, ultimately, and despite its enormous quotient of torture and violence, pedestrian. King Schulz, a German dentist turned bounty hunter, frees Django, a slave. As partner bounty hunters, the two kill a bunch of people and, then, travel to Mississippi on a mission to rescue Django’s wife, Broomhilda. The Mississippi sequence is immensely long and meaninglessly protracted – the plot contrivance, which has something to do with Mandingo gladiatorial fighting, makes no sense at all. (Why don’t the two just go Mississippi and buy Broomhilda – something that ultimately occurs anyhow after a deviation of about 45 minutes devoted to lurid hyper-violence and a few of Tarantino’s trademark scenes in which characters rant at one another in an amusingly florid way.) On a couple of occasions, the film seems about to wake-up and move into more interesting territory – the scene where Django and Schulz arrive at Leonardo Di Caprio’s Candie Land mansion is choreographed effectively, but, then, the film slips back into more torture and ranting. The picture is worth seeing for Samuel Jackson’s performance as a conniving House Slave – Jackson has never been better and his malevolence is truly horrific; he’s like a combination of Iago, Uncle Tom, and an embittered Othello who thought better of killing himself and has decided to take revenge on all humanity. Tarantino spends way too much time on pointless and elephantine gun battles and squanders interesting opportunities – for instance, he could have had macabre fun with the notion that the bounty hunters have to somehow transport their dead prey back to the authorities. But we don’t get anything of this kind. Schulz tells Django the story of Wotan and Brunnhilde and identifies the slave with Siegfried – this is an impressive sequence but Tarantino should have worked imagery from the Siegfried saga into the film. Surely, he could have figured out a way to get Django to leap through a ring of fire while playing Wagner’s Magic Fire music – everything is set up for a sequence of that sort but the picture doesn’t deliver it. Schulz and Broomhilda speak German while Django waits outside the door not understanding what they are saying – this is a reprise of the famous scene in Inglourious Basterds in which the evil Gestapo office suddenly speaks English to keep a Jewish girl hiding under the floorboards from knowing what he is saying. But in Django Unchained, the scene goes nowhere – in fact, it is staged for a romantic, sentimental effect. (Tarantino seems perpetually surprised that there are people in the world who don’t speak English) During the interminable, Hong Kong action style shoot out near the end of the picture, Tarantino loses track of what the whole thing is about – we keep wondering: Where is Broomhilda during all this gunplay? And, then, when Django is forced to surrender and, garishly, threatened with castration – don’t worry he gets to shoot off the penis of the bad guy who makes this threat – Broomhilda is completely forgotten. We see her in a brief scene simply pitched into a bed in a house full of hillbillies who are about to be dispatched by our hero. In fact, Tarantino is strangely squeamish about the sexual use or misuse that has been made of Broomhilda – he seems queasy about showing any sexual violence and prefers lots of whippings and brandings, which, unlike his Italian models, he stages without the slightest frisson of sadomasochistic intent – this is curious: if you are going to swim in this sewer why not go all the way in. The picture is overlong, and has a completely implausible coda involving lots of dynamite. In a film about slavery, that is, essentially violence inflicted by white people on blacks, Tarantino saves his most brutal stuff for black on black violence, including the torture-murder of Samuel Jackson’s character. Notwithstanding my reservations about this film, I should remark that it has excellent Western scenery – peculiar and incongruous for a picture set in the Deep South. (Parts of the picture are obviously staged in Owens Valley east of Yosemite; the eroded badlands from Boettcher’s films and Star Wars make a couple of appearances and there are beautiful snowy high Sierra scenes.) The horses are pretty and some of the gunfights are imaginatively and effectively filmed. Tarantino is generous with incidental details – for instance, Schulz’s horse always whinnies and bows when introduced (but we wonder what happened to this impressive equine actor as the film progresses) – and there is a very funny Ku Klux Klan scene. It’s an okay action movie – far better than most of the stuff you are likely to see, but disappointing nonetheless.