Best Picture #1: DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012)

A rollercoaster of thoughts went through my head while watching Quentin Tarantino's troubling, occasionally brilliant Django Unchained.  His film has not come without its share of controversy, given that it's essentially a comic book movie about slavery directed by a white man.  Many have questioned Tarantino's right to make such a film, and one prominent filmmaker has labeled it disrespectful while refusing to see it.

I think the problem is that we all have expectations for what a Tarantino film will be.  He has dealt mostly in pulp, and most of his films have been near-satirical explorations of genre rather than life.  He makes movies that inhabit a movie universe.  Even his World War II film, the wonderful Inglourious Basterds, was set squarely in the world of the movies.  While the specter of the Holocaust certainly haunted Basterds to an extent, Django is his first film to deal up front with a real-life atrocity.

And so the tone of Django is subtly different from that of his earlier films.  We've grown to expect a Tarantino comedy, but that is not what Django is, though there are several laugh-out-loud moments.  The laughter stops after a while, as it should.  The movie's outright brutality is shocking, because we aren't afforded the usual distance from violence that we expect.  Because we start with Tarantino's cheeky dialogue and are then thrown into a world of horrific violence, Django is often an enraging film.  It takes a while before we notice that Tarantino is actually making a serious movie.

Not a serious film, mind you, but a serious movie.  Django is a comic book movie after all, one with clear-cut heroes and villains, and exaggerated situations with stylized violence.  It also doesn't have much of anything to say about slavery itself, other than that it was a very bad thing that is not far enough in our past.  But Tarantino takes the subject matter seriously, doesn't trivialize slavery, and creates an elaborate and horrific universe around the pre-Civil War South.

What Tarantino hasn't changed is his knack for quirky, odd, memorable characters.  He has created a couple of terrific heroes in his two lead characters, as well as a fine performance from Jamie Foxx and yet another unique character from Christoph Waltz.  This time Waltz is on the heroes' side, playing Dr. King Schultz, a onetime dentist who now works as a bounty hunter.  He raids a couple of slavers in search of one slave, Django (Foxx), who can lead him to the men he's seeking.  Soon the two men decide to become partners in bounty hunting, and Dr. Schultz promises to help Django find and free his long-lost wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).

Broomhilda is currently owned by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a plantation owner in Mississippi who takes a special interest in Mandingo fighting, in which a couple of strong black men fight to the death for his own entertainment.  Django and Schultz hope to free her by posing as slavers and proposing purchasing one of Candie's fighters.

It's here that Tarantino abandons the usual overplayed silliness and stakes darker territory.  His scenes at Candie's plantation ("Candie-land") contain some of the most brutal and uncompromising violence I've ever seen.  But though Tarantino borrows his style from exploitation films, his movie is not exploitative but honest.  What they witness at Candie-land brings Dr. Schultz to think beyond his personal quest, and to make a decision that leads the film to its technically positive but very sad conclusion.

DiCaprio, as the film's Mississippi equivalent of Waltz's Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, finds in Candie a perfectly insidious creature: wicked, amoral, buffoonish, frightening.  Washington fails to make much of an impression as Broomhilda; though she's acceptable as a goal for Django, her role is underwritten and it feels like many of her scenes were left on the cutting room floor.

The most heart-wrenching performance comes from Samuel L. Jackson as Stephen, Candie's loyal house-servant.  Stephen is the most genuine character to ever exist in a Tarantino film: a driven, intelligent, devious man who's done what was necessary to survive.  His status as a house slave grants him certain privileges with his owner--he is allowed to speak out of turn and is treated at the very least as a conversational equal by Candie--but he is feared, reviled, and pitied by his fellow slaves.  He is the picture of a man who is disrespected by everyone, who has traded his dignity for security.  Stephen's is in many ways the saddest story in Django Unchained, and this is Jackson's best performance to date.

There has been much talk of Tarantino's liberal use of a certain word that he admittedly shouldn't be allowed to use.  In the making of a movie about slavery, for a white filmmaker to use the N-word is risky; however, for him not to use it is unconscionable.  To make a film in which slaveowners used nothing but nice words is a step closer to (forgive the term) whitewashing history.

Tarantino's main risk in using the N-word, I suppose, is that he is so good at writing memorable dialogue that he might unwittingly reintroduce it into the vernacular.  This risk is exacerbated by the fact that he is white; if one white director can use it, maybe we can all use it.  But Tarantino does everything he can to mitigate this risk; the N-word, uttered more than 100 times throughout the film, is ugly and clunky every time it's said.  He doesn't spin beautiful, quotable dialogue around it; rather, he cements it as the graceless term it is.  Come to think of it, I can't really think of a quotable line from the film at all, aside from Django's silly, forced "The D is silent."

Strongly written and cleverly acted as it is, Django Unchained is the first Tarantino film which struggles severely with tonal shifts.  The film begins comically, and at times Tarantino appears to be channeling Mel Brooks; a set piece involving Don Johnson as a doofus plantation owner and Jonah Hill as an even dimmer Klansman is hilarious.  Then the film starts to explore its more brutal side, which is jarring at first but increasingly genuine and believable.

But then it tries to have it both ways again, and concludes with a couple of spaghetti western-style shootouts, and an overblown Inglourious Basterds finale, in which the revenge fantasy is completed.  This is less compelling after what we've just witnessed; though the hero gets the girl, we're still left with the overwhelming violence and pervasive sadness of the earlier scenes, which just sort of hangs there unresolved.  Tarantino deals openly and honestly with the infection that was slavery, but he leaves it at that, and brings retribution in the form of grisly gunshots rather than a real resolution.  I suppose there was no way the movie could have ended with Stephen redeeming himself and becoming the hero.  I suppose.

*** out of ****