Quentin Tarantino is one of the few directors able to make the kinds of movies he wants to make. And “Django Unchained” is a Tarantino film through and through. It’s as though QT pressed his thumbprint on every frame of celluloid to say, “This is my movie. No one else could have made it.”
Set two years before the Civil War, the story revolves around a bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz and Django, a slave Schultz frees because he can identify three men on whom the federal government has placed a handsome price. Things go well, and Schultz asks Django to continue working with him through the winter. In return, he promises to help Django rescue his wife from the clutches of a vile slave owner named Calvin Candie.
Although a simple tale, “Django Unchained” is nearly three hours long. Thankfully, it never drags. Most scenes are the right length, conversations last as long as needed, and there’s enough action to keep your heart pumping. Tarantino could have made a more economical version of this story, but then it wouldn’t have been his movie. He would have had to comprise the development of his characters and snip the pitch perfect moments he’s good at creating, and that grew organically out of the world he fashioned and the people he placed in it.
I’m thinking of the scene in which Candie deals violently with a slave who tried to escape. Django and Schultz are forced to watch in order to maintain the ruse they created to gain access to Candie. Candie could have ordered a quicker execution, but he draws out the moment to test Django and Schultz’s authenticity. You can sense the outrage coming to a boil in Django, who in an earlier scene proved to be impulsive. Here, he must hold back or risk losing the chance to rescue his wife.
You can feel the tension in your chest. Shortening the sequence in the interest of expediency, or cutting the earlier scene, would have produced a less gripping experience. “Django Unchained” is made of building blocks that serve as a foundation for what will follow. At the end, the building explodes into splinters and thick roils of flame.
Tarantino not only knows how to tell a story, he also knows how to cast and direct actors. Jamie Foxx makes an ideal Django. He captures every nuance of the character, from Django’s initial fear and uncertainty, to his budding confidence, to his cool swagger as he comes into his own. Foxx delivers a great performance.
So does Christoph Waltz as Schultz. The role isn’t as flashy as his reprehensible Col. Hans Landa in Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds,” but it is the anchor of “Django Unchained.” Schultz despises slavery and those who practice it, making him a white man Django can trust, and someone with whom many viewers will identify. Waltz brings a lot of humor and humanity to the character, and is a joy to watch.
I believe Schultz is the persona of Tarantino in “Django Unchained.” As with “Inglorious Basterds,” Tarantino uses “Django Unchained” to take revenge on those who committed the atrocities of our past. You can feel in Schultz how much Tarantino abhors inhumanity. Critics of “Django Unchained” have slammed Tarantino for the frequent use of the “n” word, but this is not a racist movie. Rather, the dialogue and setting are true to the time in which Tarantino set the film.
The characters, however, are exaggerations, including Samuel Jackson’s Stephen, a manipulative head slave, and Leonardo Dicaprio’s Candie. But there’s an element of truth in these overblown personalities, too, as Tarantino is paying homage to the heroes and villains of the spaghetti westerns he loves.
In its bones, “Django Unchained” is a tribute to the films of Sergio Leone and other directors who made their home on the dusty plains of the Old West. As such, it’s packed with accurate details, from the cheesy red font Tarantino uses for the credits to the tinny sounding title song, which uses strings, horns, an electric guitar and drums to recreate a classic style of movie music. You can feel the love Tarantino has for cinema in every frame.
“Django Unchained” is many other things as well, including tremendously bloody and, at times, very funny. But in the end, it’s simply the product of a master filmmaker operating at the height of his craft. I enjoy action movies with a lot of special effects, and I love how computers allow moviemakers to summon anything their minds can conceive, but “Django Unchained” is a higher form of the art of cinema. It is the work of a director fluent in the language of film, who knows how to use a camera to capture the things that take place within a world he’s created. And it is a movie no other director could have made.
Rated R for strong graphic violence and language. Four stars out of four.