I have to face it: Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” is his most entertaining piece of moviemaking since “Pulp Fiction.” Some of it, particularly in the first half, is excruciatingly funny, and all of it has been brought off in a spirit of burlesque merriment—violent absurdity pushed to the level of flagrancy and beyond. That’s the place where Tarantino is happiest: out at the edge, playing with genre conventions, turning expectations inside out, ginning up the violence to exploitation-movie levels. The film is in two parts: the first half is a mock Western; the second is a mock-revenge melodrama about slavery, set in the deep South and ending in fountains of redemptive spurting blood. “Django” is a crap masterpiece, garrulous and repetitive, rich with jokes and cruelties, including some Old South cruelties that Tarantino invented for himself. It’s a very strange movie, luridly sadistic and morally ambitious at the same time, and the audience is definitely alive to it, revelling in its incongruities, enjoying what’s lusciously and profanely over the top.
What’s even stranger than the movie, however, is how seriously some of our high-minded critics have taken it as a portrait of slavery. Didn’t they notice that Tarantino throws in an “S.N.L.”-type skit about the Ku Klux Klan, who gather on their horses for a raid only to complain petulantly that they can’t see well out of their slitted white hoods? Or that Samuel L. Jackson does a roaring, bug-eyed parody of an Uncle Tom house slave in the second half? Or that the heroine of the movie, a female slave, is called Broomhilda von Shaft? Could Mel Brooks have done any better? (“Lili von Shtupp,” I suppose, is slightly better.) Yes, we are told that Broomhilda’s German mistress gave her the name and taught her German, but Tarantino is never more improbable than when he supplies explanations for his most bizarre fancies. Some of his characters spring from old genre movies, some spring full-blown from the master’s head. None have much basis in life, or in any social reality to speak of. (Remember the Jews who killed Nazis with baseball bats?) Yes, of course, there were killers in the Old West and cruel slave masters in the South—central characters in the movie—but Tarantino juices everything into gaudy pop fantasy. I enjoyed parts of “Django Unchained” very much, but I’m surprised that anyone can take it as anything more than an enormous put-on.
Much has already been written about the movie, but I would like to add a few notes of appreciation and complaint (don’t read past the middle of this post if you haven’t seen the movie).
1. Tarantino the Rhetorician
Tarantino loves elaborate rhetoric—the extremes of politeness, the exquisitely beautiful word, the lengthy, ridiculous argument that becomes funny precisely because it’s so entirely beside the point. Remember the stiff formalities among the criminals in “Reservoir Dogs”? Or the early conversation between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in “Pulp Fiction”? The two men are about to kill some punks who owe drug money to their boss. They stop to chat. The topic at hand: a man massaged the feet of the boss’s wife and, as punishment, was tossed out of a window. Is massaging a woman’s feet an offense worthy of death, like adultery? The thugs have quite a dispute about the matter; they could be bishops at the Council of Trent arguing the fine points of Church liturgy. Then they go ahead and blow the punks away. That’s the essential Tarantino joke—discourse and mayhem, punctilio and murder, linked together.
“Django” is set in 1858 and thereafter. A German bounty hunter, King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), poses as a dentist and spins around Texas, speaking perfect English. King Schultz is a mannerly scoundrel. When he encounters some white men transporting slaves through the dark woods, he says, “Among your company, I’m led to believe, there is a specimen I hope to acquire.” After shooting one of the white men, who howls in pain, he says, “If you could keep your caterwauling down to a minimum, I would like to speak to young Django.” Just as he did in “Inglorious Basterds,” in which Waltz was a polite S.S. killer, Tarantino writes fancy talk for this self-amused, highly elocutionary Austrian actor. The added comedy here is that the foreigner is so much more articulate than the tobacco-stained, scraggly-assed, lunkhead Americans he meets everywhere. He’s the Old World instructing the New in the fine points of etiquette and speech while enjoying the savage opportunities of the Wild West.
King Schultz teams up with Django, a slave he liberates, played by the growling Jamie Foxx (who doesn’t always seem to be in on the joke). The two travel around the West, killing wanted men for money. Schultz flimflams everybody, and in some cases shoots the person he’s teasing, popping him in the chest with a tiny pistol. Up until the middle of the movie, Tarantino comes close to moral realism: the cold-hearted Schultz is a complete cynic; he does what he does for money. We can accept that as some sort of truth. But then Schultz risks his life to help Django find his slave wife, who has been sold to a plantation owner in Mississippi, and the movie becomes nonsensical. The vicious comic cynicism of the first half gives way to vicious unbelievable sentiment in the second half. The murderous bounty hunter has a heart of gold.
by David Denby, New Yorker | Read more:
Photo: Django Unchained
