Runtime: 2 hours, 21 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Quick Impressions:
We saw this movie in a packed house (at 9:20 pm) with an exceptionally responsive audience, and I was very excited about the whole thing. I love that Quentin Tarantino these days seems to have the freedom to do just exactly whatever he wants, and that the audience shows up and loves it. That’s just cool. (I mean, yes, he certainly takes his time, and yes, the movie is sprawling and kind of crazy. But it’s fun to watch and thought provoking with a quirky soundtrack and artful cinematography. I think artists should be allowed to do what they want more often. We might have more cinematic successes, and we’d certainly have more spectacular, passionate cinematic train-wrecks, which are usually more entertaining than soulless, by-the-numbers (wannabe) moneymakers. Why settle for boring and average? (Most people don’t, by the way. Most people stay home unless a particularly appealing film lures them to the theater.)
I’ve been extremely excited to see Django Unchained for some time now (probably because I’ve already seen everything else I’ve been excited to see, and this is one of the big ones remaining). Even though I’m really not a fan of gory, visceral, graphic violence (and I’m too chicken to enjoy most horror movies), I do usually like Quentin Tarantino’s films. They’re so talky, and I just love to listen. I also enjoy crazy, inappropriate displays of excess. (Who doesn’t love a good spree?) And I particularly loved Inglorious Basterds (mainly because of the intensity of Christoph Waltz), though I wasn’t sure about it the entire time I was watching. The ending of that movie really took me by surprise, and at first, I hated it, but by the next day, I had decided it was possibly my favorite Oscar nominated film that year.
I also love Leonardo DiCaprio. He first impressed me in Romeo + Juliet, but his performance in The Departed is one of my favorite of all time. Since then, he’s never been quite as good in anything else, and his last few roles have been sort of bland. (I mean, Inception was great, but even though the high-concept premise is exciting, his character really isn’t.) Playing Calvin Candie, the charismatic villain you love to hate, DiCaprio is marvelous in the most exciting part he’s had in years. Maybe he should play the villain more often.
Of course, the most memorable thing I’d heard about Django Unchained (over and over again and all the time) was that Quentin Tarantino wrote the role of Django for Will Smith who turned it down and decided to make a movie with M. Night Shyamalan instead. After seeing Django, I suppose I understand why Smith passed on the role. (It’s hard to imagine the thoroughly amiable, squeaky clean Fresh Prince expressing his enthusiasm to kill white men for money.) Still, turning down a leading role Quentin Tarantino wrote for you to work with M. Night Shyamalan instead seems crazy to me, and obviously I know more about how to be successful than Will Smith. (He seems to think the path to success is
tremendous wealth and world-wide fame, whereas I know it’s all about enormous debt and virtual obscurity.) (Not everyone has the patience to do things my way, of course. It’s more of a long-term strategy and even more of a coping mechanism.)
Of course, no matter what Will Smith chooses at this point in his career, he remains rich and famous, and Jamie Foxx doesn’t have to overcome a Will-Smith-like screen persona to play the role. He’s easily believable and seemingly effortlessly convincing as Django and gives a strong, emotive performance grounded in a kind of righteous rage that it’s hard to imagine in Will Smith. It’s easy to imagine Smith playing the part though, and playing it differently. Maybe in the future, he will decide to accept the role, and he’ll star in a remake. (That would be fun, like seeing a new person tackle Hamlet—not that Django Unchained has much in common with Hamlet apart from a final act full of bodies and a vengeful, “crazy” man monologuing with a skull.)
The Good:
Django Unchained is an extremely self-conscious Spaghetti Western/Blackspoilation/revenge fantasy about a freed slave teaming up with a
German bounty hunter to take on a demented plantation owner/amateur phrenologist (whose best friend is his cantankerous old house slave, Samuel L.
Jackson dressed up like a cross between the guy on the Uncle Ben’s rice box and Uncle Remus from Song of the South) in order to rescue a woman in peril.
A movie like that could not be mediocre. Obviously, Tarantino believes that you go big or you go home. That movie is going to be something special (for better or worse).
I loved it. At nearly two and a half hours, it is quite long, but it’s solidly entertaining, and I’m hard pressed to find any scene that should have been cut.
The soundtrack is wonderful. (I’m thinking of buying it because it’s so eclectic and so perfect. You’ve got a mix of Ennio Morricone, James Brown, Jim Croce, with unexpected flights of rap.) The cinematography is very good, too. You really feel like you’re watching an old Spaghetti Western, and some of the scenes are just beautifully framed.
Costuming and set design are also high points of the film. There’s amazing detail in the costuming, and the sets at Candyland are particularly ornate. But what I loved? The gross, grimy teeth gunking up all those beautiful mouths! It seemed like everyone’s teeth got browner and browner as the movie went on.
This movie got no SAG nominations, which stuns me, but I have heard that Quentin Tarantino was struggling in the editing room to get it released in time, so maybe it didn’t screen early enough for SAG voters. How could they overlook these performances? So many of them are noteworthy!
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Leonardo DiCaprio):
I’m extremely biased in DiCaprio’s favor. I always want to love him. (Of course, that doesn’t mean I always do.) I almost always enjoy his performances, but while they’re usually high quality, that doesn’t make every one of them Oscar worthy. But he’s exceptional here. This crazy plantation owner is a very good role for him.
The moment when he drags out the skull is pretty over-the-top, but definitely memorable, giving him a chance to go absolutely berserk and show previously untapped emotions.
Really what I like best, though, is the way he reacts to and interacts with Django in the earlier scenes, particularly as they ride out on their ostensible errand and pass the man in the tree.
DiCaprio uses the perfect mixture of charm and menace to make Candie a consistently compelling yet entirely repulsive character. I really hope he gets nominated for this.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Christoph Waltz):
I think Waltz gets the best character arc in the story. (And I also like the way his character here is so different from the one he so memorably played in his previous collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, Inglorious Basterds.) He plays a former dentist who kills people for money to the collect the bounty on their heads because to do so is his legal right. If the law protects your actions, how can they be wrong?
I like best the scene he plays in German with Kerry Washington. His joke at the end is particularly funny. But he’s also quite strong in the scene with the man in the tree and again when he’s revisiting this moment in his head
later on.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Samuel L. Jackson):
I haven’t heard any awards buzz around Samuel L. Jackson’s performance, and I can’t figure out why on earth not! He’s fantastic as Stephen, the hostile old house slave who is bafflingly devoted to his sadistic master, Calvin Candy. The part is completely different than what he usually plays (which is amazing since he shows up in so many movies playing such a variety of roles).
What’s more, the part really only works because Jackson is playing it and playing it so well. Obviously Tarantino intends the character to be commentary on a cliché, not just a lazy cliché himself. But if Stephen had been played badly by a lesser actor, the audience might have missed the point (which would not have been a good thing at all). Jackson’s participation brings a necessary gravitas to the entire production, in fact.
Stephen is marvelous, both intense and entertaining from his first scene, but I like him best when he’s interrogating Kerry Washington’s Broomhilda.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Kerry Washington):
She doesn’t say much, so she’ll most likely be overlooked, but I also think that Kerry Washington gives a nomination worthy performance here, based on the amount of sheer agony she manages to convey alone. Her character is very effective. There was one moment late in the movie when I suddenly realized she might not make it, and I got so angry and thought, “If this woman doesn’t get out of here, I will hate this movie forever!” (Of course, I originally hated the end of Inglorious Basterds, then suddenly decided that I actually loved it.) But I mean, good grief! They’ve been torturing her the entire movie. If she doesn’t get to win, this movie has a sick sensibility.
The Other Performances:
The rest of the cast is very good, by the way, and very deep. Expect big name actors to show up without warning. There are a ton of them, but Jonah Hill stands out (though not really in a good way). I think Best Actor is already too crowded for Jamie Foxx, but he’s a very different kind of Django than I can imagine Will Smith playing. When he’s in cover at Candyland, he’s at his best. I also like the way he delivers the line, “It’s me, Baby.” (I think that’s the line.)
Also, wow! Any movie that features Don Johnson playing “Big Daddy” definitely knows how to make the most of surprise casting. I also am really coming to enjoy the work of Walton Goggins.
Probably the worst performance in the movie comes from Quentin Tarantino. (I say probably to be kind.) His movie is full of gouged out eyes and severed limbs, but he should have cut himself.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Quentin Tarantino):
Horrible performance (and painful accent) aside, Tarantino does a great job here and should definitely get a nomination as a screenwriter (and possibly also as a director). I don’t think this movie is quite as good as Inglorious Basterds, but it’s definitely a crowd pleaser and contains some fantastic performances.
One of the best decisions he makes is putting Samuel L. Jackson in the movie as the cantankerous Stephen. Another great choice is the way Django interferes in the scene with D’Artagnan. And I really enjoyed the scene with the bags on the heads. It was like Blazing Saddles taken to another level.
Best Action Sequence:
Certainly the most intense action occurs when Django confronts two of the three men who previously whipped and branded his wife. The mistreatment of Broomhilda is very sobering because earlier violence has been more of an occasion for cheers. Django doesn’t do a lot of talking, so we’re mainly able to sympathize and side with the character because we’re able to see the traumas of his past for ourselves.
Of course, the explosive ending is dynamite, too!
Funniest Scene/Best Joke:
No contest here. Even though the movie is full of humor, it’s tough to top the sequence when Big Daddy and the riders ambush Django and Dr. Schultz with the bags on their heads. I won’t spoil it, but it is pretty amusing.
The moment when Django and Broomhilda are first reunited gets a nice big laugh, too.
Best Audience Reaction:
When Django gets captured late in the film and we see him from an unusual angle, somebody in the crowd gasped out loudly, “Oh my gosh!” when she realized what she was seeing. Hard to beat that!
Best Scene Visually:
The D’Artagnan scene is gorgeous and particularly memorable. The tree is just conspicuously beautiful. But what happens there is horribly ugly. The stark contrast makes a lasting impression.
Best Scene:
Honestly, that scene involving D’Artagnan (played with piteous intensity by Ato Essando) in the tree is the best. So many elements come together there.
Personally, I like the part of the movie featuring Leonardo DiCaprio the best, and not just because of Leonardo DiCaprio. This is the heart of the movie when the most stuff that matters happens. We get to find out who the characters really are, and they also get to make some discoveries of their own.
The Negatives:
I’m never sure as I watch a Quentin Tarantino movie just what he’s trying to say. But the fact remains that he says so much so constantly that the movie is engaging, complex, and fun to think about. This one definitely raises questions about morality versus legality. It also makes you ask when (if ever) violence is justified, and pointedly examines the difference between being good and being nice.
One slight weakness (or strange choice) is that Christoph Waltz’s Dr. King Schultz gets a more complete story (in terms of character development, growth, etc.) than Django himself. Waltz, DiCaprio, and Jackson are by far the most exciting characters in the movie. It’s easy to imagine Will Smith making Django a bigger, scene-stealing character, but Jamie Foxx plays him instead with a quiet passion. I actually think Foxx is playing the part perfectly, but sometimes the character of Django gets a little lost in the three ring circus of excitement around him.
Kerry Washington’s part could have been beefed up a little bit to make it showier and more likely to get Oscar attention. Her best moments are all non-verbal, and she’s really magnificent in a difficult role, but it’s easy for the audience to lose sight of that with everyone else gabbing away all the time while Broomhilda remains largely silent.
For me, the weakest part of the story is Django’s treatment of the Australians near the end. I’m not sure that it’s necessary to handle that exactly the way he does. Also, Quentin Tarantino is a wonderful writer and director, but he’s such a bad actor that I didn’t even realize he was trying to sound Australian until another Australian guy showed up. Seriously, he sounded like a tone-deaf cartoon mouse trying to sing.
That crazy, springy tooth bouncing around on top of Schulz’s cart is kind of distracting, too. When I first got a look at him in action, I wondered, Is he that helpful little elf from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer all grown up?
The amount of violence to horses bothered me, too. Intellectually, I realize that it’s supposed to be upsetting. I mean, obviously, it’s horrible to kill an innocent horse but even worse to kill an innocent human being. The thing is, I’m not in favor of torturing and killing people, either. My shock at seeing the horses hurt makes an interesting point about American movies. People are shot up, blown apart, and ripped to shreds all the time, but you hardly ever see graphic violence to animals. (As if Quentin Tarantino anticipated gut reactions like mine, very early in the closing credits, we get a gigantic disclaimer that no animals were harmed in the making of the movie.)
One More Thing:
Also—not a fault of the film—our ratings system seriously needs a major overhaul. The R rating tells you nothing about what to expect from the movie. Tarantino’s name means more. I look at a film like this and one like Killer Joe and just cannot understand why the latter was rated NC-17 if Django Unchainted is only R. The Fright Night remake looks like a bedtime story for five-year-olds compared to Killer Joe and Django Unchained, but it has exactly the same R rating. And so does The King’s Speech! Good grief!
Overall:
I thoroughly enjoyed Django Unchained and find it worthy of Oscar consideration in many areas. It’s definitely not for children (which should go without saying), but it’s a fun watch and was a huge crowd pleaser the night we saw it. Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson both deserve Oscar nominations, and Christoph Waltz ought to get one as well. (Not since Doc Holiday has a dentist with a gun caused such a stir.) Inglorious Basterds is probably a slightly better film, but the two of them together would make a fantastic and thought-provoking double feature.