The release of Django Unchained presented us with one of those truisms no one wants to admit: There’s never going to be any such thing as a proper way to portray slavery in the movies. A vocal segment of people are up in arms over the way slaves are portrayed in movies from less enlightened years; movies like Gone With the Wind and Song of the South piss people off because they portray plantation field slavery as a nine to five job performed by happy-go-lucky people. Portraying slavery as a life of brutal labor, unsanitary conditions, and beatings as is done in Steven Spielberg’s forgotten 1995 film Amistad or in Django Unchained also pisses people off, even though they’re probably a lot closer to the truth. Putting slavery on film is a no-win situation.
It’s no coincidence that this unpleasant chapter of American history is rarely dealt with in the movies. Slaves have been written off as the country’s forgotten populace by Hollywood for decades, which is why all of our country’s classic western movies don’t show it at all. So when director Quentin Tarantino decided to weave it into the spaghetti western he said he always wanted to make, well, calling it bold doesn’t even begin to cover it. There’s a lot of arguing about just how much of the portrayal of slavery in Django Unchained is accurate. I looked into the subject myself for a bit of context, and my research took me to an essay on theroot.com by Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. While I was intending to interject a few clarifications, the answers I got were too full of ifs, ands, and buts for me to say anything more in a movie review.
Slavery isn’t just a backdrop in Django Unchained; it’s the driving engine of the entire movie. The main character is a freed slave named Django who, when we see him for the first time, isn’t yet free – in fact, he’s being escorted in chains by traders. This is a big deal because, you know, this is kinda, sorta his story and that’s kinda, sorta his name in the title of the movie. The traders hauling Django and the other slaves to wherever they’re going are soon met by a man, a “dentist” named Dr. King Schultz. Schultz’s dental practice and German nativity are a nice little cover for his day job: Bounty hunting. Schultz is determined to buy Django right off from the traders, who have no intention of selling and are thrown off when Schultz draws his gun. Django Unchained runs for nearly three hours, so here’s the nutshell version of the developing story: Schultz teams up with Django and trains him as a bounty hunter. Django and Schultz search for Django’s wife, Broomhilda, who got separated from Django by slave auction.
Enter Candyland! That’s the name of the plantation owned by the big bad of Django Unchained, Calvin Candie. Candie is the kind of guy Schultz and Django normally try to avoid, but in this case they really can’t help it: Candie is Broomhilda’s owner, so if Django ever wants to see her again, they have to visit Candie and make one of those chess match-like business deals.
I’m making this movie come off as a bit too talky and boring. The important thing to remember about Django Unchained is that it’s a western. Also, the guy who wrote and directed it, if you need reminding, is Quentin Tarantino. One thing Tarantino excels at is creating characters with mannerisms, pinache, and swagger that make them the height of cool…. Actually, “cool” is probably a very poor choice of words given the theme of Django Unchained. A better term would probably be comic book-memorable, because Tarantino’s penchant for creating over-the-top characters makes even the bit players stand out. The most consistent thing about Tarantino’s style of directing – besides his obvious deference to his influences – is that he seems to want to leave a mark on each and every one of his scenes the way John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence: Large and obvious. Every scene from Django Unchained is packed with heft and explosiveness. Watching it is the visual equivalent to listening to listening to an album on which every song is worthy of being a single.
Django Unchained flies by in three distinctive acts: The first, in which Django and Schultz bond with each other; the second, with Calvin Candie; and the final, with Django plotting his revenge. Tarantino being Tarantino, things get violent and stuff blows up real good. If you’re watching Django Unchained just to see the director’s trademark penchant for ultravolence, though, you’ll be sleeping through some of the most rewarding parts of the movie. Django and Schultz form a close bond through their own common problems, and that becomes all the more relevant when Django takes up arms as a full-fledged bounty hunter himself. The scenes with Candie are some of the best moments of suspense since, well, since the first scene in Quentin Tarantino’s last movie, Inglourious Basterds. Yeah, the movie does run a little bit long – it could easily have been lopped at the end of the second act – but it adds a satisfying relish to the finale.
One of the very interesting aspects of Django Unchained is that it never lets anyone forget the era it takes place in. It’s a common writing trope for the screenwriter, in a desperate attempt to connect the audience with the main characters, will foist modern values onto the main characters no matter when and where the movie takes place. The result is ridiculous historical crap like Leonidas from 300 inspiring his men with lectures about freedom and democracy – the real Sparta was a caste society which was fond of enslaving people. Django Unchained doesn’t make that mistake. Even the one fairly modern character in the movie, Schultz, believes Django’s help is worth only a third of his bounties. Early in the movie, Schultz and Django visit a plantation man called Big Daddy, with Django posing as Schultz’s valet. Big Daddy tries to ask his slaves to treat him well, but rebuffs his slave when she asks if she should treat him like a white man. She responds by saying she’s confused, because if she’s not allowed to treat him like a slave or a white man, then how should she treat him? Django himself has trouble reading and comprehending words we take for granted, like “positive.”
Tarantino massages the scenes in Django Unchained with some musical choices which, for a western, are very unorthodox. True to his form, many of his selections are rhythm and blues selections which convey a sense of cool and calm that contrast what’s happening onscreen to help build the atmosphere. It’s no accident that one of the DVD features is basically a jukebox which lets viewers select scenes by the musical selections, including one scene in the finale is which Samuel L. Jackson is heard singing.
The one big feature on the DVD I watched was an account about the scenery design of Michael Riva, who died before filming ended. When you get a load of just how good Django Unchained looks, it’s easy to see why the cast and crew held him in such high reverence. The sets combine the old spaghetti western cliches with powerful new imagery. The sets don’t just go through desert – in fact, a good number of them avoid the prototypical western desert altogether. There are some beautiful scenes of a place which stands in for rural Mississippi, smoky western villages, and ornate plantation houses. It’s a very interesting bit of side information and a close-up of an area of filmmaking which viewers too often take for granted. Unfortunately, the other features are skim – just a couple of trailers for the movie itself and the soundtrack.
In case I need to spell it out one last time: Django Unchained is awesome.