Whole tomes of literature could be written about Quentin Tarantino and his unique, heavily stylized-and highly influenced by the films of the past—way of making movies. He is practically a genre of his own and paved the way for a lot of copycat filmmakers who tried to imitate what he was doing, unsuccessfully. There is a reason after nearly thirty-five years of making movies it is still an event when he releases something new. He famously announced that he had ten films in him and that once those were released he would retire. As of this writing he has nine films out there—Kill Bill being considered one film that was forcibly cut into two—and word is out that he is now filming the 10th.
Django Unchained ushered in his brief love affair with making westerns. He would follow that up three years later with The Hateful Eight, a movie I list as my favorite from 2015, but that shift towards westerns all started in 2012 with Django. This film is billed as a revisionist western but it is also equally accurate to describe it as a movie about slavery and vengeance. As with most Tarantino films, it crosses over genres often, giving us a hefty dose of a lot of different genres and themes. It’s also aggressively violent, as only he could deliver. This is not a film to bring the little kids to, though if you are bringing children to see any Tarantino film you have made some seriously questionable choices as a parent.
Quentin paired up with Austrian-born actor Christoph Waltz to bring to life the decidedly nasty Colonel Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa, a character so vile, yet so charismatic, that we were drawn to his stage presence even as we hated him. In the years since that film released, Waltz had floundered around a bit with thankless roles in flops like The Green Hornet and Paul W. S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers. None of these films utilized his talents all that well, leaving fans wondering if he was just a one-note actor. As it turned out, Quentin Tarantino knew how to get the best out of him as was evidenced with his casting in Django Unchained.
In Django, he is playing German once again, though this time he is the polar opposite of his Inglorious Basterds character. Here, he is playing Dr. King Schultz, a dentist turned bounty hunter in the Wild West who frees Django Freeman (Jamie Foxx), a slave, in exchange for him identifying a couple of men Schultz has a bounty out for. After that bounty has been collected, Schultz learns that Django has a wife, Broomhilda “Hildi” von Shaft (Kerry Washington), who is a slave owned by “Monsieur” Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Schultz makes Django a deal: Assist him in collecting bounties throughout the current winter season and afterwards he, Schultz, will assist Django in freeing his wife.
The story follows these two men as Django gains the skills and confidence to handle a gun and collect bounties, then it transitions to the second half where the two head south to find Hildi, a plan in place to secure her freedom with the bare minimum of expense and danger. But of course something goes wrong and, as to be expected, shootouts and a lot of death occur before the inevitable conclusion arrives. This is a movie about vengeance but it goes down some unexpected paths on its way to that end.
As the name would suggest, this film is primarily inspired by the 1966 spaghetti western Django among other things. In fact, this film is a bit of a patchwork of themes and inspirations, specifically the western as well as blaxploitation movies. Tarantino doesn’t shy away from these roots, either. We will get brutal scenes of Mandingo fighting to the death, torture, even a graphic scene of dogs tearing a man to pieces. This film would be unbelievably bleak were it not for the craftsmanship Quentin has on full display. Even at its darkest there are moments of levity to lighten it a bit. Quentin is nothing if not a master of tone.
For instance, the scene where Django and Schultz execute the Brittle brothers, the men Django has been freed to identify. This sequence is filled with violence and butchery, capped off by the stunning visual of blood spraying across the cotton fields. Shortly after this, we get a sequence where a large group of inept KKK members try to extract their revenge on Schultz and Django. This scene is filled with absurdities, including one of the Klan members bemoaning that his wife hasn’t been given her due respect from the others for her sewing their hoods for them before the raid. Scenes like this elevate the darker moments and keep this film from being too grim.
Much later in the film, we are introduced to Calvin Candie. This is a character who, were he played by someone else, might have come across as just a bit too evil. By casting Leonardo DiCaprio in the role, it makes us feel conflicted about him. His character is so dark and disgusting, but DiCaprio brings his good-natured charm that made it hard to root against him in films like Catch Me if You Can or The Wolf of Wall Street. Consequently, we are shaken to the core when he reveals his explosive and sadistic temper when confronting Schultz and Django. There are no redeeming qualities to his character and we do hate him, but we are also charmed by him a bit.
On the flip side, Samuel L. Jackson is playing the lowest of the low, a house slave named Stephen who is just as brutal towards his own race as any of the white men are. While we don’t inherently want to dislike DiCaprio, the same cannot be said for Stephen. This is a man who is much smarter than he initially lets on, and it is because of him that things do not go smoothly with the attempt to acquire Hildi from Candie. In many ways, Stephen is far worse than his master, Calvin. His sadistic nature makes him the only black man Django will target in his quest for vengeance.
Jamie Foxx fits wonderfully into the mold of the vengeful former slave. Gone are his broad comedic chops seen on In Living Color and The Jamie Foxx Show, and instead we see a more dark comedic tone. When he and Schultz are discussing bounty hunting and he breaks it down to killing white men and getting paid for it, we laugh because of the brutal simplicity of that assessment, but there is the undertone of seriousness stemming from years of forced slavery beneath that humor. Foxx conveys both sides of that simultaneously, wringing out all the nuance and the broadness inherent in Tarantino’s script.
The final key role in this film is that of Hildi. Kerry Washington is a presence in her own right, and though she doesn’t get a lot of screentime, what she does have is important. She is the emotional center of the film, grounding Django and giving him a personal motivation beyond just killing slavers. We get her sprinkled in via flashbacks early on, giving us a taste of her character before her proper introduction, locked away in a sweatbox, naked and beaten down but not defeated. She was being punished for attempting to escape, showing that, even separated from Django, she was not going to accept her fate as a slave. This is topped off in the end with the visual of her looking amused while plugging her ears in anticipation of a massive explosion, blowing away everything that references her life of slavery right before her eyes.
This is, of course, a revenge fantasy. Tarantino is envisioning a world in which a former black slave extracts bloody revenge against the white slavers. Its roots in blaxploitation can be felt from the first shots as we see a line of beaten and battered, chained-up slaves being driven through the countryside like cattle by the hands of two grizzled white men on horses. Tarantino is also utilizing a jukebox full of anachronistic music to sell his message. This is a trope that he won’t finally break away from until his next film, The Hateful Eight. The music may be out of place in this setting, but it suits the film well anyway. Tarantino has a feel for music, and his movies always seem to have the best soundtracks because of it.
More than any other working director out there, Quentin Tarantino’s films are an event. If he were more prolific, that would probably not be the case. Even a Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese suffer a little from having regular releases; they can’t all be classics after all. Because Tarantino doesn’t overextend himself and just focuses on something he is passionate about, one film at a time, it allows him to really dial in on those things and give us something interesting to dissect every single time. Django Unchained is just such a film. Though he has yet to win an Oscar as a director—though there have been several films that should have gotten him that honor—lately he has been nominated for virtually every release. Only time will tell if that streak will be kept up with his tenth film or if the Academy will finally honor him with a competitive Oscar as a director or if he will end up like Sidney Lumet and be given an honorary Oscar for his lifetime work.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Stacey Sher, Reginald Hudlin, and Pilar Savone
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz (won)
Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino (won)
Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson
Best Sound Editing: Wylie Stateman
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Release Date: December 25, 2012
Running Time: 165 minutes
Rated R
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Dennis Christopher, James Remar, Michael Parks, and Don Johnson
Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
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