Quentin Tarantino (2012)
It isn’t difficult to reduce Django Unchained to ingredients in the Inglourious Basterds recipe. In Tarantino’s previous film, Jewish-American vigilantes took on Nazis; in this new one, an African-American hero-avenger (with the help of a German) defeats Southern slave owners. Inglourious Basterds subjugated World War II facts to cinema-centric fantasy (Hitler was among the fatalities in the climactic movie theatre shootout); Django Unchained places American racial history in the framework of a spaghetti Western/Southern. You can understand why Spike Lee deplores Tarantino’s trivialisation of slavery, even if you can’t understand so well why he refused even to see the film. In Basterds, Tarantino had spectacularly violent things done to the villains – with the audience not only expressing laughing approval but perhaps experiencing too a thrill of moral self-approbation because the villains were Nazis. The same thing happens in Django when white baddies get shot to pieces etc. Yet the effect for me was very different. The killings, frequent and frequently shocking, are, as usual in Tarantino, executed with nerveless panache. The audible enjoyment of these highlights (they always are highlights) is no less disturbing than it was in Inglourious Basterds, even as you realise you’re also glad to see the majority of the casualties getting their comeuppance. Yet it seemed to me that the violence in the last half hour or so (Django runs 165 minutes but doesn’t feel long) was not so much cathartic as a resumption of normal Tarantino service – and distracts him from the complexities that his imagination as a writer have led him into. People in the audience may be relieved by the blood-letting for similar reasons.
Something very different from Inglourious Basterds is the relationship between Django (Jamie Foxx) and his mentor Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), which dominates the first hour or so of Django Unchained and, because it’s so strong, the remainder of the movie too. The two meet on a dark night in Texas in 1858. Django is among a group of shackled slaves being driven by a pair of nasty siblings, the Speck Brothers. They’re stopped by Schultz, a dentist from Düsseldorf who now makes a living chiefly as a bounty hunter. Schultz wants to buy one of the slaves; asking Django what he knows about another pair of brothers – the Brittles – for whom Schultz is carrying a warrant, he displeases one of the Specks, who points a gun at Schultz. The good dentist kills him instantly and leaves the other Speck at the mercy of the now unshackled slaves, who blow his head off. Django says he can identify the Brittle Brothers; Schultz offers him his freedom in exchange for help in tracking them down. This is the start of the partnership between Schultz and Django, who becomes, in effect, his apprentice. Schultz also wants to help Django find and free his wife Broomhilda from a Mississippi plantation. The German Schultz is understandably intrigued by Django’s wife’s name. Schultz’s telling of the story of Siegfried’s quest, which sets Django’s own quest in motion, is a fine illustration of how well Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz work together. It’s also a subtle expression of Schultz’s discovery that he cares more about Django than he anticipated when he first bought him; and of the black man’s gradual emergence from incredulity that the white man can have any decent motives.
Tarantino’s frame of cinematic and other cultural reference is enjoyably rich. Movies that are obvious sources of themes and details in this one include (in chronological order): Hercules Unchained (1959), an Italian fantasy in which the hero escapes from enslavement to an evil master; Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966), an exceptionally violent spaghetti Western (the eponymous hero is played by Franco Nero, who has a cameo in Tarantino’s film); Angel Unchained (1970), made shortly after Easy Rider, in which a biker exacts revenge on a group of rednecks; and Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo (1975), the only one of these movies that I’ve seen, which features a slave trained to fight other slaves. Django wears anachronistic shades from about halfway through and says anachronistic things like ‘What’s not to like?’ from an even earlier stage. The blue costume he chooses for his arrival at the Candyland plantation in Mississippi, where the action in the second half of Django Unchained takes place, is supposedly inspired by Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy. It anticipates the plumage of Django’s outfit in the movie’s final sequence, by which point he’s become less a Western than a fully-fledged blaxploitation hero. Once Django’s out of slavery, Schultz gives him the surname Freeman; it’s no less significant that the surname of the wife Django’s searching for is Shaft.
Django’s Blue Boy outfit is ridiculous: when one of the other slaves gives him a tour of Candyland and he explains that he’s a free man, she replies, ‘You mean you wanna dress like that?’ The sequence in the film featuring the Ku Klux Klan is a more expansive piece of comedy; it’s also typical of the bewildering concoctions that can result from Tarantino’s cavalier attitude towards history – for a start, the Klan didn’t even exist until the mid-1860s. Tarantino makes their massed ranks on horseback a frightening sight and their appearance is accompanied by Dies Irae on the soundtrack. Then the Klansmen find that their hoods don’t fit (the face of Jonah Hill is revealed from behind one of them) and Tarantino has switched into territory that calls to mind Woody Allen (the would-be robber whose hold-up note is illegible to the bank tellers in Take the Money and Run) or Mel Brooks. It’s self-indulgent but also effective in that it makes the Klan ludicrous. (It reminds you of what Brooks said in the recent BBC Imagine documentary about the Jewish influence on the Broadway musical – that making Hitler ridiculous has been one of his main comedic aims in life.)
Tarantino revels in what he’s doing in this movie. You know it from the start – from the colour and font of the titles that recall other movies in the genre(s) he’s drawing on. You know it from the eclectic soundtrack, which includes original music by Ennio Morricone and the (glorious) theme tune for the original Django movie. You know it from the flamboyant cleverness of the characters’ names – as well as Dr King Schultz and Broomhilda von Shaft, there’s ‘Monsieur’ Calvin J Candie, Mr Stonecipher, Amerigo Vessepi (the Nero character). This is all essentially showing off but I found it easy to exult in Tarantino’s exuberant talent here as much as he does. And there are splendid artistic touches in the comedy – Django and Schultz’s target practice on a snowman (whitey), the giant trademark tooth attached to Schultz’s buggy. The film, photographed by Robert Richardson, looks wonderful throughout.
Django is a difficult part and not just because other actors have roles which are, except in sartorial terms, showier. The man with no name is the centre of the Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns: Tarantino’s protagonist is anything but anonymous but ‘the D is silent’ and Django has much less say to than the other major characters – he has to keep his counsel (as, at one point, Schultz anxiously advises him to do). Jamie Foxx often gives you an idea of what Django is thinking but he’s not otherwise very expressive. This isn’t a problem in the first part of Django Unchained when his taciturn reserve complements Schultz’s dynamic wordiness – it becomes more of an issue when the action moves to Candyland. The pace slows at this stage and the film never quite recovers the unrelenting brio of the first hour, especially after Schultz’s death, although there are still some strong episodes. Dr King Schultz is one of Tarantino’s finest creations, certainly since Jackie Brown, not least because he really develops as a character. Schultz describes slavery and bounty hunting as kindred – cash for flesh – but he comes to discover that the former is much harder to take. It’s hard to believe Tarantino didn’t write this role for Chistoph Waltz (or the role of Stephen, Calvin Candie’s house slave, for Samuel L Jackson). Waltz misfired in Carnage but he’s marvellous here, relishing his lines just as Schultz enjoys demonstrating his excellent, slightly pompous command of the English language. When things go beyond what Schultz expected at Candyland – when he’s surprised both by what happens and by his own reaction to it – Christoph Waltz’s concealment of Schultz’s feelings is brilliantly witty and touching.
There’s so much emotional depth to Waltz’s line readings at Candyland that Leonardo DiCaprio as Candie inevitably comes off badly in comparison – this smiley villain isn’t sufficiently dangerous underneath. DiCaprio is better than usual but the result of his constructing a character here (he does manage that) is what one’s seen happen when (more accomplished) actors impersonate a well-known real-life character – when so much effort goes into getting the voice and mannerisms right that there’s nothing else there. People in the audience laughed when Samuel L Jackson’s Stephen got anxiously excited – partly, I think, because Jackson is almost too powerful. He’s incredibly vivid in all his scenes but nothing matches Stephen’s first look when he sees Django and Schultz arriving at Candyland and senses the threat they pose to the established order. Along with Schultz, the horrifyingly loyal slave Stephen is the outstanding character of Django Unchained: Stephen has channelled his resentment of a rotten system into living to sustain it. There aren’t good parts for women in this movie but Kerry Washington does well as Broomhilda.
There are things in Django Unchained that seemed to me misjudgments or were at least puzzling. I didn’t get why the townspeople reacted as they did to Schultz and Django’s killing of the local sheriff (although Schultz’s taking time to enjoy a beer before doing the deed is amusing). A sequence featuring three dim mining company employees whom Django tricks is a drag: the weird accents of this trio (played by John Jarratt, Michael Parks and Tarantino himself) are merely disruptive and the literally explosive climax to the episode comes as a relief in the wrong way. (It’s a relief in the right way when the closing credits confirm that no horses were harmed in the making of the film.) I thought it would have been more effective if Stephen had died in the house fire at Candyland instead of being shot in the kneecaps but I suspect that Tarantino felt more comfortable dispatching him in this characteristic way, that he was almost unnerved by the shocking power of what he’d created in Stephen. The bloodbaths in the film are a problem because Tarantino seems to think they’re the essence of his film-making but there’s an awful lot – and a lot more than spaghetti arrabbiata – that’s exciting in Django Unchained. The movie is full of deaths but its vibrancy gives it more life than any other American film of 2012.
27 January 2013