Cine Me

 

Django Unchained

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1853728/

 

 

Quentin Tarantino's brutal revenge western is a thrilling return to form with inspired performances from Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx and Samuel L Jackson.

 

Django is a long film, undoubtedly, at two hours and 45 minutes, and Tarantino may even have been tempted to split it into two, like his Kill Bill movies. But Django relaxes and luxuriates in its long form, balancing deadpan moments of awe and reverence for the landscape, lovingly photographed by Robert Richardson, with the frantic orchestration of tension and violence, cheekily giving us crash-zooms on to important faces.

 

(Who else but Tarantino would choose to target human trafficking in the form of a spaghetti Western set in the Deep South two years before the Civil War? And who else would do it to a wowser of a soundtrack that includes a taste of Ennio Morricone, a mash-up of James Brown and Tupac Shakur, and (a Tarantino rarity) original songs from Rick Ross, Anthony Hamilton and John Legend?)

 

The movie is managed with Tarantino's superb provocation and audacity, with a whiplash of cruelty and swagger of scorn. It is superbly acted by Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio and, particularly, Samuel L Jackson, who creates a masterpiece with his chilling character Stephen, the grey, stooping servant-elder to DiCaprio's unspeakable slave-owner Calvin Candie.

 

Just to make liberals everywhere uneasy, Tarantino and Jackson make Stephen the biggest, nastiest "Uncle Tom" ever: utterly loyal to his white master, and severe in his management of the below-stairs race in the Big House. He fixes everyone with a chillingly shrewd, malevolent stare made even more disquieting by an unsettling Parkinson's disease tremor — an inspired touch. Stephen is overwhelmed with disgust for uppity racial politics (though that isn't how he phrases it) and he and Tarantino drop the satirical N-bomb, targeted with sadistic tactlessness and muscular bad taste at the white man's Vichyite collaborators in the Old South. Slavery is a subject on which Hollywood is traditionally nervous and reticent. Perhaps it takes a film unencumbered with good taste to tackle it. Lars Von Trier's Manderlay was one. Here is another.

 

Django Unchained is messy, overstuffed, and overlong, in a way that suits it just perfectly.

 

There’s a logical point at which you think Django Unchained should end, and then the movie goes on for another 40 minutes.

 

 

At one point, Django the character encounters Quentin Tarantino the actor, playing a cowboy who’s Australian. Why is Quentin Australian? Why is he in the movie? His acting is TERRIBLE! You can barely even tell he’s supposed to be Australian! My God, it makes no sense! I love that about it. This movie is Tarantino’s sandbox.

As much as I love Inglourious Basterds, Inglourious was overstuffed with talk. Characters taking five sentences to say things when two would’ve sufficed, in much the same way people talk when they’ve been doing cocaine. Django Unchained is overstuffed with ideas. It’s messy and silly and funny and strange, in much the same way I imagine Quentin Tarantino’s mind. It might be his masterpiece.

                                                                        

Django is out for blood. So is Tarantino, but he doesn't sacrifice his humanity or conscience to do it. In this corrective to Gone With the Wind, he sticks it to Hollywood for a Mandingo-Mammy fixation that leaves the issues of slavery out of mainstream movies. He sticks it to Spike Lee, who once objected to Tarantino's use of the n-word in 1997's Jackie Brown, by spraying the word like machine-gun fire. And he sticks it to pundits who think he crosses the line by reveling in Django's vengeance. Wake up, people. Tarantino lives to cross the line. Is Django Unchained too much? Damn straight. It wouldn't be Tarantino otherwise.