The second half of Hollywood’s holiday double feature slamming the South is Django Unchained, from Quentin Tarentino. Not nearly as prolific as Spielberg, but packing just as powerful an impact, Tarentino is first and foremost an accomplished screenwriter. He’s a master at designing complex multi-layered scenes , built into a driving, relentlessly engaging story, and usually culminating in a horrific/comic blood bath.
In short, he knows what a mass audience wants: story, character, heroes and conflict. For some reason, he often equates conflict with exploding packets of fake blood and large caliber hand-held weapons, but he’s just as adept at delving deeply into verbal sparring and the tense terror of impending, but unrealized physical violence.
Despite (or maybe because of) his fascination with the destructive power of hand held weapons, he’s managed, in his last two films, to tackle two of the greatest horrors of the past two centuries: the Nazis, and end-game slavery in the American south. In both Inglorious Basterds and Django, he has turned the tables and explored what happens when the oppressed get a chance to fight back.
This role reversal, by acting as a catharsis and de-fanging the aggressors, enables the viewer to confront without fear or even harsh emotion the true evil. Tarentino doesn’t like bad guys, and he doesn’t want them to have power. He wants to expose them for what they are, not glorify them as a lot of 21st century American television does (think Tony Soprano). He wants us to be ever vigilant against those who would enslave and dehumanize.
I suppose that his films are not for everyone. He has not mellowed one iota from twenty years ago, when Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction took blood, guts, foul language and downright ornery characters to new levels (whether high or low, you have to judge yourself) in mainstream American entertainment. And, in the end, that is what he is – an entertainer. He wants us to watch, to laugh, to cringe, to feel, and to think, all while following the gripping momentum of a story line Shakespearean in its ornate, even baroque detailing.
So, yes, there are times in this movie when you can’t tear your eyes away from something you do not want to watch: whippings, hand-to-hand combat to the death, dogs tearing a man limb from limb, and explosions for the duller moments.
But if this were all there is to Django, I’d say don’t go. Because Tarentino knows just what words to put in people’s mouths, and then gets his actors to dive completely into the world of white vs black in the US South of 1858, we are subsumed by the people and the story, and actually believe all the violence is justified and even, at times, refreshing.
I think this process of acceptance starts with Christopher Walz, returning after playing the unctuously evil Nazi in Basterds. This time, he is Dr. King Shultz, a German dentist-turned-bounty hunter, taking full advantage of the phrase “Wanted: Dead or Alive” to earn his way. He is never angry in his work, always fair, and scrupulous to a fault to make sure he has the right man before he blasts him to Kingdom Come. He is convinced his targets deserve everything he gives them, and sets up the moral structure for the even larger havoc his apprentice, Django (Jamie Foxx) eventually wrecks against slavers such as those played with Black Bart glee by Don Johnson and Leonardo DeCaprio, who surely deserves a supporting actor Oscar nomination for his velvet-coated, velvet tongued master of the 4th largest plantation in Chickasaw County, Mississippi.
Django ends up being portrayed as a black super-hero, but we first meet him cold, shivering, with nappy hair, and tortured on a death march into Texas. Shultz frees him, killing the slavers in the process, but of course only after they draw on him first, and he has made sure to pay a fair price and get a bill of sale for Django. Django learns the trade from Shultz, after realizing that he “gets paid for killing white men … what’s not to like?”
In the course of their travels, through an incongruously placed Wyoming winter, we learn Shultz has no love for slavery, and he agrees to help Django free his wife from the plantation to which she was sold after he lashed out at their former owner.
Just as surely as Lincoln offered us an opportunity to consider the complexities of our country’s struggle against slavery and oppression at the highest levels of government, Django pulls us into the brutal truths of what was actually happening in the South, and thrusts the same questions before us from a totally different, but equally demanding and entertaining perspective. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll shudder in revulsion, and, most important, you’ll think about just what makes America such a mélange of good and evil.