Here is a movie you wanted, whether you knew you wanted it or not. A work of glorious mayhem, Quentin Tarantino's latest blends spaghetti westerns, blaxploitation, a downright-odd-at-times slapstick, and a stinging indictment of American history, with a delirious amount of blood serving as the glue. Call it "Blazing Saddles" meets "Shaft," The Man With No Name meets Sweet Sweetback, or whatever you want. There's nothing else on the block like it.
Self-dubbed Tarantino's "southern," the movie drops us in 1858 (two years before the Civil War, a helpful title card informs) as bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) absconds with the title slave (Jamie Foxx). In exchange for his help tracking down Schultz's current targets, he promises Django his freedom and the chance to rescue his wife from the satanic plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, positively relishing his role).
Following 2009's "Inglourious Basterds," "Django" finds Tarantino continuing a new, unexpected phase of his career - historical period pieces as wish fulfillment. It doesn't matter that Hitler never died in a torched movie house or a runaway slave could never shoot his way through plantations with such reckless abandon. Tarantino's characters are unaware they're trapped in the confines of history. Instead, merely trapped in their creator's own imagination.
Accuracy is beside the point. What matters is Tarantino's revisions make emotional sense. He creates characters and follows them to their logical end, wrapped up in a way that is also satisfying to 21st century audiences in the theater.
One could make the argument that his career since "Jackie Brown" (to date his most human work) represents an increasingly indulgent exercise in genre. That characters don't matter. That plot doesn't matter. That an emotional core doesn't matter. That instead, his movies stand as an alter to himself and all the film geek knowledge he can thrust upon the world.
So easy an argument, that I almost believe it as I write it. But it's too easy. His movies aren't patchworks of those that came before. And they aren't dead museum pieces. They're breathing works that are hyper-aware of their own existence as movies and using genres we love, allow those genres' very conventions to be the heroes.
A hard pill to swallow, I know, that a slave like Django could waltz onto a plantation with a gun and fire into the chest of a man who whipped him, offering the perfect capper of, "I like the way you die, boy." Only in the movies is this possible. Unlike "Jackie Brown," where the emotional core comes from the characters themselves, "Django" ultimately satisfies as a testament to movies themselves as the great uniting art form.
It's movies as fantasy, yes. But it also speaks to film iconography as a shared emotional language among fans. And when it hits on a gut emotional level, as Tarantino films don't always do, it's because he's employing the bastard art of cinema (visuals, performers, musical cues, edits) to make it happen.
Plus it doesn't hurt that "Django" ain't no film student thesis. Tarantino reaffirms his status as one of cinema's most merry pranksters, throwing everything he loves into a blender and frappe-ing it into a new singular work. Above all else, the movie is wicked fun, Tarantino slashing American history with unbridled zeal.
His trademark weaknesses remain, to be sure. The movie is too long by a fair shake - you could cut 30 minutes from roughly any random chunks in the movie and not sacrifice much. Although no individual moments are downright "bad," he does indulge his seeming belief that every idea he has must be committed to screen. Some scenes (such as a dinner table conversation between Django, Schultz, and Calvin) aren't performed as much as they're staged, as Tarantino invites us to hang out in them.
Pacing can be your friend, QT.
Look. You know Tarantino by now. I know him by now. If it's your thing, this will be your thing too. If it's not your thing, it won't be your thing. Just don't call him a pastiche artist. He might take the familiar, but he reintroduces it as something aggressively original. When he makes a new movie, I look forward to it. I want to see it. I want to talk about it.
"Django Unchained" allows for a few new Tarantino tricks (luscious western cinematography, violence that stings instead of just titillating, and some of the most overt comedy of his career). But it's ultimately a logical step in the path his career's taking. What a vital filmmaker, and what a vital film. I'm so glad it's a thing mainstream audiences will see. Whether or not they realize what they're in for.
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