Tarantino pulls no punches
Django Unchained (cert. 18) puts Quentin Tarantino back in the mainstream, with five Oscar nominations. Some of his recent work has been less accessible, or even deliberately made in “B” movie style.
The story is of a black slave in Texas, Django (Jamie Foxx), two years before the American Civil War, who is liberated by a bounty hunter (Christopher Waltz), doubling as a travelling dentist, Dr King Schultz.
Schultz has sought out Django because he is witness to a murder and can identify the killers, enabling Schultz to collect his reward. Their joint quest leads to an unlikely buddy relationship, in which Django becomes a willing partner in the enterprise of taking wanted men, dead or alive. So far as Schultz is concerned, dead is easier, preferably with a long-range rifle.
Their mission takes them across the deep south, where people have never seen “a n***** on a horse”, especially not one garbed in a bright blue outfit, at his own choice, as Schultz’s valet. Deceptive offers of financial gain are enough to relax the normal rules for southern gentry like Big Daddy (Don Johnson), but when he turns the town out to pursue them in Ku Klux Klan-style hoods, it leads to a major bloodbath, only marginally diluted by the farcical argument about the poorly-cut holes in the sacks that form the hoods.
Django’s deal with Schultz includes getting his help to recover his wife Broomhilda (Kerr y Washington). Both ran away from their plantation and were sold separately.
Their owner had German connections, hence Broomhilda’s name, and that she can speak German, really a plot device so she can speak privately to Schultz in his native tongue. They trace her to the ownership of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose Candieland plantation in Mississippi is one of the largest.
The scheme to buy her back depends on more deception - if only to avoid alerting Candie to the purpose of the transaction - and it all goes horribly wrong, thanks to the intervention of Stephen (Samuel L Jackson), an old black guy who is not merely a trusted servant but apparently on first name terms, privately, with his master.
It pulls no punches with its portrayal of slavery, and is a timely reminder of the abolitionist cause behind this week’s major release, Lincoln. Spike Lee has suggested it is disrespectful to his ancestors, and all who suffered in the holocaust of slavery, but is it degrading?
Slavery was degrading, and Jamie Foxx’s Django might be seen almost as “noble savage”, in contrast to Jackson’s subservient and obsequious Stephen, but it’s hard to see the whole film as anything other than rich white men getting their comeuppance. The spurting blood and other violence are rather over-the-top, but Tarantino is rather good at that sort of thing.
It’s a long film at two-and-a-half hours but rarely leaves a gap in the pace, and it might be worth hanging around for the brief quip after the (thankfully short) credits. How likely some of it is may be an issue, but perhaps not even DiCaprio gets close to some of the mindset of the slaveowners.
Steve Parish