Django Unchained

Tarantino’s latest offering is, like Kill Bill, a pastiche, albeit a little less direct. This time, the melting pot contains three things: spaghetti Westerns, blaxploitation and Deep South plantation drama – which after all isn’t the Wild West. It is very much a wish fulfilment fantasy, drawing many comparisons with Inglorious Basterds for being a bit of bloody catharsis for the great ills of the history of White civilisation, championing one of America’s underdogs. It’s a long way from the cleverly disjointed, extremely character-focused, nuanced and snappy early Tarantino works that are what made him great, but those aren’t the sorts of films Tarantino makes any more. He makes sweeping epics with lots of self-conscious nods to filmmaking and bold stylistic statements that have fallen out of mainstream direction, and has a whole lot of fun with them. The result tends to be something that consciously can’t be called great, but is extremely entertaining to watch and contains unforgettable ideas, superb characters and performances and flashes of absolute brilliance.

Django is a slave given the opportunity to escape his cruel fate by the grace of a white man. Well, that’s how some critics are spinning things, but let’s be fair – this isn’t a story that could be told about the era without that level of facilitation. This white man is another outsider – a German immigrant, very possibly but by no means certainly a German Jew (who can after all be nationalistic and like the same things as Wagner did), who masquerades as a dentist but in actuality makes his living as a bounty hunter. He needs Django because Django can identify some marks for him. So good at it does Django prove himself that they partner up for a longer term, and the charismatic German is sufficiently moved by Django’s search for his wife (named after Brunnhilde) to offer to help him. Unfortunately, she is now the property of one of the most merciless slave-owners in the South.

Much of this works brilliantly. The dehumanized black man gets to rise up to kill the abusive slavers if they have a price on their heads – though one harrowing scene at a farm gives shades of moral grey. The good doctor’s way of doing things is very flamboyant, letting people think he is simply a deranged murderer before he reveals the truth. There’s also a brilliant comedic scene where a proto-Klan argue about the difficulty of seeing out of their white hoods. It’s all very comic book, even slapdash. There’s almost a wilful lack of attention to details and continuity – witness the amount of beer going up and down in the glasses, or bullets making a clinking sound as they land in snow. That doesn’t even seem to be the right year for the Civil War. But this is self-conscious filmmaking, constantly drawing attention to itself. Look at these faded stars, given the Tarantino treatment. Listen to this original Morricone composition, with all that spaghetti Western heritage. Yes, if I want to, I will just slap words on the screen for exposition, and have a 70s-style theme song.

It’s not a well-plotted piece, it makes a point of its unoriginality, and really it should have ended at its false end. If the intended message was that you can save a whole lot of bloodshed and misery if you swallow your pride and admit you’ve lost when you’ve lost, as the good doctor could not, that got a bit lost. As soon as Django killed the Australians who could have helped him (including a pot-bellied Tarantino doing a rather odd accent and drawing attention to himself, without a director to tell him to do it better), it became clear that this wasn’t about a good moral message and Django was no good guy: to get his way, he would slaughter everyone, including one defenceless woman who had done nothing but been born to the same mother as the bad guy and, I suppose, failed to totally overhaul the entire social order of her day, who he could easily have let go. The puddle of blood grows huge as Django’s revenge is completed, and while Tarantino is of course known for his violence, I missed the meaningful blood and suffering of Reservoir Dogs.

But for all it was imperfect, it was of course fun, as mediocre comic books are fun, and there were undeniably fantastic performances. Django himself will win no Oscars, but Christoph Waltz’s Doctor Schultz is in with a shot, and Samuel L. Jackson as an Uncle Ruckus type with a real sharp edge behind the scenes was fantastically-played. Much to praise, then, but not a whole lot to keep praising after the layers have been peeled back, very possibly in some horrific torture scene.

A question that persists: if the workers know it’s an act, and the massa knows it’s an act, who does Samuel L. Jackson’s character do the Uncle Tom performance for? Only guests? Isn’t that…really annoying and silly for those in the know?