There is much to like about Django Unchained. Unfortunately, some other things almost sink the film.
Django is based on a character's name from the 1966 Django (a Sergio Corbucci Italian Western) which starred Franco Nero, who makes a cameo in Tarentino's film. The Italian Django character drags a coffin into a town with two feuding groups, the KKK and a gang of Mexican Bandits. Quotes the poster about the film say, "Django is all about excess.... a thoroughly ramped up over-the-top epic" (LA Weekly).
From the first moment we hear the opening music of Django Unchained, we know we are in that world of the spaghetti western from the 1960s. A title tells us we are in Texas two years before the start of the Civil War. Immediately certain expectations arise: the often-tongue-in-cheek mythic story of a heroic loner against the multitude, ending in a happy ending with good triumphing over evil. Those aspects of our expectations are fulfilled with great fun.
The film at times has the absurdity of Blazing Saddles. Take, for example, the Ku Klux Klan scene where the men can't see out of the eye holes of the masks that one of the wives made for them. One spits tobacco out of one hole while trying to see out of another. Their bickering of the group mimics scenes from Mel Brooks.
Quentin Tarentino, humor is often more pointed and nasty. He has an obsession with backlit blood mists from exploding "bullets." A single shot becomes emblematic. A bad guy rides through a field of cotton trying to escape his fate. He is shot and we see a stalks of pure white cotton suddenly spattered with bright red blood.
Tarentino carries on the tradition of 1970s Sam Peckinpah who liked to shock his audiences with violent bloodbaths. With Django Unchained, I realized that I haven't seen so many blood effects since Inglorious Bastards.
Three-fourths of the way through the film, after following and rooting for the plan to rescue Django's wife, important characters are killed. Since it is a Tarentino film I was not surprised, because he has a penchant for killing his most interesting characters in extravagantly bloody ways.
Any character in a movie can be killed off by his creator as long as it doesn't break the contract author has with his reader. Hitchcock's killing off of Marian in the first twenty minutes of Psycho makes sense because she is not the real focus of the film, he has just led us to believe she is.
In a Tarentino film, we need to remind ourselves that any character is expendable. But I'm reminded of a lesson learned by a class of Mass Media students who watched Night of the Living Dead and Bonnie and Clyde. When Ben dies in NOLD, the entire class was incensed by the director's breaking the agreement they felt he had established with Ben's struggles. He is the only character who percerves throughout the whole film, and as dawn breaks he comes upstairs, the sole survivor from an attack of zombies. When he cautiously moves toward a window, a sharpshooter sees someone moving in the house, he quickly picks him off, and with no sense of feeling we watch Ben's body unceremoniously dragged to a bonfire and burned up. That lack of sensitivity toward Ben's death suggests a callous indifference of the director toward his characters and the attitude of many in the racial tensions of the 1960s. The students had just seen Bonnie and Clyde die in a hail-storm of bullets, but they accepted their deaths because Buck had died earlier and the director shows sympathy toward his characters.
The problem that I have with Tarentino is not his huge body count, but rather the constant blending of humor and death as if killing someone is a great joke. An example would be when Django shoots Candie's sister. When he shoots her, she flies (obviously pulled by a wire) through an archway in a comic book sweep that elicits a big laugh from the audience. Another character is shot in the arm, then the testicles... a torture that had been threatened Django but one he can now inflict on his nemesis. The audience howls with laughter. And that insensitivity toward death is my problem. Film teaches by example and the example that Tarentino teaches is that modern violent death is the fodder of a running gag and supposed to be funny. Even in the midst of The Odyssey's huge 108-man body count, Odysseus tells his maid not to joyously revel at the death of others.
In our present-day world of guns being used to randomly pick off twenty children and teachers, has not the sensibility toward that random violence become important? I find I cannot laugh at one of the bodies becoming a "shooting bag" by having the poor shots constantly hit it over and over.
In the end, as the evil has been violently expunged, Django reunites with his wife and his horse perform prancing tricks. A tribute perhaps to black horseman, Tom Bass?
Well, Tarentino knows about excess quite well.
From the first moment we hear the opening music of Django Unchained, we know we are in that world of the spaghetti western from the 1960s. A title tells us we are in Texas two years before the start of the Civil War. Immediately certain expectations arise: the often-tongue-in-cheek mythic story of a heroic loner against the multitude, ending in a happy ending with good triumphing over evil. Those aspects of our expectations are fulfilled with great fun.
The film at times has the absurdity of Blazing Saddles. Take, for example, the Ku Klux Klan scene where the men can't see out of the eye holes of the masks that one of the wives made for them. One spits tobacco out of one hole while trying to see out of another. Their bickering of the group mimics scenes from Mel Brooks.
Quentin Tarentino, humor is often more pointed and nasty. He has an obsession with backlit blood mists from exploding "bullets." A single shot becomes emblematic. A bad guy rides through a field of cotton trying to escape his fate. He is shot and we see a stalks of pure white cotton suddenly spattered with bright red blood.
Tarentino carries on the tradition of 1970s Sam Peckinpah who liked to shock his audiences with violent bloodbaths. With Django Unchained, I realized that I haven't seen so many blood effects since Inglorious Bastards.
Three-fourths of the way through the film, after following and rooting for the plan to rescue Django's wife, important characters are killed. Since it is a Tarentino film I was not surprised, because he has a penchant for killing his most interesting characters in extravagantly bloody ways.
Any character in a movie can be killed off by his creator as long as it doesn't break the contract author has with his reader. Hitchcock's killing off of Marian in the first twenty minutes of Psycho makes sense because she is not the real focus of the film, he has just led us to believe she is.
In a Tarentino film, we need to remind ourselves that any character is expendable. But I'm reminded of a lesson learned by a class of Mass Media students who watched Night of the Living Dead and Bonnie and Clyde. When Ben dies in NOLD, the entire class was incensed by the director's breaking the agreement they felt he had established with Ben's struggles. He is the only character who percerves throughout the whole film, and as dawn breaks he comes upstairs, the sole survivor from an attack of zombies. When he cautiously moves toward a window, a sharpshooter sees someone moving in the house, he quickly picks him off, and with no sense of feeling we watch Ben's body unceremoniously dragged to a bonfire and burned up. That lack of sensitivity toward Ben's death suggests a callous indifference of the director toward his characters and the attitude of many in the racial tensions of the 1960s. The students had just seen Bonnie and Clyde die in a hail-storm of bullets, but they accepted their deaths because Buck had died earlier and the director shows sympathy toward his characters.
The problem that I have with Tarentino is not his huge body count, but rather the constant blending of humor and death as if killing someone is a great joke. An example would be when Django shoots Candie's sister. When he shoots her, she flies (obviously pulled by a wire) through an archway in a comic book sweep that elicits a big laugh from the audience. Another character is shot in the arm, then the testicles... a torture that had been threatened Django but one he can now inflict on his nemesis. The audience howls with laughter. And that insensitivity toward death is my problem. Film teaches by example and the example that Tarentino teaches is that modern violent death is the fodder of a running gag and supposed to be funny. Even in the midst of The Odyssey's huge 108-man body count, Odysseus tells his maid not to joyously revel at the death of others.
In our present-day world of guns being used to randomly pick off twenty children and teachers, has not the sensibility toward that random violence become important? I find I cannot laugh at one of the bodies becoming a "shooting bag" by having the poor shots constantly hit it over and over.
In the end, as the evil has been violently expunged, Django reunites with his wife and his horse perform prancing tricks. A tribute perhaps to black horseman, Tom Bass?
Note this description of Tom Bass performing with his horse:
He and his rider pirouetted. They pranced. They racked. They pivoted and leaped.
The crowd hushed as they watched an equine performance the like of which none of them had ever seen. Tom rode Columbus as though the two of them had issued together from the same mother’s womb. They were half horse, half man, a perfect blameless centaur who had passed into perfection and left behind this world of tears.
Then Tom put to rest the legends. Columbus cantered backwards around the show ring.
The performance was so faultless even the other contestants began to applaud.
Finally Columbus stood on his rear legs, turned a full circle and then with the grace of a ballerina, came down to kneel on one leg, bowing his head in tribute to the astonished judges. (horseman)
Watching the elegant ending to the film, I found that out of all Tarento's films, I think this comes to the closest that I can praise.
Django Unchained (2012) ****
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