(also reviewed for Folio Weekly)
Stars Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz, Kerry Washington. Directed and written by Quentin Tarantino. R. 165 minutes. Critic’s grade: B+
Is Quentin Tarantino’s highly anticipated “Django Unchained” a road movie, a buddy flick, a Southern-twisted Western, a love story, a revenge fantasy, a revved-up exercise in exploitation, or a loopy wish-fulfillment retelling of a shameful chapter in American history?
Short answer: Yes. It’s all of the above. The film, a disturbing and provocative if undeniably entertaining blend of action, comedy and drama bolstered with sterling performances by Jamie Foxx, Leonard DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz and Kerry Washington, also carries the distinction of being the most violent mainstream movie of the year. The body count is awfully high, the murders are graphic and gruesome, and the blood frequently splatters and spurts, in a manner reminiscent of that of Sam Peckinpah, the revered, once controversial director of violent Western spree “The Wild Bunch,” among other less celebrated films.
Given the recent horrific murders in Connecticut, “Django Unchained” also has to count as Exhibit Hollywood in the coming attack on ultra-violent movies, television and video games. Tarantino, of course, already has begged to differ with those suggesting the presence of direct connections between real-life carnage and the cinematic kind. And let’s not forget the film’s status as a big-screen project with an unusually liberal use of the “N” word, which is uttered more than 100 times. The language retains the power to shock, and rightfully so. Yet it’s perfectly apropos for the characters, and setting.
The time is 1858, “somewhere in Texas,” during the run-up to the Civil War, as titles reveal at the start of another of the year’s exercises in narrative expansiveness. With a running time of two hours and 45 minutes, it hardly feels like that long. As was the case with so many Tarantino projects — lesser films like this one, as well as 2009’s far superior “Inglourious Basterds,” another ultra-violent revenge fantasy — the movie is fueled by a blend of movie-revisionist quirkiness and old-fashioned adrenaline.
The film’s start reveals the beginning of a beautiful friendship, as Dr. King Schultz (Waltz), a dentist turned travelling bounty hunter, uses his wits and astonishingly quick and accurate marksmanship to off overseers of a slave chain gang. Schultz, like the Nazi officer played by Waltz in “Inglourious Basterds,” at first comes off as an exceedingly genteel fellow, using his oddly modulating, German-accented voice to say things like “allow me to unring this bell” and “dubious proposition.” Moments later, he administers lethal gunshots. While Schultz’s sympathies are admirable — he abhors the practice of buying and selling humans — his motives aren’t entirely pure, as he taps Django (Foxx) as an accomplice in a very profitable bounty business.
After multiple murders, beautifully photographed Western landscapes and an extended comic sequence involving Jonah Hill and a group of hilariously clumsy and addled Ku Klux Klan types, the pals end up at a plantation called Candyland, run with an iron fist by pretentious and cruel Calvin Candie (DiCaprio). There, the two, seen as a strange European man and his pretentious freed-slave sidekick, pretend to be mandingo merchants, seeking to buy a winner, a black man tough enough to best others in bloody fight-to-the-death matches.
Their true mission: They plan to buy, and then free, Broomhilda von Shaft (Washington), Django’s wife; the two were separated long ago when sold by another cruel plantation owner (Bruce Dern, onscreen for all of 30 seconds or so). Threatening to make the plan unravel is old Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), a longtime Candyland house slave whose sympathies largely seem to lie with his master.
The filmmaker, working from his own typically smart, humorous script, keeps things moving at a fast clip, and clearly enjoys mashing up genres and styles, variously referencing everything from spaghetti Westerns to Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” to the Ku Klux Klan sequence from D.W. Griffith’s explicitly racist “Birth of a Nation.”
And yet, it’s all distinctly Tarantino-esque, stamped with a by-now recognizable personal style that viewers tend to either love, or love to hate. Hard to resist, if you ask me.