[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
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