Quentin Tarantino’s newest film, Django Unchained, has been billed and advertised as a Western, but that’s not entirely accurate.  It has horses and gunfights and a Sam Peckinpah mixed with Sergio Leone style, but it’s not really a Western.  For one thing, it takes place in the South, from Texas to Mississippi to Tennessee.  For another, it’s really a slavery revenge story.  And though it was generally enjoyable, it made me wish that Tarantino had chosen to make a true Western, if only to show what he could really do by sticking to the genre.

Django Unchained is the story of a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) who is bought by a bounty hunter, Schultz (Christoph Waltz), because he can recognize three men with bounties on their heads.  The first 1/3 of the film plays out like a classic bounty hunter Western, with Django learning the trade and a friendship forming between the two men.  We learn Django’s backstory, of the wife who was taken from him, setting the stage for the driving force behind the rest of the film.

Django’s wife, it turns out, was purchased by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who runs a plantation called Candieland where he forces slaves to fight to the death in Mandingo fights (named by Tarantino after the film in which they first appeared).  DiCaprio plays Candie as the most despicable villain possible, a man captivated by his own power and ability to subjugate those beneath him.  Django and Schultz put together an elaborate plan to infiltrate Candieland, posing as buyers for Mandingo fighters, in order to rescue Django’s wife.

Django Unchained is a stereotypical Tarantino movie.  It’s brilliantly filmed, filled with interesting cinematography, and packed with cameos from the Tarantino troop of regular actors.  It has an almost brilliant soundtrack, mixing instrumentals from Ennio Morricone with classic songs and more modern music, which only fails with the inclusion a couple of poorly timed rap songs.  It’s painfully violent: not as over the top as Kill Bill, but more in line with Inglourious Basterds, both brutal and realistic.  Much has been made of the brutality of the Mandingo fighting, which some have compared to torture porn, but despite its importance to the plot it only appears in one scene.

Tarantino’s trademark dialogue returns as well, though without the modern pop culture references, sticking instead to Alexandre Dumas.  There has been a lot of discussion of his gratuitous use of the n-word, but it honestly feels period appropriate, and makes sense in the way the characters use it.  Jamie Foxx gives a solid performance, given the one-dimensional nature of his character (mostly he just has to act like a badass).  Christoph Waltz returns to the high form he displayed in Basterds and gives Schultz a real sense of soul.  He also was born for Tarantino’s style of dialogue.  DiCaprio is morally disgusting as Candie, despite his Southern charm, but he’s fairly one-dimensional also.

The standout performer is Samuel L. Jackson.  He plays Calvin Candie’s house slave, Stephen, who is basically the power behind the throne at Candieland.  Jackson plays Stephen as the smartest, or at least most observant, person in the room, who has to play the role of an ignorant slave in order to keep up appearances.  He’s a master manipulator, and has no interest in upsetting the status quo.  He’s the sort of leach who benefits from the institution of slavery despite being a slave himself.  It’s a performance that’s both subtle and hilarious, and Stephen ends up being the real villain of the piece.

There has been much debate with the release of Django Unchained over a wide variety of topics, including depictions of slavery, use of the n-word, and violence.  These debates have covered both specific criticisms of Django Unchained and cinema as a whole.  I’m not going to delve into these issues very much.  I’m not bothered by the use of the n-word or violence in film, because I consider film a type of artwork, and an artist should never be afraid or feel restrained in presenting the art they want to present.  Many great works of art have used violence or insensitive language to tell wonderful stories, and those things should be off limit.  Besides, there is a big difference between showing something on screen and actually doing or saying the same thing to someone in real life, despite some people’s claims to the contrary.

As for the way Tarantino chooses to depict slavery in Django Unchained, my biggest complaint is with the quality of the story rather than the fact that Tarantino, as a white filmmaker, chose to make a slavery revenge story.  Tarantino can hardly be faulted for Hollywood’s failure to make compelling and serious films about slavery, just because he chose to center a less serious story on that dark time in America’s past.  At no time in the film, however, is slavery presented as anything other than an abomination, nor is the issue of slavery ever treated lightly.  In the end, I’m not bothered by Tarantino using slavery as the setting for his Spaghetti-Western style revenge story, nor would I be upset if he’d set it in the Holocaust or some other horrible tragedy, I only wish he’d had a better story to tell.

B