Educational Media Reviews Online

Set in the Antebellum South, Quentin Tarantino’s wildly entertaining, anachronistic, ultra-violent revenge fantasy/love story Spaghetti Western tackles a subject rarely seen on film: enslaved African-Americans. Django, played by the charismatic Jamie Foxx, is a slave who teams up with the German-born bounty hunter/dentist, Dr. King Schultz, (the eloquent Christoph Waltz), to track down the vicious Brittle brothers. Schultz promises Django his freedom when the brothers are captured. Once freed, Django becomes Shultz’s sidekick. He learns to read; he transforms his sartorial style; he develops his expertise with a gun. But it’s his quest is to find and rescue his enslaved wife, Broomhilda (the gorgeous, compelling Kerry Washington), that fuels him. Hildy, who speaks German, is trapped in Candyland, run by plantation owner Calvin Candie (a viciously entertaining Leonardo DiCaprio) and his head of the house slave, Stephen (a devastatingly demonic Samuel L. Jackson).

There have never been characters like Django, Schultz, and Stephen on film, nor most likely in real life. Some critics have wrongfully called Stephen an Uncle Tom. Not only wasn’t Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom a house slave, as a Christ figure, he was the farthest thing from evil. Her creation wasn’t the sell-out he’s come to symbolize; in fact, Tom defiantly refused his master’s request to provide information about a runaway slave’s whereabouts and to beat a fellow slave, resulting in his being beaten to death. Stephen, who’s made up like an old, grizzled man, is a self-serving antichrist. Jackson said in a radio interview that he sees the character as insidiously entwined with the owner. His father was Candie’s head slave, and his grandfather Candie’s grandfather’s head slave. Stephen is empowered by Candie to protect the status quo. Conversely, Django is empowered by a German, a pseudo abolitionist, to kill the American white oppressor, one of many inspired Tarantino touches. The blood splattering from the duo’s gunfire fills up many frames, but the most brutal scene in the film shows a slave being torn apart by bloodhounds while Django looks on.

The production values of the film are commanding. Meticulous attention was paid to portraying accurate details of slavery, including the bloodhounds, masks, chains, and Mandingo fighting. Django Unchained was filmed partly on the historic Evergreen Plantation in New Orleans.“The slave quarters filmed were also part of Evergreen,” according to publicity materials. Foxx said, “You can’t walk through those places and not shed tears and feel something. I took my three and a half and my eighteen year old children, and I let them walk through there. I said, ‘This is where you come from.’ That’s where we needed to be so we could really get down into the story.”

Inspired by blaxploitation films like The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972), starring Fred Williamson, that was, according to Eric Benson, the “only slavery film before Django Unchained that told a story of black-male empowerment,” and Mandingo (1975), as well as the Spaghetti Westerns of Italian film director Sergio Corbucci, whose oeuvre includes Django (1966), starring Franco Nero (who has a cameo in Tarantino’s film), the film also weaves a strand of German folklore, the legend of Brunhilde by way of Wagner’s opera. The music mixes Ennio Morricone with “Fur Elise” and hip hop, John Legend, Richie Havens and Johnny Cash. It provides a stirring backdrop for Robert Richardson’s lush cinematography, which includes magnificent Wyoming vistas as well as a beautiful shot of blood-splattered cotton, a contrapuntally charged image that immediately becomes an iconic symbol of American slavery.

The love story prevails, and Django triumphantly gets his woman back. The ride is transporting, transgressive, and transcending. However, the film is twenty minutes too long. As always, the violence in Tarantino is cartoonish, but the final shoot out is wearying. The acting overall is superb, and the film is hilarious at times--the subversive Mel Brooks-inspired scene of Klansmen laying blame for their wardrobe malfunction pokes fun at this devastating, shameful aspect of American history. Some have complained about the overuse of the N word in the film, however, it’s accurate and not gratuitous. Like Inglorious Basterds (2009), Tarantino’s previous film which tells the revisionist story of Nazi hunters who kill Hitler, the postmodernist pastiche Django Unchained brilliantly chips away at dehumanizing history, unloosing and humanizing the horrors of the reality and the what-ifs of the imagination.

Awards

• Academy Award Best Original Screenplay and Golden Globe Best Screenplay, Quentin Tarantino
• Academy Award and Golden Globe Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz