Django Unchained

                        Django Unchained

 In Quentin Tarantino’s films over the past ten years, someone horribly wronged plans a bloody revenge against the perpetrators.  In Kill Bill, Uma Thurman pursued five people who had shot her and killed everyone at her wedding rehearsal In a two part story.  In Inglourious Basterds Jewish soldiers killed and scalped villainous Nazis and a major stem of the plot focused on a Jewish girl whose family had been killed by the Nazis planning her revenge against Nazi leadership in a movie theatre.  It was a complex film despite having a straightforward theme and I thought it stood with the best of Tarantino’s work.  It mixed genres but was most memorably an unconventional adventure film. 

To give a sense of perspective let me quickly state how I liked other Tarantino films.  Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds are to me masterpieces of plotting, dialogue, original characters and their motivations.  I have only seen Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown once and liked them but was not too drawn in and am in no hurry to watch them again.  Death Proof (the longer version) was fun but I would only strongly recommend the last twenty minutes or so.  The Tarantino films I love I do so enough that I get pretty excited each time I learn a new film of his is coming out.

Fair warning, this discussion is full of spoilers so if you have not seen the film you want to avoid this until afterwards.  

In his new film, Django Unchained Tarantino tells a revenge story about slavery.  Spielberg’s film Lincoln, which came out around the same time, is about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery.  Despite a focus on stopping it, no slavery is shown in that film, though the beatings administered to slaves is described by an ex-slave.  Django Unchained teaches the audience a lot about it.  The story has been filmed as a Spaghetti Western with a hero similar to Clint Eastwood’s character in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy.  In this film, the villains are slave owners, like the Nazis, some of the cruelest people ever to exist.  There are some scenes of brutality toward the victims which feel authentic, designed to make the audience hate the villains. We also as in the other film see very detailed scenes of the revenge being plotted out and executed.  However, while I loved Inglourious Basterds and was with it all the way and loved the second part of Kill Bill (the first I liked but the second looked at the characters in more depth), this film for me is more of a mixed bag.  I think those films had stronger scripts whereas this one suffers from some structural issues, especially in the third act, which feels particularly self indulgent, despite it having won an Oscar for best original screenplay.

First I would like to point out the things I liked, of which there are many.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays a deliciously snide Southern Plantation owner with the memorable name of Calvin Candie.  It is a terrifically colorful role for him.  He is charming and sadistic and DiCaprio, who has played more complex leading men lately (Inception, Shutter Island) has a ball in the role.

Samuel L. Jackson plays a vicious old house slave.  He had a lot of fun as a wily old man who is revealed to be pretending to be crippled and hard of hearing for as long as it benefited him.  Jackson seems to play a lot of parts based on the bad assed persona he established in Pulp Fiction and it has been a long time since I have seen him in a part this rich.

The film is worth watching for the second act alone.  It has long suspenseful scenes loaded with great dialogue, a Tarantino specialty, especially the dinner scene.

The Dukes of Hazzard was one of my favorite shows as a child and I loved seeing Tom Wopat in a small role as the marshal in the first act and he had a great scene with Christoph Waltz.

Tarantino’s unintelligible (deliberately?) character’s death by bullets mixed with dynamite.  I did not like the character but his offing was fantastic.

Christoph Waltz’ character, Dr. Martin Schultz.  Waltz is playing a similarly verbose but much more moral character than in Inglourious Basterds.  He completely shines and proves himself a perfect match for Tarantino’s dialogue.  I particularly liked the scenes in which he and DiCaprio are chewing the fat.  Dr. Schultz comes to the film already hating slavery but he grows to despise even more in his as he interacts with Candie and sees the Mandingo fighting and the slave who is killed by Candie’s dogs, which is his first real exposure to it.

The scene in which Django guns down an old killer from a distance in front of his son is very effective, recalling a similar scene in Kill Bill.

The film gives us a background, through Django on slavery and teaches us about the different hierarchies.  I realized I knew more about the efforts to free the slaves than about their existence.  Beforehand it never occurred to me that they could have different statuses.  I knew the men had worked in the fields in plantations and many of the women worked in the houses though some had worked outside.  I knew they had been whipped for varying reasons but really understood little else about the horror of their lives.

The Mandingo fighting scene is disturbing and feels authentic and is played for the proper impact.  DiCaprio’s and Waltz’ varying reactions add much to it.  It is the beginning of Waltz’ character’s personal disgust for DiCaprio which grows even more when he sees DiCaprio sic dogs on one of his slaves.

Michael Parks’ grizzled old character who may be an ancestor to Earl MacGraw, a corrupt Texas Ranger who appears in many other Tarantino films.  

All the characters seem to have the right length of hair for the period and I enjoyed how Waltz was always fingering his thick moustache.

Tarantino’s films often have some unspoken background plotting.  For example in Kill Bill we never see why the group of killers disbanded or why things are tense between Bill and Bud (perhaps the two are related).  In Pulp Fiction Butch and Vincent do not like each other and the film never states why.  Calvin Candie seems to have an incestuous relationship with his sister since at one point he kisses her on the lips and refers to her the way a lover would.  Also Dr. Schultz never explains (or I missed it) why he cannot stand listening to Beethoven.  It seems a little unpatriotic of him if you ask me.

I like a lot of the musical choices, and was especially fond of the use of the song I Got a Name by Jim Croce and the accompanying montage of Django and Dr. Schultz traveling through the Western landscape.  It identified Django as a character who was now making something of himself and the visuals played perfectly with the music.

There however were many things I did not like, which has rarely been the case with the Tarantino films I have seen before.

The film is overly bloody.  It has never bothered me in a Tarantino film before (though I wasn’t crazy about the excesses in Kill Bill Vol. 1) and perhaps the recent Newton school shootings influence this (this is being written in early 2013) but every time someone is shot the blood gushes out of the bodies like a fountain and the quantity seems about double from his other films.  A lot of people are shot in the head so this only adds to the effect.  The violence on the slaves felt horrific without being gratuitous (ie when the dogs kill the escaped slave most of it is off screen) but the excessive blood from the shooting scenes is what truly bothered me.  I do not know if since this is Tarantino’s version of a spaghetti western if the extra blood is supposed to represent pasta sauce but I thought it was tasteless.

The entire third act contains little beyond Django killing people for almost no reason than to satisfy bloodlust.  He saves his wife Broomhilda easily (no one is guarding her directly) and the final scene in the Candie house is completely devoid of subtlety as Django just savagely guns people down.  There is no suspense at all since he has the drop on everyone.  After all of the cleverly written scenes earlier to see the film end with a massacre perpetuated by the hero was too much.  

It is not just the violence that disturbs me but the way it is presented.  In Inglourious Basterds The Bear Jew beats a Nazi to death with a baseball bat but there is a purpose behind it (to intimidate his lower ranking officers to reveal an ambush location).  Also that act is largely off screen.  Hitler is shown shot violently but it’s Hitler so I was willing to go with it.  In the Kill Bill movies Uma Thurman’s The Bride also goes on a killing spree but everyone she attacks is able to defend themselves and the fight scenes entertain while also being cathartic.  Kill Bill Vol. 2’s final battle was more of an emotional face off than a physical one (though the physical one was very cleverly staged with both characters sitting down and fighting with swords across a table).  Also, The Bride never celebrates after her kills and has a great scene in the bathroom after finally killing Bill where she is alternately laughing and crying which felt very real.  Django has no such regrets and his wife has no reaction to seeing her husband gun down so many people.  Treating Django as a brutal mannequin who at the end of the film smiles and even does tricks with his horse right after unleashing such carnage diminishes him as a character even if the people he did this to had it coming.

I would have enjoyed more interaction between Django and Broomhilda.  There is a brief flashback of them running away and her being whipped but the film spends an hour and a half building up to their reunion and when Broomhilda finally sees Django she just faints.  Then at the end when he rescues her they have a big kiss but there little is said between them to suggest a strong connection.

Dr. Schultz seems too smart to gun down Candie the way he does in those circumstances just to make a point.  It might have worked better if he had shaken Candie’s hand and made the remark about Alexandre Dumas at that point and then somehow a gunfight starts because Django, who has a much more personal stake in the events, is set off.

Part of the reason the third act is so unsatisfying is both Waltz and DiCaprio are absent.  Django is too much of a monosyllabic character to drive the plot of a Tarantino film himself even though I see the idea was to set the final idea was to stage a confrontation between Django and Stephen.  

Even though Stephen describes the life of a miner in a pretty loathsome way the sequence in which Django is taken by the miners and then escapes was a completely needless detour after Django was captured.  Since he manages to get free without much hassle I think a creative escape from  Candie’s employees themselves (or from hanging upside down) would have worked better a la The Bride’s escape from the coffin in Kill Bill Vol. 2 (in which an extended flashback reveals how The Bride learned the skills that happen to help her escape).

I did not like song that accompanied Django’s first shootout in the house at the end of the second act but the quantity of blood being spilled in that scene already had me in a bad mood.

Some other points:

I read a draft of the script which gives more background on Broomhilda’s story and show shows how she became one of Candie’s slaves.  It is an interesting read but disturbing.  She had been bought for an insecure young man and she was forced to be his lover.  Despite having to have sex with him the young man and his family treat her well but then Candie manages to win her away in a card game with the young man.

I was glad this sequence, and a couple of other scenes that show Broomhilda being sexually assaulted, were removed.  It is certainly hinted in the finished film that she occasionally has to fulfill sexual duties but it would be going too far to show it so Tarantino did show some discretion.

The other draft showed Django making the final showdown more of a contest but it was not written particularly well though it was a definite improvement over the final version.  If I were charged with the task of coming up with something I probably would have had them be discovered trying to escape and slowly have Django take people out while trying to get out and lead it to a face to face with Stephen, who would presumably also be armed.

So there are my thoughts on Django Unchained.  If the film were on TV I might keep it on to catch the pretty good first act, very good second act but I would turn it off afterwards.  I would not buy it and would only recommend it to others with caution.  It is not bad film, but the weak parts keep it from being a very good one.  I hope Tarantino uses a little less blood in whatever film he does next. ***