Another Violent Fantasy: A Review of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained

Director Quentin Tarantino lays his cards on the table pretty early in his acclaimed yet highly controversial film Django Unchained. One of the very first subtitles of the film reads "1858: two years before the Civil War" notwithstanding the fact that the American Civil War actually erupted in 1861, or THREE years after 1858 and not two. This is the first of many anachronisms that regularly pop up throughout the film, and they only serve to emphasize one thing: this film is no more an accurate representation of the deep American South in the 1850s to 1860s than Tarantino's last film Inglourious Basterds, was of the Second World War.

Django Unchained is the story of a slave (Jamie Foxx) who longs to be reunited with his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from whom he has been separated. He is being transported, along with several other slaves, in the dead of the night by slave traders when he is freed by a traveling bounty hunter who used to be a dentist, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). As a bounty hunter, Schultz is in the business of hunting down wanted criminals all over the country, and it so happens that Django (Foxx) knows and can identify by face three of the fugitives Schultz is hunting at the moment. Schultz makes a deal with Django; if he can help him hunt down his three fugitives, Django gets a share of the bounty and his freedom. The arrangement works out well, but when Schultz finds out that Django intends to use both his new wealth and freedom to attempt to buy back his wife in the deep, deep South, he both fears for him and admires him, and decides to help him. Django reminds him Siegfried, the hero from the popular German saga of the Nibelungs, who went to great lengths to rescue his bride Brunhilde, and he now wishes to aid him in his quest. Together, they find out that Broomhilda's new owner is Calvin Candie (Leonardo di Caprio), a second or third generation plantation owner in Tennessee who has "diversified" his slave ownership; he trades them as mandingo fighters (sort of a much more brutal version of UFC) and as prostitutes. Candie fancies himself a connoisseur of many things in life; he claims to be a francophile but speaks not a word of French, and like many people of his kind he is basically a completely pretentious fool. Schultz and Django then plan an elaborate con to get Candie to sell Broomhilda to them, one which will appeal to Candie's vanity. Unfortunately, the possible fly in the ointment is Candie's longtime slave and effectively majordomo Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), who is as sharp as Candie is dense. Things are on a knife-edge, and if it all goes south the two are looking at a very, very bloody confrontation.

As with most Tarantino films, he's managed to both garner praise and stir up controversy with the depiction of his chosen subject matter, specifically slavery and racism in the deep South. Filmmaker Spike Lee has decried the film as "disrespectful" to his ancestors, and other people have weighed in against the film's overall tone and depiction of its subject matter.

It's hard for me to have a truly informed opinion on whether or not the film trivializes or in any way disrespects the collective experience of African-Americans as I am neither African-American nor intimately familiar with the history of slavery in America. About the only claim I can make to being knowledgeable of African-American history is that I've seen Edward Zwick's Civil War epic Glory multiple times as well as several movies starring Denzel Washington or Will Smith.

What I can say, and this is something worth pointing out, is that there is no pretension on the filmmakers' part at posing historical discourse here. The anachronisms are the first clue, starting with the repeating rifle that nearly everyone and his brother uses in the film notwithstanding the fact that the device was actually invented in 1862 and only mass produced two or three years later, to Quentin Tarantino's favorite swear word: "motherfucker," which by many accounts was not popularized until the twentieth century. Again, to look for historical significance in this film is the same thing as likening Inglourious Basterds to Schindler's List, or even Saving Private Ryan.

While the film makes the usual statements about racism, what I found interesting was the slightest, almost imperceptible suggestion that the beliefs in which racism is rooted still exist among some people in today's world.

More to the point, however, Django feels valid as art because it tells a fantastical story audiences have never seen, at least not in this form. Again, to draw a parallel to Inglourious Basterds, its revisionist history is, in some ways, cathartic. The Jews never got to avenge their murdered loved ones and friends by killing Adolf Hitler. In fact, for all the people Hitler killed, nobody even got to lay their hands on him as he died by his own hands. This irrevocably annoying historical truth actually made Hitler's fictional death by machinegun at the hands of one of the Jewish commandos comprising the "Basterds" truly gratifying, and was the very embodiment of the revenge-fantasy theme. How many slaves were actually able to exact direct vengeance on the white men who oppressed them? I really don't know, but to my knowledge there weren't many, if there were any at all. Django simply transposes well-known story tropes from old Westerns involving revenge and gunfights, amplifies the violence, and that's the movie. It's a revenge fantasy, and to those harping on the use of the dreaded "n" word in the film, I have to say it's worth pointing out that just about every white person in the film who uttered it meets an extremely violent end. Tarantino scripts himself into a very brief role in the film, incidentally, and meets a predictable but nonetheless quite amusing fate. I bet he had a ball putting on a cockney accent.

In the final analysis, the film is hugely entertaining, even though I found myself wincing at some of the more extreme violence. Foxx's Django and Waltz's Schultz are certainly among the more compelling characters in Tarantino's roster, and diCaprio was outstanding as the foppish, brutally decadent aristocrat Candie. It is worth noting that Waltz's character Schultz contains echoes of his previous role, Hans Landa; apart from their German nationality, both gentlemen are murderously pragmatic sorts. This is not to say Waltz or Tarantino recycled the character, but there are parallels of sorts.

It's easy to get on board Tarantino's revenge thrill ride because he has created characters in whom it is easy to invest, and because between gunfights he peppers the scene with his now-trademark dialogue. It's nothing quite as eloquent as David Carradine's deconstruction of Superman in Kill Bill, Vol. II or Samuel L. Jackson's Biblical soliloquy in Pulp Fiction, but there are several moments worth watching again on DVD. In terms of the violence, it's fair to say that this film is not for the faint of heart (or, in the case of copycat murderers, the psychologically-impaired); while the sight of Uma Thurman's Bride slicing up 88 Yakuza members in Kill Bill Vol. I was decidedly extreme, here it's the quality, rather than the quantity of the violence that rather made me cringe. Suffice it to say, not even genitals were safe in this movie.

Still, for fans of Tarantino and utter catharsis, this film is an absolute must-see.

4.5/5