EMANCIPATION!!: a review of "Django Unchained"

"DJANGO UNCHAINED"

Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino

**** (four stars)

Quentin Tarantino is operating on an entirely different level!

Ever since his auspicious arrival with "Reservoir Dogs" (1992) and his cinematic firebomb of "Pulp Fiction" (1994), Quentin Tarantino has gleefully rewritten the rules for cinematic storytelling and filmmaking time and time again. While the conceptual jukebox of his creative mind spews out one wildly presented hybrid after another, every single familiar element from movies past are recycled and re-contextualized in a fashion that it can only be described as "Tarantino-ian." He is truly a film genre unto himself, a feat rarely achieved and definitely not a trait in abundance with 21st century movies. 

While I anxiously await the arrival of each new film from him as an event and have loved every film he has directed (to varying degrees) thus far, I do have to say that his particular penchant for African-American culture, and African-American pop culture in particular, has troubled me from time to time. His very liberal usage of the word "nigger" in film after film is an element I have wrestled with internally. On the one hand, I treat the usage of that word in storytelling as such: Everything depends upon the context in which the word is used, who is saying the word, why the word is being said and what environments do the characters exist inside of. While his streetwise crime characters would indeed use the word in the violent and racially charged underworld they inhabit, I did feel that Tarantino's line describing "dead nigger storage" in "Pulp Fiction" was him being too clever and to a harmful degree. And then, there was the highly memorable but emotionally repugnant scene between Christopher Walken and the late Dennis Hopper in Director Tony Scott's (R.I.P.) "True Romance" (1993), which Tarantino scripted. Yes, it is a brilliantly acted scene, one that is essentially an elaborately stated middle finger from one man to another. But why did the verbal middle finger have to consist of the idea that one character was descended from "niggers"...and utilized as a joke, the ultimate insult at that? I have to say that when I first heard that Tarantino was seriously thinking about creating a "Southern" instead of a "Western" and set his tale during the time of slavery, I was extremely nervous, to say the least, with how he would represent this era and horrific chapter in our nation's and my race's history. "Tread lightly, Quentin," I mentally messaged to him. "Tread lightly, brother." 

After experiencing how he handled Nazis and the Holocaust in his brilliantly executed "Inglourious Basterds" (2009), I felt a tad better about his potential future project. By the time I saw the first trailer for his new "Southern," I had a stronger feeling of the tone Tarantino was going to take and in addition to any anxieties being alleviated, I then became excited. Now having seen the finished film, the nearly three hour "Django Unchained," I feel that Quentin Tarantino has outdone himself as he has created a one-of-a-kind experience that I think is his finest work since his two part/two fisted epic "Kill Bill" (2003/2004). It is a titanic motion picture. A grueling, orgiastic odyssey unlike any other film I have seen this year or most years for that matter. And also, "Django Unchained" represents Quentin Tarantino's vision with a truly unprecedented moral and ethical seriousness while also not skimping a moment of his trademark cinematic glee and supreme storytelling vigor. For fans of "Inglourious Basterds," when Brad Pitt exclaims at that film's justifiably grisly final moments that "I think this just might be my masterpiece," I have to let you know for as terrific as that picture was, I feel that it serves as a mere warm up to the masterpiece of "Django Unchained." 

Beginning "somewhere in Texas" in the year 1858, two years before the Civil War, we meet Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave as part of a chain gang being transported across the country by the Speck brothers (James Remar and James Russo). On one frigid evening, the group is accosted by the oddly loquacious and presumed dentist Dr. King Schultz (the brilliant Christoph Waltz), who requests to speak with the slave known as Django in order to attain some information concerning the whereabouts of a group of slave traders known as the Brittle Brothers. A scuffle ensues during which Dr. Schultz reveals himself to really be an abolitionist/bounty hunter, disarms the Speck Brothers and frees Django, enlisting him in his quest and deputizing him as a bounty hunter. 

As their shared journey moves forwards, the two men forge a tentative partnership and a deal is struck between them. If Django can help Dr. Schultz locate and kill the Brittle Brothers, Dr. Schultz will, in turn, help Django rescue his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of the sadistic young plantation owner Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) from his massive compound known throughout the south as "Candyland." 

As you would expect from a film by Quentin Tarantino, the genre splicing and hybrids are all in place. What he has boiled together in his cinematic stew is another slab of revisionist history a la "Inglourious Basterds." We have the wide vistas and conceptual structures of Spaghetti Westerns, the righteous anger and vengeance of 1970s Blaxploitation films, a condemnation of the Hollywood slavery opera while existing as a slavery opera and it also even possesses a brilliantly re-imagined retelling of a German fable while also creating a cinematic folktale of a newly emancipated slave reborn as a gun-slinging legend of the South. Also, and as with his past efforts, his film is fueled by a kaleidoscopic genre bending soundtrack that mixes country, folk, soul, and even 21st century hip-hop to its pre-Civil War imagery. 

"Django Unchained," which is sumptuously photographed by veteran Cinematographer Robert Richardson, unfolds as luxuriously as a 19th century novel, and is filled from one end to the other with Tarantino's peerless dialogue which all of the actors roll around their lips with relish. Turning back Tarantino's cinematic clock a bit, remember very early in "Pulp Fiction" when hitman Jules says to his partner in crime Vincent Vega, "Let's get into character"? With that, much of "Django Unchained" almost operates like Tarantino's version of George Roy Hill's "The Sting" (1973) merged with nearly unbearable Hitchcock-ian tension and suspense, where every principal character is operating under some sort of pseudonym or false pretense and speaking the opposite of their true intentions. 

Jamie Foxx's performance at the titular Django is a study of intense implosiveness that erupts into volcanic fury. Christoph Waltz again captures the stunning musicality of Tarantino's language and rhythms while Leonardo DiCaprio shows a terrifying new sense of of gleeful malice as well as self-righteous racial piety and superiority as Calvin J. Candie. His monologues are outstanding. And then, there is an almost unrecognizable Samuel L. Jackson as Calvin's head house slave, Stephen, a chilling and infuriating cauldron of self hatred who will wail in anguish over any transgressions made against his white owners but will craft all manner of unspeakable horrors to members of his own race. The "house Negro"/"field Negro" dynamics between the slave Stephen and the emancipated warrior Django contains sharply observed commentary of the divisions within the African-American community that exist even to this day.  

Now, I would imagine that some may feel that the topic of slavery is one that should be off limits to any sense of cinematic escapism and frivolity. I wholeheartedly agree and as I stated earlier, I was concerned with how Tarantino would approach something like this. While some may refuse to see this film out of respect for the period or for our ancestors, I would not argue with anyone but I would ask them to at least give this film a shot, either now or in the future, as I believe that Quentin Tarantino has not made light of the era or was disrespectful in any conceivable way. Of course, it is a matter of taste. But, I have to say that with "Django Unchained," Tarantino has moved much further and deeper from his constant theme of revenge. The emotions I traveled through while watching the film and the primal level of intense catharsis I felt as Django embarked upon his journey while bestowing a punishing brand of retribution provided me with a certain deliverance I have rarely experienced in the movies and almost never when it comes to the representation of African-Americans on screen.

I have made no secret of my extreme hatred of Director Tate Taylor's box office smash and Oscar winning feature "The Help" from last year as it was yet another film that completely marginalized the noble and silently suffering African-American characters in favor of the white lead who acts as savior. Furthermore, it insultingly trivialized the issue of racism by being so afraid of its subject matter and that it was unwilling to make the imaginary white audience in the movie theater remotely uncomfortable. Friends of mine who love the film have informed me that the softness of "The Help" was not bothersome to them because it was entertaining. Fine. But why did it have to be entertaining at the expense of the truth? Racism is not comfortable and it should never be comfortably depicted no matter how entertaining the movie in question happens to be. With "Django Unchained," Quentin Tarantino never for even one moment makes that crucial mistake. Yes, we are plunged into a Tarantino cinematic universe but he pays proper respects to the voluminous, repugnant history of slavery by never blinking an eye with the brutality of the period and forcing us to not blink alongside him.

In regards to a film like "The Help," Tarantino plays with the conventions of the cinematic "white knight" saving the noble, silently suffering black victim through the relationship between Dr. King Schultz and Django. It was a seriously risky move to name his white, German character "Dr. King," but since he is the story's initial emancipator, the name seems fitting. As the story develops and Django's role evolves from slave to emancipated to punishing emancipator, Tarantino also upends the movies' conventions of that noble, silently suffering black victim's sense of moral superiority by refusing to "sink to the same level" of his tormentors. Tarantino also lays to waste the iconic Hollywood love affair with the antebellum south of films like "Gone With The Wind" (1939) and even Disney's own "Song Of The South" (1946), which features that infernal Uncle Remus and the song I have seriously hated, hated, HATED throughout my entire life, "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah," via an mountainous bloodbath of an explosive climax. 

Beyond those qualities, Tarantino very powerfully takes all of his storytelling razzle-dazzle and grounds all of it with the nightmarish historical truth of what the experience of slavery actually was. He never shies away from the physical and verbal brutality of the era and nor should he. If we are given films and documentaries about the Holocaust often and again, in order to help us as a society always remember the atrocities of the recent past, then the exact same should be performed for the African-American Holocaust of slavery, a period of which the America of the 21st century is still not willing to deal with internally as a matter of understanding and healing between the races. Visually, Tarantino brings us images of rape, whippings, African-Americans locked in chains or imprisoned naked in metallic hot boxes, skin brandings, black human beings encased in full face masks of metal, to the death sport fighting for the entertainment of the plantation owners and in one graphic sequence, a black man being eviscerated by a pack of wild dogs. 

And then, there is the verbal brutality contained within the film. Yes, controversy has already erupted surrounding "Django Unchained" for its massive usage of the word "nigger." To my ears this time, Tarantino's usage of the word did not bother me at all as this was indeed the language of the time period. It is a word utilized as innocuously as "table" or "chair," which is apt as slavery, in addition to serving as the complete degradation and potential annihilation of the African-American race, was also the business of human trafficking. Calvin J. Candie fashions himself a businessman and black people, at that time, thought of as being 3/5 of a human being and treated with less respect than members of the animal kingdom are nothing more than property meant to be handled and spoken of in any way slave owners wished. Delving even deeper into the psychology of the racist's mind, Calvin J. Candie, while holding a skull and wielding a hammer, ruthlessly delivers a monologue concerning the nature of "phrenology," the so-called Science that explains the differences between black and white people...a mindset that also exists to this day for some.

While we have the fictional creation of an African-American bounty hunter, everything I have just compiled are all the realities of slavery which I have not seen depicted in such an "in your face" fashion before. As difficult as it is to view, I deeply appreciated Tarantino's willingness to depict the reality of what my ancestors experienced, and most importantly, as a race, survived!!!  

Much like George Lucas and Anthony Hemingway's "Red Tails" from the start of this year, what spoke to me so powerfully over the course of "Django Unchained" is that Quentin Tarantino understands how the image is EVERYTHING. For the African-American slaves within the movie, the mere sight of an African-American man on horseback, picking out his own clothes (which initially leads to a moment of Tarantino's wicked humor which is peppered throughout the film), walking and speaking with such authority and then having the sheer audacity to gun down murderous slave owners and traders in full view, is a sight of possibility. That there is life beyond the chains. For those of us in the audience, the cinematic arrival of Django provides every African-American with a vibrant image that the unimaginable experience of slavery is one that our race survived. As a race, I firmly believe that we are still undergoing our sense of reconstruction as we still deal with the shame of being descendants from those who were enslaved. But the saga and soul stirring love story of Django and Broomhilda Von Shaft (whose surname is designed to represent the future African-American cinematic descendant who is a certain black private dick whose a sex machine to all the chicks in the 1970s) are here to show the power that we, as a race, have because we survived an experience we were not meant to survive. That makes us a powerful, beautiful people and that there is no shame in our enslaved past. We are emancipated and we must move forwards. Our existence in the 21st century, especially with President Obama in office, is a testament to our collective victory.

Speaking of the first African-American President, we should look at the racially turbulent and divisive tenor of the country at this point in time in regards to the arrival of "Django Unchained." Whether by intention or accident, Tarantino's film has arrived at a point in our collective history where a supreme nerve at the center of our country is being pushed demonstrably. Again, the image is EVERYTHING and when I saw that trailer for the very first time, the reaction in the predominantly white audience at the sight of a black man gunning down racist whites was palpable in its frigid nervousness and frankly, it should be. When viable Presidential candidates on the right own hunting grounds with the moniker "Niggerhead" and another nearly referred to our President as a "government nigger," those venomous words signal to anonymous racists that their own brand of hatred is acceptable. With that, at some point those very racial tensions just may crack...and not in their favor. For some, "Django Unchained" could be heeded as a warning and it surprises me that there has not been a media outcry frightening potential white viewers away from this film for fear of race riots just as there were when Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing" was released all the way back in 1989. And that observation brings out yet another issue...

The existence of  "Django Unchaned" also speaks to the money driven racism and fear that exists within Hollywood as this exact film could and would NEVER, EVER be made with an African-American filmmaker at the helm and as the conceptual and artistic driving force. But somehow, a white man is able to get this film made, especially someone with the clout of Quentin Tarantino. Thankfully, Tarantino realizes this racial filmmaking quandary and level of unfairness and he does not squander the opportunity to make the most of this highly unique storytelling experience to right some cinematic wrongs.  

Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained" is as much a labor of love as any film he has ever released. The sheer joy he has in creating his complete cinematic universe is infectious and for a film enthusiast like myself, I deeply appreciated how he swings for the fences with every time at bat, never taking his unique position as a filmmaker for granted. With "Django Unchained," Quentin Tarantino has crafted a motion picture out of pure fearlessness. Not recklessness. But pure, unadulterated, bold and brazen fearlessness that speaks to the majesty of his specialized brand of cinematic art. He has defiantly made the exact movie that he himself would pay to see, any potential offended audience members, regardless of race, be damned. 

"Django Unchained" is one of 2012's highest achievements.