Some sectors of the media have been much exercised by its “depictions” of black slavery in the southern United States, still a topic of some sensitivity in America.
Predictably, Django Unchained also upset Tarantino’s rival enfant Spike Lee, who objected to Tarantino’s use of the n-word – although it’s hard to see how you would make a movie about slavery in the South without using it.
When you see Django Unchained you might wonder what all the fuss was about: perhaps the most shocking thing about the movie is that anyone would be shocked by it.
It’s not especially violent, certainly not by the standards of modern action movies. It’s not even about slavery, all that much: thankfully, this is not a realist dramatisation about the historical social complicity in human slavery in mid-19th century Southern United States; but a Tarantino movie, after all, which mainly means clever monologues delivered at gunpoint.
Django (Jamie Foxx) is freed from slavery in the first scenes of the movie by a bounty hunter, the enigmatic Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). From that point, his status as a freed slave provides the motivation for a classic Western story of revenge, with the notable difference that the character getting his revenge is a black man, and his victims are white slave owners.
Together, Django and Shultz dispense a little justice on Django’s former captors, and track down Django’s missing wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), a slave on the estate of a slightly Satanic landowner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo di Caprio).
As he did with Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino effectively parodies his own movie as he’s going along – which among other things provides bulletproof ironic protection from film critics, and lets the director indulge in surreal reinventions of the past: Django hunts his former slavers in a pantomime courtier’s costume, and Tarantino appears in a bit part in his own movie as a slave trader with a comedy Australian drawl (mercifully, his appearance is brief).
While he’s on screen, Waltz as Shultz gets most of the good lines – Foxx as Django is more of a Eastwoodian (or Bronsonian) hero, who says little but glowers his way through the whole movie.
Leo di Caprio as the slave owner Calvin Candie is showy and over-the-top, but the character seems too stupid to be really evil – that part falls to Samuel L. Jackson, who plays the vicious head slave Stephen, Candie’s ancient retainer.
The movie leaves a few questions unanswered, but none of them are especially important: Is it a parody? Is it ironic? What’s the difference? Did you know Jamie Foxx rides his own horse? And what about Tarantino’s Aussie accent?