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Django Unchained, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has been nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.
PREPARE to be entertained, challenged and offended. Quentin Tarantino has roared back to form with this funny, bloody and stylised Western.
Controversy, almost inevitably, trails in the film’s wake. African American director Spike Lee said he refused to watch this movie about slavery because it “disrespected” his forefathers. The film sprays the “n-word” around more thoroughly than the usual “f-word” in Tarantino films and that in itself has prompted debate.
For a change, Tarantino’s overall vision can be roughly regarded as politically correct, with a former black slave as a gunslinging hero set against some indelible portraits of white racists, from a foppish, sociopathic Mississippi plantation owner (memorably played by Leonardo DiCaprio), to the white trash that he employs.
The performance that lingers longest in the memory, however, is that of Samuel L Jackson who plays Stephen, the owner’s butler at the plantation. He’s the daddy of all Uncle Toms, a sinister potpourri of malevolence and comic posturing. Both confidante and stooge to his boss, Stephen turns abject servility into the art of gaining power. Jackson’s is an extraordinary performance, probably his best since Pulp Fiction, and, given that he is an African American, one that must have taken considerable personal courage to play.
The action starts in Texas in 1858, two years before the civil war. One of Tarantino’s most marvellous characters, German dentist-turned-bounty hunter Dr King Schultz (wittily played by Christolph Waltz), frees a slave, Django (Jamie Foxx), from his chains and the two subsequently team up, killing wanted men for money.
The film’s first half is Tarantino at his absolute best, with some wonderful jokes and surprises – none better than the gag at the Klu Klux Klan’s expense – before the film changes gear as Django reveals that he must rescue his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who is a slave at a plantation, “Candyland”, in the deep south.
We now enter the movie’s darkest phase. In order to achieve his goal, Django must initially pretend that he is a black slaver, a man looking for potent black flesh to become “Mandingo fighters”, slaves who fight to the death to entertain the owner and his hangers-on.
There’s a real sense of horror – Candyland as America’s personal Auschwitz – in this segment with one slave being torn to pieces by dogs while slavering white trash look on, and another in which two men fight to the death. It’s hard to watch these scenes, and harder still to adequately deconstruct them.
In a filmic sense, this is Tarantino’s tribute to the Spaghetti Western, and in particular the movies of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci who have influenced him. Being Tarantino, of course, his palette of influences is even wider than this, with German myth and modern rap music included.
Superbly photographed by Robert Richardson, Django Unchained is a shot of pure cinematic adrenalin from one of the most talented, bold and perverse directors in Hollywood.
