Django Unchained Review!
Quentin Tarantino is a brilliant director and I love his style and panache. More importantly, though, I trust him. I completely trust Tarantino to sit me down and tell me a story and I know that what ever story it is he has thought it through and has carefully crafted it with a painful amount of neurotic detail. I don't think that Django Unchained was his best work, but it is still a phenomenal film and definitely has that Tarantino watermark of quality seeping through each and every scene. This film is beautiful and brutal and gorgeous and gory and by now we should expect nothing less from Tarantino.
Acting: One day Quentin Tarantino woke up and must have thought "I wonder how badass I can make Jamie Foxx look?" And thus this film was born. Well, not actually. Not at all, really, but that thought makes me happy. Foxx was a total badass and displayed some of his best acting to date, a huge amount of boldness and flexibility, especially during the scenes at and in transit towards Candyland Ranch. Also, the interactions between Django and his wife seemed to be almost entirely devoted to just making Django as over-the-top-badass as possible. Jamie Foxx had a great performance, no doubt, but I felt like he could just not quite compete with the rest of the stunning cast. Christoph Waltz is just such an entirely interesting man: his voice, his manner, and his character meshed together in such a way that you can't help fall in love with him a little bit more than you already did after watching Inglorious Basterds. He is well deserving of the Golden Globe he won and I look forward to his success at the Oscars. Speaking of awards, if there was ever a joint acting award, Leo DiCaprio and Sam Jackson would get it because they were just great together. I just want to give them both a great big award for their performances in this film. They just worked and had great chemistry together and I feel like Leonardo DiCaprio should have started being cast in Tarantino flicks a LONG time ago. The character he created and his command over the canter of his own voice was like no role he's played before and I get the feeling that Tarantino really teased Mr. Candy out of him.
Music: Tarantino, as always, knows his music. The man has become fairly famous for the soundtrack choices he makes in all his films and here is no different. I'd say the best track work he ever did was Kill Bill Vol. 1 (Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang" is simply gorgeous) with Pulp Fiction as a close second. I actually still have the Pulp Fiction soundtrack on cassette. Proud moment, realizing that. The main theme for Django is beautiful and powerful and exactly the kind of track I'd expect Tarantino to put in this film. There is some controversy over the Rick Ross song "100 Black Coffins" that was used - a hard and rough gangster rap bit. In a film full of beautiful and melodic music it stands as a sharp contrast and highlights part of modern black culture that most people try to turn away from. It seems counter-intuitive: Tarantino wants to have brutal violence juxtaposed with melody and this rap doesn't seem to fit the bill. However, I think that this whole film is an exploration of the figure of the black man in American culture - not a glorification, not a peek through a rosy looking glass, but an honest look - and I am proud of Tarantino for having the balls to include a risky song. As a cool bit of trivia: "100 Black Coffins" was actually Jamie Foxx's idea and there is a neat interview about that (http://www.vibe.com/node/137771). I think the rap works with the overall theme and messages of the film even if it does clash with the rest of the audio aesthetic.
Cinematography: The cinematography gave us a great view of the American south, a place that is not terribly difficult to make look good. Each location was typically well shot but there were a few scenes that really stood out to me. The opening sequence in the dark woods was wonderful, trees lit with sharp back-lighting made gnarled frames for the slaves to hobble past, breathing white breath into the visibly cold air. The funeral scene towards the end featured a great tree and bursts of sunlight streaming through its branches and the light silhouetted the funeral party in a massive wide angle shot. Another favorite shot of mine was the scene where Django fires on Big Daddy as he attempts to flee the raid: the camera swoops low and follows the body as it falls from its horse. Finally, the most striking single shot was a close-up of blood spattered cotton. It was so simple and so beautiful and so honest. It really stuck out for me.
Plot and Writing: Once again, the writing, like everything else, is quintessential Tarantino. I feel that the ending sequence with Samuel L. Jackson's death was exceptional. By and far the best written part of the film was the opening sequence where Dr. Schultz buys Django from a pair of slavers. The writing is tense and controlled and Schultz, played by Waltz, immediately proves his character's worth and intrigue by subtly playing by every rule of pre-civil war America. The careful focus on laws, legitimate sales, and proof of sale receipt is fantastically controlled and undermined by Schultz's sage advice to the remaining slaves which boiled down to: either be good slaves or be bad men. Throughout the film, Schultz' writing and lines really drive the dialogue and plot until he passes the torch, in a way, to DiCaprio's character. Then, once Mr. Candy has no more lines, Django picks that bloodied torch up from off the ground and delivers that final scene with Steven. The whole screenplay really takes its time and effort to show Django the way to find his own voice so he can articulate and speak out with words so powerful that they are just as effective as the bullets he shoots.
Overall: I feel like a broken record, I'm just singing praises for this film left and right, but I really feel like there is not much that could have been improved upon. Some complain about the film being too long, honestly I felt it wasn't long enough and there were still a few small strings to tie that might end up in a director's cut (like that one female thug who was never explained but was filmed to stick out). My only real criticism is that Django Unchained just doesn't quite have the same "umph" or heart as Tarantino's earlier work. All the familiar Tarantino-isms are there, the film was beautifully written and a treat to look at, but there is just some X-factor missing. The faint feeling that it could have been just a bit…more… but it wasn't quite.
Favorite Moment? Easily my favorite moment of the film is KKK pre-raid banter scene. Tarantino has a brilliant precedent for writing in scenes that are completely irreverent but provide fantastic texture to his films. This scene features Jonah Hill in a perfect role along with a small legion of dim witted racist hillbillies arguing about the eye-holes of their masks. The point Tarantino makes is that this otherwise faceless and intimidating gang is actually just a bunch of average guys that just so happen to be a lynch mob. In every other scene they are just a mob (a-là Illinois Nazis), but here they are given a unique opportunity to have a personality. The scene is reminiscent of the diner scene of Reservoir Dogs where a bunch of average guys, who happen to be brutal and violent thugs, are given a greater depth as they argue over the ethics and merits of tipping the waitress. Both scenes are irrelevant, plot wise, but hold a powerful effect developing the film with a very Tarantino texture.
9/10
- Jay
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