This review is a quick smattering of thoughts that was first shared in my Letterboxd review.
There’s no questioning Tarantino’s mastery and control behind the camera. Rewatching Django Unchained, the film bursts to life instantly with a just about perfectly gritty and homage of a title sequence and grandly sweeping title song. The film’s opening scene inside a completely dark forest almost looks patently on a set, but Tarantino is doing that intentionally and makes the bleakness and distinct lighting of the scene beautiful. You watch it and its hard to imagine that this will be anything but another of Tarantino’s masterpieces.
I had felt lukewarm about the film on Christmas Day 2012. My somewhat embarrassing review questioned if it was entirely complete as the film was bold, but messy and disjointed, full of set pieces that existed only on their own terms and a revenge plot that felt secondary whenever Tarantino trotted out the flourishes, bloodshed and rap tracks.
And in the first hour of “Django,” those feelings had completely vanished, only to return once Leonardo Dicaprio’s utterly chilling and compelling character showed up. That’s because the first hour is a straight Western, and Tarantino nails it. He could’ve easily drawn out the vigilante hunt for the Brittle brothers to Leone length and made a damn fine film, but he had different ambitions.
Whereas the first hour of “Django Unchained” looks at racism and slavery as an institution almost ironically and mockingly (the hilarious pre-raid sequence and Don Johnson struggling to explain to his slave girl just how to treat Django), when Calvin Candie shows up the film gets downright exploitative and harrowing. The film practically stops being funny and amusing (although some of those sequences may still play that way for some people, and maybe that’s part of the problem) and instead uses brutality and violence to really cast judgment on the high society and white privilege.
“You said this is my world, and I gotta get dirty, so I’m getting dirty,” Django says. And Tarantino is doing the same, going full bore into the ugliest aspects of slavery and torture to really get inside the minds of these sadistic and vindictive individuals. And he uses that energy to enhance the drama in the film’s second half, which becomes essentially a mind game between Schultz, Django, Candie and Stephen.
It might be too easy to say then that Tarantino dips too deep and falls into his style over substance trap that has long been a cliche criticism of his films, but when you see the film become so needlessly violent and Django turn into such a ruthless harbinger of death before parading his horse in cocky celebration at the end or Tarantino abruptly retrofitting any song he needs to fit the moment, it can be hard to not jump to that conclusion.
The common criticism during Oscar season was that the film was rushed and put together up until the last minute. That may be technically true, but it’s a copout and doesn’t mean Tarantino didn’t get the film exactly the way he wanted it before release. (Although an update on that is that Tarantino has now considered releasing 90 minutes of unused footage to create a four part “Django Unchained” miniseries, so maybe there was some stuff he left on the editing room floor that would’ve made a difference)
On a side note, another Oscar time criticism of the film was that Christoph Waltz won his second Oscar for basically playing the same character he did in “Basterds.” That’s hardly true, even aside from the obvious fact that he’s the good guy versus the Nazi this time around. But Schultz is a wordsmith and gentleman whereas Hans Landa was a crazed hunter who used eloquent and careful speaking to break people. It’s hard to say whether or not he deserved the Oscar or was even better than Leo (who is fuuuuckiiinngg greeeaatt in this movie), but he does deserve all the praise he gets.
Where I think the film gets lost is in Tarantino’s sudden quest in its last half to deliver the biggest form of vigilante justice. In Candie and Stephen he creates a devilish character who could stand in for all of slavery, and Tarantino completely demolishes it in the biggest, most cathartic way possible, making his black character looking as noble and badass as he can in the process. But it loses the elegant wordplay, the interesting camaraderie between Django and Schultz and even a sense of morality that makes itself most known during Schultz’s fable about Broomhilda. That moment is such a wonderfully staged storytelling sequence and one of the sweetest Tarantino has ever filmed, but it seems to suddenly vanish when the film becomes something else entirely.
This is hardly a popular opinion, and the film is rated super highly on IMDB. Many may even prefer it to “Inglourious Basterds” or “Kill Bill”, but now the film has rubbed me the wrong way twice and it’s a hard feeling to shake for a director I admire so greatly.