Since the movie year of 2012 is arguably most notable for being The Year of the Procedural, it would be entirely fitting if I spent this first paragraph laying bare my own list-making process. No list is entirely set in stone for all eternity, a simple fact I'm reminded of when looking back at my 2011 list, which I would now revise by adding two supremely accomplished action flicks to the runner-up list: Tsui Hark's imaginative Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, which I hadn't seen before making the '11 lists, and Brad Bird's playful Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, which I had seen, though it took me a couple repeat viewings to realize how awesome it is. Adding to the inevitable imprecision of list-making is the nagging sense that there's no way to see absolutely every movie of note within a given year, so apologies to the unseen-by-me Middle of Nowhere, Compliance, Tabu, It's Such a Beautiful Day, Detention, Room 237, A Royal Affair, and Elena. To address the 2012 movies I did see and love, I'd much rather, at this tardy stage, tackle the ten best and the runners-up in one fell swoop, instead of in two separate pieces, as I did last year.
With that conveniently thematically-on-point editorial house-cleaning out of the way, I want to quickly get into what makes 2012 The Year of the Procedural. Two brilliant American auteurs best known for visceral and sensation-driven cinema committed to this cerebral form with a force and intelligence that would surprise only detractors--Kathryn Bigelow with Zero Dark Thirty, and Steven Spielberg with Lincoln. Those of us who have always believed Bigelow and Spielberg to be as deft with subtext as they are with primal impact are merely glad that these two films have become among the year's most celebrated and widely discussed accomplishments. Elsewhere, procedurals came in non-fiction form (David France's How to Survive a Plague); from far-off lands (Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Turkey-set Once Upon a Time in Anatolia); and even played in a kid-friendly key (Ken Kwapis' Big Miracle). So what has caused this flood of nuts-and-bolts-driven cinema? Surely the nature of 2012 as an election year in America played some unconscious part, and I'd like to think the cultural ascension of David Fincher's serial-killer procedural Zodiac--which received no Oscar attention upon its release in 2007 but is now considered a masterpiece by many filmmakers and cinephiles--contributed too.
As you may have guessed, a few of the above-mentioned titles made their way onto my best-films-of-2012 list. Here is the list itself:
1. Amour (Michael Haneke). There's something poignant about a gifted film artist with a naturally cold-blooded, sometimes even mercilessly cruel voice laying his heart on the line for all to see. In doing just that with the devastating Amour, Austrian formalist Michael Haneke has delivered the crowning achievement of his career. He has sacrificed none of the exacting, demanding-yet-rewarding rigor of his framing and pacing, and yet in the interaction between octogenerian Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and his wife, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), who is slowly dying after suffering a severe stroke, a real life and intimacy breathes through that is refreshingly new to Haneke's work. A lot of credit is surely due to the effortless duet between Trintignant and Riva, who offer a stunningly authentic portrait of senior-age couplehood and devotion. Any movie that deals this honestly with death is understandably a tough sell, but Haneke's masterpiece tackles the subject like no movie I've seen--it's unflinching yet graceful, a starkly beautiful hymn to anyone forced to say goodbye to a loved one.
2. Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino). The best American film of the year is geek auteur Quentin Tarantino's follow-up to Inglorious Basterds, a historical satire in a more mythic, epic vein than its 2009 counterpart. I don't need to add much to the rave review I wrote earlier: http://brettbuck.blogspot.com/2013/02/review-of-django-unchained.html. If there's anything I neglected to dwell on, it's that what makes Tarantino such a poet of screen violence is his responsibility in knowing the difference between the kind of violence that should sicken audiences and the kind that should excite them, which is especially valuable considering the current reactionary national discourse on the subject. The cathartic kick of Tarantino's action scenes here would be nowhere near as potent without his horrific portrayal of the abuse that slaves in the antebellum American South experienced.
3. The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan). Since not everyone is as batty (sorry) for writer-director Christopher Nolan's wrap-up to his popcorn-cinema-elevating Batman trilogy as I am, I'll make my case for it via my in-depth full review: http://brettbuck.blogspot.com/2012/08/review-of-dark-knight-rises.html. On repeat viewings, what sticks with me most is, funnily enough, what drives many fanboys nuts (spoilers ahead): Nolan's generosity in granting Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) a happy ending, one that pointedly depicts him hanging up the cape and cowl for good. Capping a magnificently bleak trilogy with a fully earned light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel resolution feels powerfully, movingly right.
4. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow). As mentioned above, the procedural is a new form for action maestro Kathryn Bigelow, and yet how she aces this departure is largely by infusing even the most talky scenes with her signature tactile physicality. As CIA analyst Maya (Jessica Chastain, brilliantly evoking the way obsession churns like an engine within the character's belly) travels the globe in search of Osama bin Laden, we're immersed in the sandy, teeming Pakistani streets and the white, sterile Washington corridors of power along with her. And Bigelow's gift for action set pieces that derive their power from shooting and editing that respects spatial coherence (fancy that!) comes to the forefront in the bravura climactic raid on bin Laden's compound, a half-hour stretch of film sure to be studied for decades. Bigelow and writer Mark Boal give equal attention to mapping the film's narrative shape, crafting an intricate series of negotiations, bribes, sleepless data analyses, and, yes, interrogations that provocatively and grippingly reveal information as the real weapon in the War on Terror.
5. Lincoln (Steven Spielberg). As often as Steven Spielberg has chronicled historical events, he's never done so with as much modesty as he brings to this quietly passionate, often surprisingly funny depiction of President Abraham Lincoln's efforts to pass the slavery-abolishing 13th Amendment. The voice of writer Tony Kushner (the landmark Angels in America) dominates to such a degree that one of the movie's great pleasures is rolling around in the brainy intricacy and dry wit of his glorious language. And for this humanist study of democracy, it's entirely apropos that Spielberg democratically allows every member of his expert ensemble cast to shine. Within that ensemble, Tommy Lee Jones brings such fire and conviction to abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens that he actually manages to dwarf Daniel Day-Lewis' typically flawless portrayal of Lincoln. At the same time, though, Day-Lewis' shrewd way of suggesting Lincoln's ability to harness his gentle eccentricity in order to manipulate those around him is a neat parallel to what Spielberg has pulled off here: like Lincoln, Spielberg is a visionary who can exert his powers in an invisible way.
6. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson). The underlying sad beauty of writer-director Wes Anderson's comedies is how their immaculately conceived storybook worlds act as barricades trying to keep the harsh messiness of the real, adult world at bay. When two barely pubescent lovebirds (Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman) run away from their respective homes to set up stakes in the New England wilderness, it's out of a belief that a Lost Boys-style existence is not only plausible, but the answer to never-ending bliss. Anderson constructs this specific otherworldly setting with eye-popping assurance, and contrasts the kids' innocence with the weathered melancholy of the grown-ups in their lives (Bruce Willis has rarely been better than he is here, playing a lovesick policeman with sad-eyed gravity). Perhaps most importantly, Anderson is mature enough to realize the kids' haven is an illusion, a temporary escape at best--a point he drives home in a heartbreaker of a final shot.
7. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson). A thrillingly strange and visually meticulous epic, The Master finds vital filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson blending some of his pet themes--the Boogie Nights-esque formation of an uncoventional family; an alternately scary and sympathetic broken-soul protagonist akin to those found in Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood--with a vein of post-war anxiety and a gift for offhand abstraction that distinctively belong to this staggering work. As ever, Anderson inspires his actors to scale dizzying heights. While Amy Adams is a quietly forceful wonder in her power-behind-the-throne role, much of the film's power rests in the knotty chemistry between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix as, respectively, a master and a disciple locked in a symbiotic bond. Hoffman locates the humanity within his gabby blowhard, while Phoenix, in an unforgettable tour de force that really should be winning more awards, lays bare the raw-nerve vulnerability of a generation struggling to rebuild in the aftermath of chaos, as well as that of anyone so desperate for answers to life's questions that the wrong places start looking right.
8. The Grey (Joe Carnahan). At his worst, such as the assaultive Smokin' Aces, director Joe Carnahan indulges in pageants of empty macho bluster. So it makes a perverse kind of sense that he has made his first genuinely great film by not abandoning his fascination with he-man masculinity, but instead refining his manner of portraying it. A vividly gritty and harrowing story of men fighting to survive in a snow-and-hungry-wolf-strewn environment that threatens to swallow them up at every turn, The Grey mixes B-movie manliness and artful lyricism in a manner reminiscent of memorable '70s genre entries like Jaws and Deliverance. It would be nothing without Liam Neeson, in one of the year's major underrated performances, as the group's assertive yet secretly grief-stricken leader. The film's misleading see-Neeson-fight-a-bunch-of-wolves marketing didn't do it any favors. The real, more humane spectacle here is Neeson's sensitive and iconic embodiment of a man who chooses to embrace life while teetering on the precipice of death.
9. Seven Psychopaths (Martin McDonagh). Playwright Martin McDonagh established a Coen-esque flair for quotable dialogue, darkly funny violence, and stealthy thematic layering with his big-screen debut, In Bruges. This follow-up manages to be even more sneakily profound, and its greater cinematic scope proves that McDonagh is further honing his visual chops. When the writer-director strands his writers'-block-afflicted authorial stand-in (Colin Farrell) in the limbo-land of Joshua Tree with his violence-prone best friend (the great, live-wire scene stealer Sam Rockwell) and a pacifist accomplice (Christopher Walken, in his best, most emotionally textured performance since Catch Me If You Can), a realization sinks in: the Rockwell and Walken characters might be mere manifestations of Fictional McDonagh's warring psyche. Thus, underneath the meta games of Seven Psychopaths is the resonant suggestion that every artist--or every human being, really--can be the victim of an interior tug-of-war between optimism and oblivion.
10. Cloud Atlas (Lana Wachowski & Andy Wachowski & Tom Tykwer). This singular sci-fi weave of six different but interconnected narrative threads certainly took its knocks from some critics, and it undeniably tests how many whack-a-doo flaws a movie can contain while still laying claim to greatness (i.e. Tom Hanks' schticky work is his only insufferable non-Gump performance, and I'm not sure a film so narratively dense benefits from trotting out a near-indecipherable pidgin-English-style concocted language in one of its story strands). That said, this movie's massive ambition and intoxicating passion make it genuinely addictive; I've already seen it three times, and don't plan on stopping there. While the symphonic cross-cutting of its storytelling engulfs the senses, what engages the mind is how each story becomes a rousing rise-of-the-oppressed parable. This unapologetically political blockbuster is brave enough to spit in the face of institutional racism, sexism, and homophobia. Its box-office failure means we may never see its like again, which is a damn shame.
Here are the next ten runners-up of 2012. Befitting their runner-up status, the capsules will run shorter, although why I have a certain Best Picture Oscar front-runner 18 spots lower on my list will require elaboration:
11. Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard). Both tough-minded and big-hearted, this unique, beautifully thorny love story from gritty poet Jacques Audiard, following up A Prophet with another triumph, doesn't shy away from the warts-and-all humanity of its two central characters. Matthias Schoenarts is brooding and compelling as the male lead, but the movie belongs to Marion Cotillard, who displays an emotional range that puts many of her contemporaries to shame.
12. The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard). Like Haneke's Funny Games for the Harry Knowles generation, this surprise-filled genre treat from director Drew Goddard and witty co-writer Joss Whedon interrogates viewer complicity in the horror genre while operating in a fast-paced, wildly entertaining key sure to win over even those uninterested in parsing its meta-narrative meanings.
13. Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (Matthew Akers). The year's most emotionally cathartic documentary actually manages to be about emotional catharsis, about the elemental power of connecting with an artist for a good, cleansing cry. The world of performance art is so often held up for mockery that this argument for its accessibility is something to celebrate.
14. Headhunters (Morten Tyldum). The less said about this devious, unrelenting rollercoaster of a cat-and-mouse thriller, the better. Suffice it to say that anyone who loves the dark elegance of Hitchcock's wrong-man suspense films and the nasty kicks of Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave will be in heaven here.
15. Searching for Sugar Man (Malik Bendjelloul). Much like Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, this is a deep and affecting non-fiction look at how art is received. In spinning the yarn of mysterious balladeer Rodriguez, documentarian Malik Bendjelloul fluidly uses Rodriguez's music to create an entrancing cinematic atmosphere, and his film is a testament to the notion that any sincere work of art is bound to connect with someone, somewhere.
16. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan). One of the year's formidable art-cinema achievements, Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan's gorgeous and haunting police procedural turns a seemingly mundane murder investigation into an examination of whether professional detachment is ideal--or even possible--when tending to the business of why a life has been taken. The landscape photography stuns, and bursts of absurdist humor provide idiosyncratic comic relief, but it's the philosophical and moral weight that sticks with you.
17. Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh). Simultaneously exuberant and brainy, this character-study-disguised-as-male-stripper-melodrama effectively acts as a grab bag of what makes the (allegedly) near-retirement director Steven Soderbergh such a unique talent: his proud, showy flair for composition and editing; his interest in performance as a theme, and related ability to mine the depths of deceptively "limited" actors (Channing Tatum and Matthew McConaughey in this case); his subversive politics of sexual objectification (a key dancing set piece is pointedly shot via a female gaze); his post-'08 fascination with what constitutes work and play in recession-era America. Which is all an elaborate way of saying, "please, Stevie, don't leave us!"
18. Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold). It's always exciting to be present at the point when a gifted young filmmaker really kicks his or her game up several notches, and that's what has happened here with Andrea Arnold, who previously established a control of mood and atmosphere with Red Road and Fish Tank. In Wuthering Heights, her best film yet, Arnold wisely eschews the musty tastefulness of conventional literary adaptations in favor of creating an immersive, daring mosaic of mud, blood, fog, and teenage flesh. Lest that last element sound overly prurient, it should be noted that Arnold keeps her vivid evocation of teenage erotic longing from tilting into creepy territory. More impressively, her poetic use of nature calls to mind the master Terrence Malick. Make no mistake, though: her voice is her own, and we'll be hearing a lot of it in the future.
19. Argo (Ben Affleck). So obviously, there are four Best Picture Oscar nominees I greatly prefer to this one, the front-runner. And I would concede that its relative superficiality and tendency to paint every brown-skinned character as a wild-eyed beast may cause it to age poorly among discerning audiences. Nevertheless, when viewed properly as a popcorn movie for adults, it serves that purpose in excellent, sure-footed, and engrossing fashion. It's also the rare studio movie about America's conflicts with the Middle East that is propulsively entertaining, and never even remotely preachy. Affleck's craftsmanship and doses of period flavor make Argo feel sort of like what would happen if Ron Howard's best, smartest work had a few shots of Alan J. Pakula '70s atmosphere added to the mix; he's certainly the real deal. So too is writer Chris Terrio, who puts some priceless zingers into the mouths of priceless character actors Alan Arkin and John Goodman...which, I shouldn't have to add, is not the same as saying he deserves to steal the Oscar that should rightfully go to Lincoln's Tony Kushner. (I mean, come on!) Still: pretty great.
20. The Raid: Redemption (Gareth Evans). While this Indonesian B-movie-pressure-cooker's weary cynicism towards urban corruption puts it in the esteemed genre company of gems like John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, I'm not gonna lie: I love it because its brutal, beautifully choreographed, acrobatic, non-stop action kicks a lot of fucking ass.
And here's everything else I considered list-worthy, which brings the total to a nice, even 30 standout films:
21. Cafe de Flore (Jean-Marc Vallee)
22. Dark Horse (Todd Solondz)
23. Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
24. Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo)
25. Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell)
26. The Central Park Five (Ken Burns & David McMahon & Sarah Burns)
27. The Five-Year Engagement (Nicholas Stoller)
28. Prometheus (Ridley Scott)
29. Savages (Oliver Stone)
30. Easy Money a.k.a Snabba Cash (Daniel Espinosa)
And just for fun, my choice for a quite-good 2012 release that may leap into a runner-up position upon multiple viewings, a la Ghost Protocol last year: ParaNorman (Chris Butler & Sam Fell). I'd bet money on this, actually.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Review of "Django Unchained"
[Warning: SPOILERS Unleashed. Please read only after you've seen the film.]
While much has been written about Spike Lee's sight-unseen dismissal of Quentin Tarantino's smart, savage, and hugely entertaining spaghetti "Southern" Django Unchained, one bit of irony that has seemingly eluded many critics and reporters is that Django shares with Lee's scathing, underrated satire Bamboozled an interest in how a single cinematic image can speak volumes about racial representation. Whereas Bamboozled focused on the negative representational baggage of an actor wearing blackface, Django is intended as a corrective, offering provocatively loaded images that empower black characters and, by extension, black audiences. I'm thinking in particular of a majestic low-angle shot of the titular freed-slave hero, Django (Jamie Foxx), repeatedly cracking a whip over the hide of an outside-the-frame slave driver (MC Gainey), surrounded by the kind of mammoth, moss-drenched trees that have long been a part of our collective cinematic imagining of the American South. Django is set during the region's antebellum period, a time when enslaved black Americans had every reason to fear the whips of their white masters. Thus, the reversal of historic expectations contained within this image could hardly be more pointed--or more viscerally effective.
A keenly judged balance of the visceral and the cerebral has come to define Tarantino's voice as a filmmaker as surely as his more frequently discussed passion for disreputable genre fare. So it makes sense that on first viewing, Django struck me as a combination of Inglorious Basterds' meticulous satiric structure--with every dialogue exchange laying bare the business-as-usual commerce behind American slavery, in place of the earlier film's verbal fixation on survival-as-negotiation in WWII-era Europe--with the blood-splattered, high-body-count excess of the Kill Bill movies. This equation amounts to one way of interpreting Django's greatness, and Tarantino's flair for exciting action set pieces is certainly matched by his ear for talk that is at once thematically fertile and enjoyably, deceptively loose. (Django's bitter joke explaining why a white, German ally is visibly shaken by the sight of attack dogs tearing into an escaped slave's flesh--"he's not used to Americans"--packs more punch and bite into one line than writer-director Andrew Dominik was able to drum up for the entirety of his own capitalist satire, the tedious, pathetically Tarantino-indebted Killing Them Softly.)
But after a second viewing, Django feels like a more unique accomplishment within the Tarantino oeuvre, not to mention his most towering achievement since the landmark Pulp Fiction (and I don't say that lightly, considering I absolutely adore all of his films, even the oft-maligned and admittedly indulgent Grindhouse entry Death Proof). What makes Django so unlike the writer-director's previous work is that, when boiled down, it's an epic, populist hero's myth--a rousing folk tale with an eccentrically dark, outrage-fueled underbelly. Its different-season-spanning, Texas-to-Mississippi-traveling size and scope mark it as different in key ways from Basterds, which is somewhat anti-epic in its contained focus on the intrigue surrounding the doomed premiere at the theatre run by Melanie Laurent's character. Glancing at the past literary and cinematic works that have influenced the shape of Django offers another way of understanding what makes it such an unusual and special Tarantino movie: within its DNA are the widescreen vistas, stubbly grit, and Morricone music of Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns; the epic-journey sweep and "man struggling to return to his wife" hook of Homer's The Odyssey; the black-male swagger and empowerment politics of any number of blaxploitation flicks; and the peculiar character layout of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which similarly surrounded a conventional protagonist with an assortment of grotesquely seedy, satirically caricatured Southern-weirdo supporting characters.
That character layout puts Foxx at a disadvantage relative to the rest of the cast, as he's required to occupy the still center of a storm of crazy that the supporting cast members have a great deal of fun whipping up. However, Foxx turns out to be an ideal anchor, bringing stoic authority to Django, in addition to more soul and real feeling than he's brought to any project since Ray.
There's also nice, unforced emotion from Christoph Waltz's note-perfect, deservedly Oscar-nominated performance as Django's aforementioned white, German ally, a chatty dentist-turned-bounty-hunter named Dr. King Schultz. We know from Waltz's Oscar-winning turn as the villainous Hans Landa in Basterds that he's an ideal mouthpiece for Tarantino's dialogue, chewing on every word as if each was a morsel of a particularly delicious steak. What's revelatory about his Django performance is how subtly and sympathetically he embodies Schultz's decidedly non-Landa-esque goodness, his disarming gentleness and quiet moral certainty. The chemistry between Foxx and Waltz is clearly meant to evoke that of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--and, magically, it really does earn the comparison.
Although Django and Schultz encounter a few vivid oddballs in the film's first half (including a Colonel Sanders-bearded plantation owner played by Don Johnson, whose superb comic timing is something of a surprise even after his goofy work on HBO's Eastbound and Down), it's not until they arrive in Mississippi at roughly the halfway point that the film's other two major performances come to the forefront. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Calvin Candie, the decadent, spoiled-rotten, more-articulate-than-actually-bright master of a plantation immodestly dubbed Candieland. DiCaprio is one of the two or three most dependable star-level actors around, and he's so good at playing quiet torment I wouldn't really mind if that's all he did for the remainder of his career, but all the same, it's a real pleasure to experience how uncharacteristically loose-limbed and inventive-on-the-spot he is here. He finds an ideal scene partner in Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Calvin's fiercely loyal right-hand man, Stephen. The character of Stephen, a slave who will gladly rat out and abuse other slaves at the drop of a hat, is one of the movie's riskiest provocations, but the movie is smart enough to implicate the vile system that creates a mindset like Stephen's, and Jackson's performance is not only bold but very skillful in its balance of being a mostly comedic turn played totally straight. (My brother shrewdly noted that one of the script's more affecting complexities is that the friendship between Calvin and Stephen feels as genuine, in its more poisonous way, as that between Django and Schultz.)
Calvin invites Django and Schultz, who feign an interest in purchasing one of Calvin's "mandingo" fighters when their real plan is to rescue Django's wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington, touchingly wounded, though sidelined for much of the movie), from Calvin's clutches, to dine with him at Candieland. The resulting dinner sequence has been criticized by some of the film's detractors for being too padded and agonizingly slow, but I'd actually argue that it's the best-directed sequence of Tarantino's career, and the point in the film where his anger at the greed, oppression, and racism of this culture reaches full, galvanizing boil. He uses every filmmaking tool at his command to convey that Candieland is a rotting carcass underneath its fussy old-money grandeur: the camera fluidly moving back and forth between the relaxed guests in the dining room and the harried, enslaved servants toiling in the kitchen; the hot, orange glow of director of photography Robert Richardson's lighting blending with the dark reds of production designer J. Michael Riva's dining-room walls to suggest the hellfire and bloodshed that Calvin's privileged world is built upon.
That bloodshed becomes literal once this sequence is over, in a go-for-broke shootout wherein one of the casualties is poor Dr. Schultz. Even fans of the movie have been debating the effectiveness of the 20 minutes or so that follow this shootout and bring Django's tale to an end. But the second viewing, for me, confirmed that the myth of Django would be far less thematically potent if it didn't illustrate how Django would thrive without Schultz by his side. In his savvy negotiation with an Australian mining company (whose ranks unfortunately include Tarantino himself, trotting out a wince-inducing accent for his cameo), Django proves that a German immigrant who harnessed his gift for gab to succeed in capitalist America makes for an ideal role model for a freed black man aiming to succeed in the antebellum South to follow. In order to seize power, Django must put what he learned from the deceased Schultz to the test.
Although this story was always destined to end with an empowered Django, Foxx's choice of how to play the character in full badass mode likely could not have been predicted. As Django struts into Candieland to enact his vengeance, Foxx brings the kind of peacocking, anachronistic swagger that has marred many of his weaker performances, and that he wisely kept tamped down until the final scene. And yet, when viewed within the context of this grand hero's myth, Foxx's choice makes an odd, perfect kind of sense. In the epic character arc of a black man who enters the movie with such timidity he's afraid to raise his voice when talking to the white bounty hunter who freed him and then exits it with the freakish confidence and control of a blaxploitation/folk hero, there is great poignance and glory. If Spike Lee ever decides to see this masterpiece for himself, he might even agree. Grade: A
While much has been written about Spike Lee's sight-unseen dismissal of Quentin Tarantino's smart, savage, and hugely entertaining spaghetti "Southern" Django Unchained, one bit of irony that has seemingly eluded many critics and reporters is that Django shares with Lee's scathing, underrated satire Bamboozled an interest in how a single cinematic image can speak volumes about racial representation. Whereas Bamboozled focused on the negative representational baggage of an actor wearing blackface, Django is intended as a corrective, offering provocatively loaded images that empower black characters and, by extension, black audiences. I'm thinking in particular of a majestic low-angle shot of the titular freed-slave hero, Django (Jamie Foxx), repeatedly cracking a whip over the hide of an outside-the-frame slave driver (MC Gainey), surrounded by the kind of mammoth, moss-drenched trees that have long been a part of our collective cinematic imagining of the American South. Django is set during the region's antebellum period, a time when enslaved black Americans had every reason to fear the whips of their white masters. Thus, the reversal of historic expectations contained within this image could hardly be more pointed--or more viscerally effective.
A keenly judged balance of the visceral and the cerebral has come to define Tarantino's voice as a filmmaker as surely as his more frequently discussed passion for disreputable genre fare. So it makes sense that on first viewing, Django struck me as a combination of Inglorious Basterds' meticulous satiric structure--with every dialogue exchange laying bare the business-as-usual commerce behind American slavery, in place of the earlier film's verbal fixation on survival-as-negotiation in WWII-era Europe--with the blood-splattered, high-body-count excess of the Kill Bill movies. This equation amounts to one way of interpreting Django's greatness, and Tarantino's flair for exciting action set pieces is certainly matched by his ear for talk that is at once thematically fertile and enjoyably, deceptively loose. (Django's bitter joke explaining why a white, German ally is visibly shaken by the sight of attack dogs tearing into an escaped slave's flesh--"he's not used to Americans"--packs more punch and bite into one line than writer-director Andrew Dominik was able to drum up for the entirety of his own capitalist satire, the tedious, pathetically Tarantino-indebted Killing Them Softly.)
But after a second viewing, Django feels like a more unique accomplishment within the Tarantino oeuvre, not to mention his most towering achievement since the landmark Pulp Fiction (and I don't say that lightly, considering I absolutely adore all of his films, even the oft-maligned and admittedly indulgent Grindhouse entry Death Proof). What makes Django so unlike the writer-director's previous work is that, when boiled down, it's an epic, populist hero's myth--a rousing folk tale with an eccentrically dark, outrage-fueled underbelly. Its different-season-spanning, Texas-to-Mississippi-traveling size and scope mark it as different in key ways from Basterds, which is somewhat anti-epic in its contained focus on the intrigue surrounding the doomed premiere at the theatre run by Melanie Laurent's character. Glancing at the past literary and cinematic works that have influenced the shape of Django offers another way of understanding what makes it such an unusual and special Tarantino movie: within its DNA are the widescreen vistas, stubbly grit, and Morricone music of Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns; the epic-journey sweep and "man struggling to return to his wife" hook of Homer's The Odyssey; the black-male swagger and empowerment politics of any number of blaxploitation flicks; and the peculiar character layout of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which similarly surrounded a conventional protagonist with an assortment of grotesquely seedy, satirically caricatured Southern-weirdo supporting characters.
That character layout puts Foxx at a disadvantage relative to the rest of the cast, as he's required to occupy the still center of a storm of crazy that the supporting cast members have a great deal of fun whipping up. However, Foxx turns out to be an ideal anchor, bringing stoic authority to Django, in addition to more soul and real feeling than he's brought to any project since Ray.
There's also nice, unforced emotion from Christoph Waltz's note-perfect, deservedly Oscar-nominated performance as Django's aforementioned white, German ally, a chatty dentist-turned-bounty-hunter named Dr. King Schultz. We know from Waltz's Oscar-winning turn as the villainous Hans Landa in Basterds that he's an ideal mouthpiece for Tarantino's dialogue, chewing on every word as if each was a morsel of a particularly delicious steak. What's revelatory about his Django performance is how subtly and sympathetically he embodies Schultz's decidedly non-Landa-esque goodness, his disarming gentleness and quiet moral certainty. The chemistry between Foxx and Waltz is clearly meant to evoke that of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--and, magically, it really does earn the comparison.
Although Django and Schultz encounter a few vivid oddballs in the film's first half (including a Colonel Sanders-bearded plantation owner played by Don Johnson, whose superb comic timing is something of a surprise even after his goofy work on HBO's Eastbound and Down), it's not until they arrive in Mississippi at roughly the halfway point that the film's other two major performances come to the forefront. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Calvin Candie, the decadent, spoiled-rotten, more-articulate-than-actually-bright master of a plantation immodestly dubbed Candieland. DiCaprio is one of the two or three most dependable star-level actors around, and he's so good at playing quiet torment I wouldn't really mind if that's all he did for the remainder of his career, but all the same, it's a real pleasure to experience how uncharacteristically loose-limbed and inventive-on-the-spot he is here. He finds an ideal scene partner in Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Calvin's fiercely loyal right-hand man, Stephen. The character of Stephen, a slave who will gladly rat out and abuse other slaves at the drop of a hat, is one of the movie's riskiest provocations, but the movie is smart enough to implicate the vile system that creates a mindset like Stephen's, and Jackson's performance is not only bold but very skillful in its balance of being a mostly comedic turn played totally straight. (My brother shrewdly noted that one of the script's more affecting complexities is that the friendship between Calvin and Stephen feels as genuine, in its more poisonous way, as that between Django and Schultz.)
Calvin invites Django and Schultz, who feign an interest in purchasing one of Calvin's "mandingo" fighters when their real plan is to rescue Django's wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington, touchingly wounded, though sidelined for much of the movie), from Calvin's clutches, to dine with him at Candieland. The resulting dinner sequence has been criticized by some of the film's detractors for being too padded and agonizingly slow, but I'd actually argue that it's the best-directed sequence of Tarantino's career, and the point in the film where his anger at the greed, oppression, and racism of this culture reaches full, galvanizing boil. He uses every filmmaking tool at his command to convey that Candieland is a rotting carcass underneath its fussy old-money grandeur: the camera fluidly moving back and forth between the relaxed guests in the dining room and the harried, enslaved servants toiling in the kitchen; the hot, orange glow of director of photography Robert Richardson's lighting blending with the dark reds of production designer J. Michael Riva's dining-room walls to suggest the hellfire and bloodshed that Calvin's privileged world is built upon.
That bloodshed becomes literal once this sequence is over, in a go-for-broke shootout wherein one of the casualties is poor Dr. Schultz. Even fans of the movie have been debating the effectiveness of the 20 minutes or so that follow this shootout and bring Django's tale to an end. But the second viewing, for me, confirmed that the myth of Django would be far less thematically potent if it didn't illustrate how Django would thrive without Schultz by his side. In his savvy negotiation with an Australian mining company (whose ranks unfortunately include Tarantino himself, trotting out a wince-inducing accent for his cameo), Django proves that a German immigrant who harnessed his gift for gab to succeed in capitalist America makes for an ideal role model for a freed black man aiming to succeed in the antebellum South to follow. In order to seize power, Django must put what he learned from the deceased Schultz to the test.
Although this story was always destined to end with an empowered Django, Foxx's choice of how to play the character in full badass mode likely could not have been predicted. As Django struts into Candieland to enact his vengeance, Foxx brings the kind of peacocking, anachronistic swagger that has marred many of his weaker performances, and that he wisely kept tamped down until the final scene. And yet, when viewed within the context of this grand hero's myth, Foxx's choice makes an odd, perfect kind of sense. In the epic character arc of a black man who enters the movie with such timidity he's afraid to raise his voice when talking to the white bounty hunter who freed him and then exits it with the freakish confidence and control of a blaxploitation/folk hero, there is great poignance and glory. If Spike Lee ever decides to see this masterpiece for himself, he might even agree. Grade: A
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