Django, unspooled

I saw Django Unchained on Christmas Day, and have been thinking about it often.

I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I wonder if the counter-programming factor of a Christmas release helped give it a nudge.  Perhaps a rip-roaring tale of revenge is the perfect antidote for holiday cheer; because the setting and some of the more spaghetti-western direction (and blood, lots of blood) aside, it feels very much a piece with Inglourious Basterds: a long, talky tale of revenge against some of history's most despicable villains, with a few side barbs about how a modern audience has largely forgotten just what made them history's worst people.

We know, reflexively, that Nazis, slavery = bad, but frequently we don't spend a lot of time dwelling on why we think that.   Perhaps we've seen Indiana Jones beat them to the relic once too often to think they're true villains.  If for that reason alone, Tarantino illustrating that behavior, big as life and twice as ugly, is an invaluable way of connecting to a vanished history.

The racial component, marginally present in IB, is inescapable in Django; a film dealing chiefly with slavery has no ability to skirt the issue, though it does tend to rely on the seemingly eternal, disproportionate strength of the "n-word" as a pitch level.  For on the character scale, it's still not especially developed; Django himself is a paragon that no other slave character, save perhaps Hildy, is at all near alike. He's suitably downtrodden when the film begins, but quickly adapts to the life of a bounty hunter and his later cultural lapses are more akin to fish-out-of-water comedy.  King Schultz likewise, is the only apparently enlightened white man in the south; the rest are stock racists or outright mustache-twirling villains.  

That Waltz, who won an oscar for the shrewd, jew-hunting Landa in IB, is cast here as the slavery-loathing German is a pleasing little piece in Django's margins.  Schultz accepts slavery, makes use of slavery, but hates it all the same; when the time comes that its human face pushes him too far he breaks ranks with it, decisively, leading to as ugly a turn of events as IB's basement shootout.

In Django, while the lead villain is DiCaprio's Calvin Candie, it's Sam Jackson's performance as the smartest guy in Candieland that carries the serious dramatic weight.  After a long turn of playing himself in film after film (joining such luminaries as Nicholson,  Pacino, and DeNiro) it's fairly astonishing to see Jackson really dive deep into  a role, particularly one as loathsome as Candie's house slave, Stephen. Even when he's dropping loud MF-bombs late in the film, you're never quite wondering when these snakes are going to get off this plane.  With Django playing layers on top of layers for Schultz, Jackson is a terrific counterpoint: is Stephen loyal? Venal? Self-hating? Does a "real" Stephen even exist under those layers?

Also, like Basterds, it's in its way a quixotic micro-scale revenge fantasy; at the time of both films, the villains are about to be swept into the dustbin of history; whether by Operation Kino/Shoshana's ultimate success (or later, as history actually occurred), or here by the civil war.   Hitler, Goebbels, and Candie were on their way out long before they wronged that one man/girl in ten-thousand.  Watching them die by violence is momentarily exhilarating yet the violence is undercut. It's less satisfying than seeing their ideals defeated -- to say nothing of seeing them realize that defeat -- it's another level of storytelling that marks Tarantino as an elite filmmaker.

On the stylistic level, Django is a less film-geeky film than Basterds; or at least it's on a less cerebrally-film-geeky level.  Bounty hunting and dead rednecks are a little easier  to engage with than a wheels-within-wheels plot of cinema uber alles.  Which isn't, again, to say the latter isn't perfectly satisfying; it just demands more from the viewer, of whom many, even devoted Tarantino geeks, won't get all the WW2-film references, homages, criticism, and pastiche. The difference is it's easy to spot things you suspect are references in IB, whereas Django keeps enough in the garish foreground that you have less time to note the sausage-making.

Writing out these thoughts, I see the film said a lot more about subjects beyond the spaghetti-western revenge film; but it also mimics its style model well enough to work on a dumber level for those wanting or needing one.   It's early to say where I would rank it among Tarantino's work, but it's fairly strong out of the gate.