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Django Unchained (2012)
  
Review
Django Unchained is half a
good movie of classic Tarantinoesque quality, before descending
slowly but surely into a racist, disrespectful blob of a film that
left me with a vapid aftertaste. Essentially a buddy movie set
in Texas and Mississippi shortly before the American Civil War,
Django Unchained tells the story of a slave named Django (Jamie
Foxx) who gets freed from his chains and owners by the highly
eloquent German bounty-hunter and pistoleer Dr. King
Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Schultz's eyes are primarily on bounties and
his own gain, but he needs Django to point out three wanted slavers for
him, and since Schultz also "despises slavery", the stage is set for
two unlikely friends and heroes roaming the American South chasing
despicable bad guys and turning heads in the process.
The good thing is that Tarantino
is back to his usual self in writing fun and elaborate dialogue and
preposterous situations from which Dr. Schultz always finds a way
out through fancy talk and/or lightning-quick hipfire. In his homage
to classic westerns (more in the direction of Peckinpah than Sergio
Leone), Tarantino
gladly presents his minor characters as stereotypes and writes up
larger-than-life villains in order to create the inevitable big
showdowns. Leonardo DiCaprio's despicable born-and-bred slaver and
misanthrope is our protagonists' biggest nemesis; the target for the
eventual boss battle. And it is through him that Tarantino's fine
balance between the 'cool' and the 'uncool' begins to wobble in my
book. It becomes apparent that what we're witnessing is not simply a
western story about a couple of unlikely heroes and friends, but
rather a raid of vengeance on whites on behalf of all African-American
slaves, much like what the Jews received from Tarantino in
Inglourious Basterds.
In its process of vindicating the
horrible racism and cruelty that African-American slaves were once
subjected to, the film goes way overboard itself – both in its
anti-white masturbation – which one would have to be blind not to
see – and in exaggerating and making cheap entertainment out of the
situation of the slaves. The result is a film that I suspect will
leave both black and white viewers perplexed. You may
well feel that you have been entertained by Django Unchained,
but rather than make me sympathise for black people of the 1860s
United States,
it just made me despise vengefulness even more.
And for those people who aren't
able to recognise the exaggerations and agitation Tarantino stirs up
here (younger viewers probably), I fear the film will be completely
counterproductive; i.e. substantiate differences and stereotypes
rather than being uniting and progressive. In his earlier days,
Tarantino used violence to create effect and show us the fine line
between the ugly and the beautiful; now his violence is more gory
and less poetic, and the story around it seems merely like a bad excuse
for it all.
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