A Wild, Wild Western

Django Unchained

** out of ****

Directed by: Quentin Tarantino

Starring: Jaime Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington and Samuel L. Jackson

Running time: 165 minutes

Quentin Tarantino is a virtuoso wordsmith and one of our generation’s most ambitious directors. He’s made an astounding career for himself by taking the kinds of films he loves – whether they be crime noir, Samurai flick or World War 2 epic – and injecting these homages with his own brand of manic characters and humourous, unconventional dialogue.

However, Tarantino’s latest film, Django Unchained, is his biggest disappointment to date. It is his least engaging and most wildly uneven effort that, while still terrifically performed, wavers around trying to find its tone. It is shot like a Spaghetti western, with its wide-angle long shots and whipped close-up zooms, but is structured like a serious vigilante drama.

Meanwhile, it features cheeky and cartoonish violence that would feel at home in a Blaxploitation flick, but instead distracts from the severity of the subject matter.

The film begins in the antebellum South as a chain gang of slaves move through Texas. One of these slaves, the titular character with the silent ‘D’ who is portrayed by Jaime Foxx, is granted his freedom by a cunning bounty hunter, Schultz.

Schultz is played by Christoph Waltz, who eats his words as deliciously as he did as the hotsy-totsy Nazi in Inglourious Basterds. Pinged with his own white guilt, Schultz vows to kill plantation owners. As Schultz tells Django, he “despises slavery.”

Django becomes Schultz’s valet and learns the rules of the gunslinger. The ex-slave is off to find his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who is the property of notorious plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

The best scenes in the film explore the tricky master-slave dynamic between Schultz and Django, and later on, between the moustache-twirling Candie and his subservient head slave, Stephen, played by a bristling, bittered Samuel L. Jackson.

The film belongs less to Foxx – who gets surprisingly few delirious scenery-chewing moments – and more to the wild, cartoonish semblances of the supporting cast, notably Waltz, as a cunning Bugs Bunny-like talker in Elmer Fudd’s costume. Jackson also gets a meaty role, with his character’s rabid belief in the hierarchical status quo a fascinatingly original characterization.

Although Tarantino dates the film in 1858, he is elastic with the history. He brings in the KKK in the film’s most cheerfully satiric scene, although a whole decade before their roots sprouted in the Deep South. The writer/director also plays modern, distractingly anachronistic music in the background to little effect.

Django Unchained tries to be a tribute to both the Spaghetti western and the Blaxploitation film. The protagonist, with his royal blue costume and sunglasses, dresses like a gaudy 19th-century version of John Shaft. 

The vulgar, sensationalist scenes of gunplay and retribution toward the end, however, don’t match up well with the tense moments that came before. Unchained wavers between a cheeky exploitation film and an adventure drama steeped in a savage historical context. Tarantino doesn’t find the right balance between these two extremes.

By shifting the realm of historical tragedy to the levels of a playful, genre-centric romp, Tarantino is a more effective entertainer than a politically relevant filmmaker.