By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on DVDs: Django Unchained
PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW
DJANGO UNCHAINED (Also Combo pack Blu-ray/DVD/Digital) (Three and a Half Stars)
U.S.: Quentin Tarantino, 2012 (Weinstein Company/Anchor Bay)
Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained was a surprise multiple winner at the last Oscars. but only because some of us may have overestimated its outrage quotient, and underestimated how damned entertaining it is. After Dirty-Dozening it up in his last picture, Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino pullls us here into a magical movie land that buff Tarantino knows well: the wide-open, ironic, gun crazy realm of mid-to-late ’60s-early ’70s Italian spaghetti Westerns—a roost ruled by director Sergio Leone and star Clint Eastwood and their “Man With No Name” Trilogy, but also home to a wild bunch of trashily enjoyable offshoots by moviemakers with lesser names and smaller guns. Like Sergio Corbucci, who made the original Django in 1966.
An audaciously enjoyable and horrifically exciting melodrama set in the Old West and the Old South of the nineteenth century, Django Unchained churns out not so much the history of our dreams, or the dreams of our history (what John Ford and D. W. Griffith gave us), but the nightmare alternative Western history of Leone and his colleagues and imitators, from the revisionist ‘60s and ‘70s, when there were movies with titles like A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die. Since Tarantino has called Leone’s The Good, The Bad and the Ugly his favorite movie, it’s not surprising that he gives his new show something like the grandly operatic super-style that was Leone’s hallmark: an eye-popping cross-cultural technique full of simmering machismo and tolling bells and epic showdowns and Mexican standoffs and explosive violence, with characterizations so lurid and unrestrained and colorful (in many different ways) that the movie often seems to be poking fun at itself. And us.
Tarantino’s latest is a jocular, bloody madhouse of a movie that stomps on notions of political correctness as if they were bugs. The title comes from a sleazily baroque oater directed by Corbucci — an Italian Leone knockoff that starred, as coffin-toting bounty hunter Django, the 1967 Camelot’s Lancelot, Franco Nero. (Nero does a self-kidding cameo here in a bar scene, but Vanessa Redgrave, Camelot’s Guinevere, is nowhere to be seen. And the real-life Django—the great French Gypsy jazz guitarist surnamed Reinhardt—is unfortunately nowhere to be heard.)
Instead we get charismatic African-American gunman-bounty hunter Django (played with stoic hip and smolder by Jamie Foxx)—an embittered ex-slave saved from outlaws and schooled in slaughter by Dr. King Schultz (played, with another Oscar to show for it, by Christoph Waltz, the wordy Nazi villain of Inglorious Basterds). Waltz is a good guy this time, Django’s mentor, but there’s some high-grade screen villainy by Leonardo Di Caprio and Samuel L. Jackson, both of whom would have stolen the movie if Waltz didn’t already have it stuffed in his back pocket.
It’s a typical Quentin Tarantino mix: a grand expansion of the kind of movie that used to be slapped together by producers, Italian and otherwise, whose motives were mostly purely mercenary, and writers and directors of sometimes high but batty-looking style who would do practically anything to keep the audience awake. We’re in the West and the South, circa sometime around 1858, and we see Waltz as the dazzlingly eloquent German traveling dentist and bounty hunter Schultz save and free the quietly deadly slave Django (Jamie Foxx). Schultz wants Django to help him track down some elusive bounty prey, Django‘s old acquaintances the Brittle brothers, murderous scum for whose heads fortunes are offered. Django, hellbent on revenge, wants to find his still enslaved wife, the German-speaking Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).
In the course of their search, interrupted by numerous cameos by erstwhile stars and mainstays of that great cinematic era, the late ‘60s and ‘70s, Schultz and Django wind up in the elegant but barren-looking estate Candyland, insane domicile of the sadistic Southern Gentleman Calvin Candie (Di Caprio), whose affairs are actually run by Stephen, a devilish consigliere disguised as an Uncle Tom. There, surrounded by affable bigots, Southern aristocrats, milk-faced semi-belles and persecuted African-American gladiators, King and Django infiltrate the beast’s lair and whet Candie‘s depraved racist appetites, by pretending to be part of the local Mandingo slave-fighter trade. They also find Broomhilda. (A reference to Wagnerian opera or the ’70s comic strip?)
The movie is appropriately scored to great jangly torrents of old Ennio Morricone music (and one new Morricone theme), and those of his colleague Luis Bacalov—along with Richie Havens (“Oh Freedom“) and Jim Croce (“I Got a Name“). I also found it amusing to savor the small but pungent roles played by Don Johnson (as Big Daddy), and everybody from Bruce Dern to Russ & Amber Tamblyn to Michael Parks to James Remar to Tom Wopat to Tarantino himself. Amusing too is the movie’s cheerfully sarcastic version of the Ku Klux Klan, shown as Klan-robed dimwits who repeatedly ride into each other (especially Jonah Hill), because the Klan-seamstress misplaced the eyeholes in their masks.
You can say what you will about Django Unchained, but you can’t say it’s not both entertaining and some kind of deeply personal project, or that it doesn’t have something to say (often stingingly) about American racism and violence. Tarantino takes a story and script that might have been written by Elmore Leonard or David Mamet after a few shots, and directed by a Sergio Corbucci, a Fernando Di Leo or a Lucio Fulci, and gives it the kind of finicky attention to high style you might expect from a David Lean or a Federico Fellini.
One of the likable things about some trashy, unrestrained, magnificently awful movies—trash done with genius and shamelessness — is that this kind of show lets you indulge some sleazy impulses, without suffering the usual consequences. That’s part of Tarantino‘s appeal. He opens up great golden veins of amusing garbage, enlivens his stories with his genius for dialogue and the fruits of his hip encyclopedic take on movies, and then just doesn‘t censor himself. Much. He makes us laugh, so we have a tendency we let him get away with murder. I‘m not complaining about this. Django Unchained is probably his best overall picture since Jackie Brown—partly because it has his best overall dialogue since Jackie Brown (which was based on Elmore Leonard), and dialogue is one of his strongest, sharpest points.
Is Django enjoyable? Indubitably, as King Schultz might say. Is Django offensive? Probably. Should we take it seriously? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Or, to be less wishy-washy, we should take the soul of this movie seriously, but not necessarily the body. We’ll leave that to the flesh-peddlers and violence hucksters and racists, who, in this movie at least, get their just desserts.
Extras: Featurettes, Sound Track Spot; Twenty Years in the Making: Tarantino’s XX Blu-ray Collection.