Is That It?

After watching Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, I'm in a bit of a quandary... How does one review this film? Do we look at it critically, citing a couple nice scenes, strong performances, and strong cinematography? Should we look at it intellectually, delving into character dynamics and trying to puzzle out the reasons why certain things happen? ... Or is this taking the film more seriously than it wants to (or deserves to) be taken? After all, it becomes abundantly clear within the first few seconds of Django Unchained that this is not a serious, historical look at slavery, slaves, slave-owners, or even the violence which the film is so steeped in. Is it best to admire the film for its cleverness and persistent, ironic sensibilities, as seems to be the preference with most people?

I don't know. Like I said: quandary.

One thing I do know: I was not impressed. I've touched on this before (see link), but I've not been a fan of Tarantino's most recent "phase"; though, guessing by the last nine years of his career (ie, from Kill Bill on), I'm not sure that term is appropriate. My father-in-law and I talked about this once before: Tarantino's always been a movie-lover first, and a filmmaker second. He has virtually no interest in recreating the "real" world - he's having too much fun in the reel world. His movies are full of winks, nods, homages, sometimes outright thievery of his favorite scenes, filmmakers, actors, and music cues... And yet, something's changed. This is not the same man who brought us Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown. Even Reservoir Dogs shows a restraint sorely missing from his last five films.

What do we think of when we think of Quentin Tarantino? I'd venture most would say they think of pop violence and foul language: cool guys hurting people in cool ways, cursing all the while and yet somehow being cool and clever, and "Hey, don't get upset - it's all in good fun. This isn't the real world, these characters are basically flesh-and-blood (heavy emphasis on the blood) cartoons."

And I don't mean to sound like a stick in the mud, but that's not the Tarantino that intrigues me. That's not the Tarantino I admire. Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown are great films because of what's not shown. Because of how people behave in increasingly extreme circumstances. Those are films about believable people cast in unbelievable scenarios. Tarantino once said that he liked to take real people and put them in the movies - that's what makes his early films memorable. As strange, extreme, and absurd as situations got, you could believe what the characters were doing because they still acted like real people. (Though, to be fair, he also broke this mantra: Harvey Keitel's "The Wolf" is a reel character interacting with real people.)

Then came Kill Bill; then everything changed. Suddenly, the man who almost always showed violence as being either (a) offscreen, or (b) bloodless when it was on-screen, added red to his palette, and his films have become increasingly blood-soaked. This was not a movie about real people, real situations, or anything we'd see in the real world. As Tarantino himself once said, Kill Bill is the kind of movie his characters from Reservoir Dogs would go watch - ie, ultra-violent, campy, and over-the-top.

This modality has brought him increased popularity, controversy, and (I imagine) revenue, but I fail to see how any serious movie-lover can continue to support it. His is a story of wasted talent. It was fun for a while, but he's become the author of his own redundancy. Four of his last five movies have been revenge stories - Kill Bill I & II about a spurned mother rescuing her baby, Inglourious Basterds about Jews exacting revenge on Nazis for their atrocities, and now Django Unchained, which we'll get to finally...

Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino) - 2.5/5

I imagine by now a number of people have either written me off completely or find me to be a humorless, pretentious ass... This just is not true. As I've said repeatedly: I love action movies and horror movies. The degree of violence matters very little - it's to what end I care about. For instance, my question to the Django-lovers is thus: what do you love about the movie, other than being "funny" or "cool"? It's not a stuffed-shirt film about the drama of slavery and the evil deeds visited upon an entire race - I get that. But what is it, other than a piece of pop/ironic entertainment? Is it anything more? ...less?

There are good scenes in Django Unchained. There really are. Even some great ones. As a whole, though, it is not good. The film idles along for the first hour or so, introducing Django and his rescuer, a bounty hunter named Schulz. They bond quickly, Schulz proves himself a man of his word (and mighty good with a gun, too), and Django rides with him as a free man. Django helps Schulz with a job, and Schulz promptly asks him to be a partner. Django reluctantly agrees - his first priority is to rescue his wife; but, as Schulz rightly points out, it is not so simple for a freed slave in the South to try and free another slave. Their partnership remains, and they concoct a scheme to win her back. Enter Candie (DiCaprio), perhaps the film's best character (certainly the most interesting): he is an enormously wealthy plantation owner, and he owns Django's wife.

You can imagine where it goes from there... I frankly have little interest in discussing or divulging plot details. There are two fantastic scenes once Django and Schulz get to "Candie-land," as well as the film's major action set-piece. The first is a tour-de-force speech where Candie enumerates the supposed differences between whites and blacks and threatens to kill Django's wife; the second is a marvelously suspenseful bit of brinkmanship between Candie and Schulz over handshake customs.

Conversations. Tense conversations. These are the highlight of the film. Many will disagree, and will prefer the lengthy, excessively gory shootout immediately following (I'm no expert, but I'd venture it has to be the wettest shootout in film history - blood and viscera slop, spill, and squish out of virtually every character), but for me it was the conversations that gave the film hope. "Finally," I thought, "Tarantino has found what he's best at; finally, the film has a chance at greatness!" ... If only that were true.

Let's get back to the violence of the film, its one true commodity. What end does it serve? Schulz used to be a dentist, but now he's a bounty hunter... how did that happen? And, was it that easy to just up and start killing people for money? He is repulsed by slavery, presumably because it visits violence and injustice upon other human beings... Does it not bother him that he does the same? He says he only kills criminals, not innocent people, but even then - is it so easy for a dentist to become a killer? For anyone?

"You're taking this too seriously" - that's the common reply. And that's a fair point. This isn't meant to be a moral tale. The only "innocent" in the film is Broomhilda - everyone else is "bad" to degrees. Schulz kills criminals, Django kills slave-owners and those who are complicit... but they still kill. And Django doesn't just kill: he humiliates, maims, and then destroys... Are we supposed to cheer when he tortures his victims? Is that entertainment? Is that "all in good fun"? Is that all Django Unchained is meant to be? Because that's not enough.

p.s... I know, I've prattled on long enough, but here's another issue I have: Kill Bill works (if it does at all) because it adopts the modality of the samurai/revenge movie. I've seen Lone Wolf & Cub, Master of the Flying Guillotine, etc... When heads come off, they fly off; when people are cut down, they are split in two. When blood sprays, it's an arterial spray. So I get the ultra-violence of those two. Inglourious Basterds, however, is meant to be more like a Dirty Dozen kind of thing - where we're rewriting history to get a "Yeah! Go get 'em!" kind of response... And now here's Django Unchained, which is allegedly a Western. But no Western ever looked, acted, or talked like this. We know Tarantino's studied Sergio Leone (even has the great Ennio Morricone working on the score, though you'd never guess it) - how much better if he had made something along those lines. A great Western gets suspense through silence, music, and grit. This sense of suspense is sadly lacking from Django Unchained, replaced instead with the immature, gleeful desire to kill just about everyone and everything on screen - and as messily as possible, at that.