MasterChugs Theater: ‘Django Unchained’

Let me get right to the point: Django Unchained is easily Quentin Tarantino’s worst movie. Oooh, such a controversial statement. Allow me to clarify that a bit: it’s still a great movie.

Here is the particular brilliance of Quentin Tarantino: He can rip a horrific page out of history — slavery in the pre-Civil War era South — put it through his favorite grindhouse mill, kick in biting comedy whose sheer audacity and searing irony demands laughter, and yet never for a moment diminish or let us forget the brutal reality.

It’s a brutal movie at times and it’s a hilarious movie at times. Yeah, that sounds like standard Tarantino.

The film’s essentially simple plot begins in Texas in 1858, when a somewhat comical, eloquent dentist-turned-bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz, played masterly by Christoph Waltz, accosts a couple of slave traders with an offer to buy one of their charges, Django, whom he needs to identify a particular quarry. After a couple of shootings, accompanied by the smooth talking Schultz’s justifications — he calmly kills a sheriff, for example, then explains to the vengeful townspeople that the man was actually wanted for murder — he trains Django in his profession. In the face of hatred and bigotry, he and Django become friends as well as partners and together proceed to conduct a profitable business in legalized murder.

Django’s quest for his wife, Broomhilda, separated from him by slave owners, leads the pair to Mississippi and Candieland, the splendid mansion of the wealthy slave owner Calvin Candie, where the script reaches a grand climax that mixes the violent with the mawkish. Typically, the director paints himself into a corner and seems not to know how to end his movie, so he simply keeps piling on incidents and repeating himself, very like his methods in Inglourious Basterds, which means the picture runs for nearly three hours.

Playing against those boyish good looks, Leonardo DiCaprio makes Candie a charismatic monster; it’s a pleasure to see him branch out from low-hanging-fruit roles of leading men. Here, he demonstrates just how well he can pull off portraying a loathsome cur that’s enjoyable enough to almost make you forget he’s a horribly racist man. However, the scene-stealer is Tarantino go-to guy Samuel L. Jackson as Candie’s right-hand man, Stephen, a slave who’s averse to any change in the master-slave dynamic. With his stooped posture, baffled expression and weirdly righteous outrage, Jackson makes Stephen the film’s most fascinating character. He’s also almost unsettling and nearly uncomfortable to watch at times, which makes him all the more watchable.

He’s certainly more interesting than Django, a stock, one-dimensional Tarantino character with a single-minded purpose. The Oscar-winning Foxx expresses Django’s simmering and eventually seething fury with steely-eyed intensity, but the role doesn’t allow for much more than standard vengeance, reducing to him to more of a background character with very little command presence. Maybe he’s homaging Clint Eastwood’s Man Without a Name, but it’s not very clear. Even in the fun moments, there’s rarely any bursts of elation from the man.

He’s definitely out-shined by Waltz’s kooky dentist/bounty hunter/German that’s obligated to aid Siegfried. Seriously, Motion Picture Academy, give this man an Oscar, NOW. As in Inglourious Basterds, Christoph Waltz holds the movie together, practically with his bare hands. His precise and ironic diction, flavored with a slight German accent, his droll character — he travels in a small coach with a gigantic molar on the roof — contrast nicely with the surprising abruptness of his quick draw and efficient dispatching of his quarry; he also demonstrates a certain necessary cold-bloodedness, perhaps left over from his Nazi officer in the previous film.

Since this is quintessential Tarantino, there is never much time between blood-spilling. Somehow, he and cinematographer Robert Richardson have created a palette that connects the visual sensibility of the Old South and the Old West seamlessly — the blood is just as red and bountiful in both places.

One of Tarantino’s great strengths, and weaknesses, as a filmmaker is the way he falls in love with his actors and his ideas. It makes him reluctant to let go of certain bits and means that others go on too long — often it’s the highly choreographed action scenes that he can’t bear to end. I can just imagine the pained expression Tarantino gets when he’s forced to make cuts.

Tarantino’s smudgy fingerprints are all over every frame of Django Unchained, but ironically, he breaks the film’s hypnotic spell by making a return to acting in a supporting role that just burdens him with a foreign accent. It should be noted though that I literally LOL’ed upon seeing him on the screen, but the laughs turned into cringes when he talked. He simply isn’t a good enough performer for his presence to be anything but a distraction in a rip-roaring crowd-pleaser this consistently great.

That’s actually a testament to the movie. Quentin Tarantino isn’t good enough an actor for his own movie. That’s a damn good movie and it is.

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