There Will Be Blood

Waltz and Foxx can shoot straight in Django Unchained.

«« Django Unchained. Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. 

It’s taken a while for this writer to get around to Quentin Tarantino’s latest opus, Django Unchained.  This has nothing to do with his craft as a filmmaker. On a tactical, scene-by-scene level, Tarantino’s work is unique. It crackles with an energy that is purely his. In an industry where the pre-sold commodity, the sure thing, is valued above everything else, he’s a special beast indeed.

            The hesitation has more to do with the theory behind all his work—namely, an aesthetic of revenge that is becoming monotonous. In such films as Kill Bill, Death Proof, Inglorious Basterds, and now Django, Tarantino ransacks the trashier side of film history to construct elaborate visions of retribution—veritable Grand Guignols of vengeance. Indeed, by his self-justifying moral calculus, the more horrid the original insult, the more baroquely over-the-top the revenge is entitled to be. The result is that Tarantino has it both ways: he gets to envision Nazis slaughtering Jews (as in Basterds) or whites abusing blacks (as in Django) with all the vivid detail of proper, old-fashioned exploitation—as long as he balances his moral books by turning the tables later, with even more blood, more extreme prejudice.
            On a certain level—the level, one supposes, of grown men who have never matured beyond their teenage years—all that can seem pretty profound. It’s a level where one of the oldest morals in all of storytelling, of the essential emptiness of vengeance, has never occurred to anybody. And there’s no shortage of historical inspiration, either: a whole raft of possible Tarantino projects await (whites vs. Indians, Jews vs. Arabs, Christians vs. Muslims, Hatfields vs. McCoys, etc.) where he can go on reducing even the saddest of conflicts into his own brand of vengeance porn. “My hands are clean,” Tarantino seems to say, after the ex-victims splatter the blood of their enemies all over the audience. It’s as predictable as Christmas.

            This time he ransacks the spaghetti westerns of the 1960’s, such as the Franco Nero Django (1966), marries it to the hyper-violence of Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, 1969), and breeds his usual low-art, high-artifice story of Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave who becomes a bounty-hunter. Django’s teacher in the trade is Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German immigrant who gives up dentistry for tracking down outlaws. Django turns out to be a natural marksman, an expert rider, and can even read—skills that seem odd in a lifelong field slave, but are useful enough to the good doctor. Soon the mismatched pair are turning heads from Texas to Tennessee, bagging fugitives for cash. “Kill white folks and get paid for it?” muses Django. “What’s not to like?” (Got to wonder why King never seems to go after black outlaws, but never mind.)

            This being a Tarantino opus, vengeance must figure somewhere, and does as they hatch a plan to rescue Django’s wife Hilda (Kerry Washington) from a Mississippi plantation owned by the genteel yet debauched Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Candie is another in Tarantino’s gallery of loquacious rogues, fond of brandy and cigars and forcing his slaves to fight to the death bare-handed on his parlor floor. It’s probably not a spoiler to reveal that things end bloodily, with stacks of corpses among those who formerly did the stacking, and Django riding into the sunset to the sound of Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name”.

            Not so much a remake of the 1966 Django as a riff on its mannerisms, the film reconstructs the same color palette, the same taste for whip pans and crash zooms. In short, it is completely ironic, über-cool…and utterly predictable. You’d think it impossible for a movie that includes numerous knee-cappings, disembowelings, whippings and gunshots to the crotch to be dull, but Django Unchained tests that proposition. At two hours and forty-five minutes, it takes almost as long to play out as a double feature of the original Django plus A Fistful of Dollars. It feels longer.

            As in Inglorious Basterds, the silkily appealing Christoph Waltz lends an incongruous presence that, in Tarantino’s pulpy universe, amounts to a breath of fresh air. Samuel L. Jackson also does a memorable—if grotesque—turn as the “house nigger” from Hell, ably and proudly embodying the worst clichés of black race betrayal. Both are better than Jamie Foxx, who seems a bit bewildered in a difficult role.

            In the end, Django is the work of a talented director who is just too enamored of his tricks to grow up. What’s it going to take for Tarantino to stop exploiting exploitation? In this, there’s some precedent for change: Clint Eastwood, himself a veteran of spaghetti Westerns, basically cashed in on exploitative drivel for decades until, at the age of 62, he directed Unforgiven. The obverse of everything he had vulgarized over his career, Unforgiven was a cosmological Western about—aptly enough—the tragic futility of vengeance. It launched Eastwood’s career as a “serious” filmmaker.

            Tarantino is not yet 50, so he’s got time yet to surprise us, to make his own Unforgiven. We can always hope.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro