Erik's thoughts on "Django Unchained"

      A white man's perspective of a blaxsploitation revenge fantasy, Quentin Tarantino's pre-Civil War picture show, Django Unchained, fictionalizes the past by giving the historically oppressed a chance to attack back. Like Inglorious Basterds, the film can be loosely categorized as a 1970s genre pastiche, a film about then, processed through the recent past, and made now. Ennio Morricone, Johnny Cash, 2Pac, and more provide Django's soundtrack with a distinct choice to be timeless; lacking an era, the tunes replicate the director's period of media consumption. Fun as it is, Django's erratic tonal shifts and pleas to be cool prevent it from achieving the gravitas of Basterds. A recent topic of media discussion, the film aims to equally provoke, shock, and evocatively inspire a debate among moviegoers.

     I saw the film the night of Super Bowl Sunday. When the film began it was just myself and an older woman in the theater, and by the halfway point, she had left. A theater all to myself, I've since come to realize it may not have been the ideal setting for a comedy (if that's what it is), as certain scenes feel tailor-made for a large group setting; a mob mentality is not, however, something to joyously surrender to. Save for the horrendously played scene involving the KKK, I felt the rest of the film was played quite straight, give or take the much too contemporary portrayal given by Samuel L. Jackson serving as a strange fit.

     Tarantino has much talent to show off, and his screenplay is a sprawling epic with a few pieces too many. There is the typical but appreciated homage throwbacks (old Columbia Pictures logo, flashbacks which look like they were coming off a faded VHS tape), the uncomfortable yet expertly handled sickening acts of violence (the Mandingo fights, the dog-lynching, the blood soaked finale), the often playful, wise, and occasionally too-smart-for-its-own-good dialogue (the "dimples located in the skull" passage), and even a head-scratching directorial cameo to boot. Ironically, for a film where the distinct parts are greater than the whole, this is a Tarantino work not segmented by chapters and title cards.

     Will this film offend those eagerly wishing to be offended? Probably, but Tarantino nonetheless provides his white audience with a unique surrogate: Christoph Waltz, playing a traveling murderer, cinematically justified as such due to being a wise bounty hunter with a just cause. This white European character assists but ultimately fails to get Django what he wants (his wife), destroying a well calculated plan via a handshake refusal with a charismatically reprehensible slave owner (played by Leonard DiCaprio). Django must eventually claim what is his independently of his white partner.

     What to make of the fact that the last person to die at the hands of Django is a black man subservient to his fallen white master? That we are to relish what ultimately comes down to the offing of a slave by Django, a former slave, struck me as somewhat of a cop-out, a way to make White America accept Django's actions by hoping that they are, at its core, something other than racially motivated.

     About fifteen minutes too long — just when you think the downer of a conclusion is reached, the film starts back up again — Django Unchained is nonetheless at its best (and worst) when it decides to melt away its structure. One sequence takes place in real time over the course of thirty plus minutes (approx.) and it could play fascinating for some and tiresome for others. Does one get the feeling that Tarantino lays on the derogatory racial remarks to keep his audience invested by leaving them appalled? For a film which often uses quick zooms to focus on its characters' expressive faces, you can almost feel the camera's anxiousness to do the same to its viewers. Set before the birth of film, the character of Django is often photographed in 35MM in dramatic fashion; Tarantino has created a pre-cinematic mythic character of cinema.


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