Django Unchained

I saw Django Unchained on Sunday. It averages out to a mediocrity. It's part good, part bad, part ugly, part boring.


The leads are good. Colonel Landa (Christoph Walz) is his old self as Dr. King (get it?) Schultz, a bounty hunter with an unexplained past as a dentist. His uncanny marksmanship demanded a change of vocation. Without the "dead" part of "dead or alive," he'd still be a dentist. Jamie Foxx is Django. This being Tarantino, there is a comic book aspect to the characters and the story, and Foxx plays Django's transformation from slave on a chain gang to avenging, sharp-shooting, superhero lover with all of the style the outrageous plot demands.

This is a movie that cannot be spoiled if you have seen Glorious Basterds. If you're a purist when it comes to such things, stop now. Its good moments are few enough that I rather hate to serve them to you here. Its ending in a display of pyrotechnic vengeance was foreshadowed by Basterds.

Basterds and Django reinvent classic forms: the war movie and the Western. It's high time they did, and you'd think Tarantino is just the man to do it. He is, but must he luxuriate in every shot of a man walking? Must we see Django, the instant marksman, shooting a snowman repeatedly? Tarantino's dialog is losing its touch. "The D is silent," Django says. That made it into a trailer because it's one of the better lines of the film. When the writing drives the action, as when Leonardo Di Caprio is talking about his "property," Tarantino's touch is as sure as ever. But in the interminable scenes between the ones where stuff is happening, it's just workmanlike. The best scene in the movie, for me, is the introductory scene between Dr. King (Schultz) and Django, with King quizzing Django a bit about what it's like to be a slave, and at the same time telling him how the next couple of weeks will go down. He owns Django, after all. "I feel guilty," he explains. The retelling of the South and the Western begins here. If any slave girl should get slapped by a white woman in this movie... well, let's just say this movie isn't going to end with a soliloquy by a white woman, and leave it at that.

It's not a Western. It's a Southern. The time is 1858. The story does not move out of the slaveholding South. It starts in Texas, and instead of staying in the West, Mississippi is its first destination. Enormous letters spell it out. This genre tends to start somewhere godforsaken and move to someplace cursed. By sending the Western to Mississippi, Tarantino wrenches the wheel and points the story in his new direction. Everything follows from this early indicator. It's going to be all damnation, all the time.

A plantation owner is explaining to a slave that Django is a free man. He is Dr. King (Schultz)'s valet, and he's not to be treated like a slave. "Am I supposed to treat him like he's white?" "No." They settle on treating him like the idiot in town.

Monsieur Candie (who doesn't speak French, but prefers to be addressed that way), played by a Leonardo DiCaprio, slams his hand on the table and cuts himself. The scene is a tour de force-- Tarantino at his best-- with characters locked in verbal and mortal combat simultaneously. Through it all, Candie, growing more and more outraged, literally has blood on his hands.

Django Unchained is more tension-filled than Inglourious Basterds. Django is an avenging hero in the middle of slavery. Basterds was about genocide, and had a couple of scenes with individual Jews threatened by the Nazis, but the tension in Django is better. Slaves are abused in escalating fashion throughout the movie, and as the crimes mount, the clarion call of this The Wind Done Gone, this opposite of Birth of a Nation reaches its crescendo when Candie brags, "This is my property, to do with as I choose." That theme-- property, and ownership-- is woven through Django Unchained and ties it to a frame that is cast into fire.

Wow, it's long, though. And not just the running time. Scene after scene is indulgently long. One of the most dramatic scenes opens with a shot of impressively spurred boots walking across a floor. You can picture it already, and hear those spurs jangling, see the boots carry their owner arrogantly into the scene. You become aware, watching it, that you're watching this guy's boots. By far it is not the only time that you get tired of somebody walking through a scene, or looking at something, or talking. Talking slowly. Killing slowly. It's like watching the Yankees play the Red Sox. (If you're a baseball fan, you know what I'm talking about). Sure, it's dramatic, but must it be dragged out like this?

Implausibility in a story like this should further the myth. But Django gives us too long to consider that this pair strike down a remarkable number of men with only wanted posters by way of authorization. The story reminds me of the role playing games I played as a teenager, where the heroes are created out of thin air in a hostile territory and move about, dispatching baddies, without organized consequences. In other words, it's not just a movie, and it's not just a comic book: It's juvenile. And it's repetitive. How many times can you wave a wanted poster at an angry mob to keep them from hanging you? A lot of times, apparently.

Be prepared for naked racism. Obviously. This story will not be sanitized into a story about any white nobility. Don't get your hopes up for any redemption, although there is some drama along those lines. This is the movie to make you think about how much you loved Gone With the Wind. You're going to see people treated like property. You're going to see them bristle. You're going to see them submit. You're going to see movie vengeance.