The story of my Django Unchained viewing experience

A snowy Sunday afternoon, my friend and I were looking forward to experiencing Quentin Tarantino’s next installment of high octane, fast talking, genre shifting movie fun. We were ready to be entertained because regardless of whether or not you like a Tarantino film, you can never fail to be entertained. I was particularly excited to see Django Unchained ever since Tarantino announced this next project just after the release of Inglorious Basterds. The trailers that appeared intensified my interest and as a consequence I had kept my exposure to hype and review to an absolute minimum, so as not to have my experience tainted. I had only glimpsed high ratings given from a couple of publications and a random quote of “DiCaprio looks like an overgrown baby”. (Can’t remember the source but I can safely say it’s a completely incorrect observation. If anything, DiCaprio has never looked better) My interest was piqued.

And for the first hour, with a packed house, collectively holding our breath with what was about to happen, all was well. Everything happening before me was exhilerating, hitting all my expectations, enveloping me into a world that I thought I would hate, westerns and the slave trade. I was laughing at the snappy dialogue, the quickly paced story, Christophe Waltz and Jamie Foxx were quite simply killing it. And then –

Darkness.

For what ended up being an hour. A couple of poor ushers, intermittently came out to apologise for the technical issue they were having and it would only be ten minutes, then that turned into twenty minutes and so on. We were offered complimentary drinks and stuff and refunds for the few that stormed off in disgust. I would just like to add that it stands as a testament to the quality of the film that the only people who seemed to have left during this interlude was the couple in front of us (I was so relieved, I wanted to whip of the guy’s fedora. Who wears a fedora in the cinema? Stop watching Mad Men my friend) and a scatter of others. When the film came back to life, I had a quick scan of the theatre and the place was still more or less packed. I think that everyone else felt like I did, the wait was worth it. We didn’t want to have to wait another day to get back into that world and its story. (I still got my refund the next day though because despite how good the film was, the screening experience was still below par).

The Review

As you’ve probably guessed, I really enjoyed Django Unchained. Much more than I expected. A general rule of thumb for me is that the more excited I am about a film the more likely there is room for disappointment because the film can’t reach all of the high expectations I have created. I think that my enjoyment was truly down to the writing.

As you may have also realised from my previous film reviews, I tend to judge the strength of a film of narrative fiction on the script and characterisation, which for me is the foundation of a film. If the script is of shoddy workmanship or a bit shaky, then I tend to not hold much hope for other important elements such as directing, acting, camera, editing etc. Without a decent story, all the great acting, directing, editing in the world won’t save a film. Tarantino is a professor at highlighting the importance of a good story and script and I genuinely think Django, for me personally will be the go to example of the best of Tarantino. Yes I enjoyed Django more than Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs (although to be fair I haven’t seen the others in a long while).

Before I saw Django, I did watch the now infamous encounter Tarantino had with Channel 4 news presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy (is it me or has Guru-Murthy dialled the smugness dial up to 11. For a while during the interview I was getting him confused with Piers Morgan):

He suggests that he is at his peak, and I don’t know if he was just being combatative (rightly so) with Guru-Murthy, but he came off a bit big headed about his talent. I did find myself thinking “Mr. Tarantino, is one’s head so huge that you’d say this without  any humility whatsoever?” In general, I like Tarantino’s work, but I find him a bit of a required taste when it comes to his interviews. Sometimes I welcome his enthusiasm and its obvious he loves what he does, but other times I do actually wonder if he’s on crack.

After watching Django, I can say that I think Tarantino was spot on with his thoughts on his career path. I think Django is a return to form. I liked Kill Bill and Inglorious Basterds was fun but Django for me was so much better. If I had to give  the film an arbitrary and nonsensical rotten tomatoes rating, it would be 98% fresh. And my reasons why?

The Story

Jamie Foxx plays Django, a freed slave, who with the help of Dr. Schultz (Christophe Waltz), a German bounty hunter, sets out to find his wife who is has been bought by a brutal plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

When I first heard that Tarantino was making a film about slavery, my gut reaction was to groan in dread. I thought to myself, not another Hollywood white-washing of a black story. But as more details started to emerge about how Tarantino was seeking to make this a story where the titular hero was black and this was HIS story I started to become interested. After watching the film, I don’t think that because I am black myself, that I found it so refreshing and strangely uplifting that I responded so well to a well written black hero, filling what is universally considered a white role. A black cowboy??

It was evident from the opening moments of the film that Tarantino was sending a message as he plays on the reactions of townspeople seeing a black man on a horse. What I viewed was that their reaction even though this was some 200 years ago, sadly share some of the same sentiments today. A black man in a leading role? This ridiculous Hollywood assumption that ethnic minorities (with the exception of Will Smith and Eddie Murphy) can’t lead a mainstream film because audiences are not responsive to ethnic characters or their stories is ridiculed by Tarantino. Past films that attempt to address the history of the slave trade or treatment of Native Americans or other groups, (Amistad, Gone With the Wind, Glory, Dances With Wolves, Last of the Mohicans), usually tells them from a distinctly european or white perspective, with the white character centring the story or fulfilling the hero/sympathetic role, so as not to lose its apparent appeal and keep an empathetic audience’s bums in seats (the recent release of The Impossible starrring Naomi Watts and Ewan MacGregor has reignited this discussion).

In Django, Tarantino succeeds in not only reenergising and reconstructing of a dying genre – the Western – but he also addresses head on the epidemic in cinema as described above. In his interview, Tarantino makes it clear that he wanted his eponymous hero to be black, to have a hero that black men to look up to and in a wider context address the fact that although there were plenty of abolitionists who wanted to help blacks, there has rarely been a film that has shown the blacks who also fought and endured and lost so much for their own freedom. This is in direct opposition to the Hollywood frankly offensive view of whites being a ‘saviour’ to the completely helpless childlike blacks.

The way Tarantino addresses this is through the relationship of the two main characters, Django and Dr. Schultz. Tarantino acknowledges that Dr. Schultz, helps Django but buying him his freedom, but he is well aware that Django is his own man, and their relationship quickly develops to that of an equal footing, their completely different personalities, complimenting and playing off each other. Dr Schultz learns as much from Django and Django does from Dr Schultz and eventually Django is the formidable hero. Something that is rare in such a story and was very much appreciated.

(I shall stop my Hollywood vs race rant and for another feature for another day, where I will look into the role of ethnic minorities, in particular black actors starring in films and TV. Was the brief explosion during the 80s and 90s really the golden era for black presence in entertainment? I wrote about this for work a couple of years ago, so it will be an interesting feature to follow up on again in the future.)

The casting & acting

It appears that Samuel L Jackson may have competition as the go-to-guy for Tarantino in Christophe Waltz. Once again, he comes into his own and is mesmerizing as the witty Dr. Schultz. I think he and Tarantino have an excellent working relationship where Tarantino seems to write to allow Waltz’s charm to come through despite some of his actions being questionable. This is where I feel Tarantino is not only a good writer of dialogue but a very decent actor’s director. Outside of his work with Tarantino, I have only seen Waltz in Carnage and although the whole film was disappointing, I was especially disappointed with Waltz’s performance. Not that it was bad, it was a very competent performance but compared to his work in Inglorious Basterds and now Django, I realised how important the actor’s relationship is with the director.

The perfect foil to Waltz’s super talky Dr Schultz is the monosyllabic intense and still perfomance of Jamie Foxx’s Django. Foxx fully embraces his role, cutting an imposing figure that causes curiosity and worry amongst his ‘superiors’ even when he is shackled and chained. His relationship between himself and Schultz is a natural, easy and fully believable.

Leonardo DiCaprio also puts in an impressive performance as the unbalanced plantation owner Calvin Candie. When I heard DiCaprio had been cast, I had assumed that he would play the role of Schultz, that he was too baby-faced and handsome to portray a brutal slave owner. However, if anything, I think his looks adds to his performance. For some reason, the innocent good looks and charm makes his character even more sinister.

Samuel L Jackson, completes this Tarantino feature, hamming it up as Stephen, the accountant/servile snake friend of DiCaprio’s Candie. Stephen is typical Samuel L Jackson roles of the past but really old and just as cranky. He’s seen as more despicable character because he celebrates the racist, torture and treatment of his fellow human beings, willing to cut the neck of others and swim in their blood to save his own.

This is what I relished about the performances. Each of the characters were multifaceted. They were three dimensional. The heroes were equal parts charming and brutal, while the villains had elements of them that were alluring as well as despicable. All living in a brutal world where theres no room for moral ambiguity and passivity.

Violence & Humour

What was surprising about the film was the humour. In true exploitation genre style, there is humour in the violence but it is not done at the expense of the serious subject matter. There is a particularly funny stand out scene where a group of men have a discussion that descends into an argument about the shoddy workmanship that went into their Klu Klux Klan sheets. Its was amazing good fun to laugh at a repulsive part of American history.

The violence was as typical in a Tarantino film, very brutal, but I think it was essential to the exploitation genre that Tarantino is going for. The violence is shocking in the beginning but is so over the top that they become quite cartoonish that doesn’t detract from the film. It is interesting that scenes of torture on the slaves that is more hinted at than shown, was invariably more unsettling than the revenge violence that is visually more bloody and more prominent. I think that this was because Tarantino was sensitive to making a distinction between depicting the the real brutal treatment of slaves that did occur during the slave trade and  the the fantasy element of the revenge violence.

The violence question that inevitable arises when dealing with Tarantino films and what got Tarantino so riled up in the video clip above, is old and tired. Quite simply depictment is not endorsement and any self respecting adult should know this. Tarantino was right to get annoyed, how he handled it is up for debate, but I tend to agree with his sentiment. This film is an exploitation homage, so there will be violence, I for one am not a big fan of violence when it is just there to shock. Like sex and nudity in film, if its there just to titillate or shock then you’re story’s weak and you need to go back to the drawing board. However, in this film, everything else is strong and the violent element part and parcel. Well everything else is strong except for…

2% 

As mentioned before I gave the film a 98% fresh rating. What happened to the 2%? The 2% is reserved for my disappointment in the lack of a decent strong female character in the film. In the interview, Tarantino wanted to create a black hero for the black MALE to look up to, and in that he succeeded but what doesn’t sit well with me is what about the black FEMALE? Once again, there is an invisible group, forgotten at the expense of others. My only question is that were only men slaves? Were black women also not enslaved and often in addition sexually abused?

I’m not going to go on a feminist rant, but Kerry Washington literally had nothing to do and she is billed highly, so considering the well written male characters surrounding her, all she had to do was play the damsel in distress who screamed a lot. This is particularly disappointing coming from a director who lamented the lack of leading black actresses in film that led him to make Jackie Brown. I know Tarantino has love for his chocolate ladies so it was just a little disappointing for it not to be seen in this otherwise fantastic feature.

Final thoughts…

An excellent effort and return to form from Tarantino. In one single feature, he has reinvented the Western, created a new subgenre – a Western Blaxploitation movie  (have to mention the excellent and seamless blend of traditional Western score like Ennio Morricone’s score from another good western, 1970’s Two Mules For Sister Sara with modern rap and blues) – that equal parts entertained, and also questioned social issues that are not only prominent two hundred years ago but are still relevant today. This film with a fantastic mix of good story, good dialogue, good acting and beautiful cinematography that created a film that was just good fun and for me sneaks first place in the Tarantino film canon. An unexpected hour-long intermission was soon forgiven and quickly forgiven, there are not many films that one can say that about!