America 1858. “Gentleman, you had my curiosity. But now you have my attention.” Leonardo DiCaprio’s Calvin Candie, Francophile, plantation owner and slave trader addresses Django and Dr King Schultz with ridiculous Southern hospitality. To paraphrase David Thomson, a slaver’s good manners are, “About as encouraging as sweet breath in someone preparing to torture you.” A new Tarantino film always arouses curiosity but a Spaghetti Western about slavery demands our attention.
Candie’s a wooden toothed Amon Goeth, his mansion the ruinous plot of degradation and exploitation, Candyland. Calvin’s dubious intellect is compensated by the horrid fortune of his birthright, the power of life and death over fellow human beings. To cast a foul shadow over characters like Rhett Butler, DiCaprio’s matinee idol looks are thus enslaved. The result is thoroughly repulsive, a snivelling psychopath, incestuous, barbaric with all the charm of an aging Nazi war criminal.
Candyland is indeed, “the end of the line”–Colonel Kurtz’s camp transported to the Deep South, where legal insanity holds free rein. Candie presides over the most heinous atrocities in Tarantino’s “Django Unchained”, Mandingo warriors fighting to a blood soaked death in a sojourn and attack dogs ripping apart a runaway slave. Both scenes are unsettling and at odds with the over-red squibs that spring forth like bloody fireworks every-time someone is gunned down. Tarantino’s demarcation of violence feels so exact he must have anticipated the controversy with the precision of a Bond villain, “liberal media backlash. I’ve been expecting you.”
The question of should Tarantino; a white American make an exploitation flick about slavery is irrelevant. “Django Unchained” lives and breathes in the here and now. This is the bastard of movies such as “I Escaped from Devil’s Island,” “The Great Silence,” “Mandingo,” and the original “Django”. Does it develop a meaningful discourse on America’s dark past? Of course it doesn’t, just as Mel Gibson in Roland Emmerich’s, “The Patriot” didn’t reconcile the reality of black involvement in America’s War of Independence. What “Django Unchained” does do in its own lurid way is portray slavery as nothing short of the genocide it was.
At no point are Candie or his ilk portrayed as sympathetic, charming or attractive villains. They are pathetic, backward but incredibly lethal due to their standing in Southern genteel society. The overwhelming sense of their god given right over their slaves is palpable throughout the film. Tarantino channels this through Samuel L. Jackson’s fearless and frightening performance as Stephen, Candie’s head slave. Stephen is so enraptured by the divine right of his master to rule him that he no longer sees himself as black, his collusion and betrayal so complete that he can manipulate Candie’s thinking.
Dr King Schultz, the German bounty hunter becomes increasingly aghast as he witnesses the slave trade first hand. After using the word parley he’s told to speak English. Schultz replies dryly, “Oh, I’m sorry. Please forgive me, it is a second language.” The irony of this social commentary isn’t lost on Tarantino who casts Christopher Waltz in the role of the immaculate, urbane, former dentist. Waltz of course played Hans Landa, the ruthless SS colonel in his previous historical revenge opus, “Inglourious Basterds.”
King appears from the forest like a mythical traveller, a German folk-tale from a Fritz Lang epic. His name and profession equally evoke Martin Luther King and Szell from “Marathon Man.” Who knows what Tarantino was thinking, a man who forgets movie references quicker than we can research them? King verbally digs himself into dangerous holes and we revel in the way he levitates out of them. Waltz is an actor made for Tarantino’s dialogue and as with “Basterd’s” the film is a poorer one when he’s not around after he reaches an epiphany like Pike in “The Wild Bunch.”
Schultz frees Django, a slave who can identify his next bounty, the Brittle Brothers. Jamie Foxx as Django is stoic, a loyal husband in search of his wife Broomhilda. The pair strike a rich and in one scene, very moving partnership. He’s ruthless, proud, the exterminating angel of vengeance. Dr Boyce Watkins in the Huffington Post calls Django, “one of the few serious black heroes ever produced by Hollywood, a place that tends to put black people in a really degrading box. Django wasn’t just a sidekick or comedic buffoon. Django was simply a strong, brave, highly skilled black man who loved his wife enough to put his life on the line to save her. In fact, I dare say he was downright inspirational, which is more than you can say about the black men in “The Color Purple.”
Inspirational or not “Django Unchained” has unleashed a debate about slavery that Tarantino says, “America hasn’t seen in thirty years.” Certainly it has caused controversy over the constant use of the word n*gger by the characters. This time it would seem reasonable to assume that its usage in a film about slavery is historically accurate. In actual fact it feels that the word has reclaimed some of its former power to shock after its trivialisation through three decades of rap music where the er was diluted into an a.
Candace Allen in the Guardian wrote, “I did not find offence in QT’s use of the word nigger. In earlier films one could sense the man’s romance with the word was akin to that of a small child taking rapturous joy in being potty-mouthed. That tendency is not present in Django. In 1858 the word was used for black people in both North and South, by both black and white, by “men of good will” like Mark Twain and evil racist sons of bitches. I submit that, given Django’s circumstances, the word was used with restraint. A film about slavery with any verisimilitude would be absurd anachronism if the word was avoided to soothe modern sensibilities.”
Tarantino is not approaching slavery as a faux intellectual but from a rampaging, visceral, tabloid reading viewpoint, the way we’d secretly love to react if Candie and his cronies violated our loved ones. Actually, if you tear down the hype “Django Unchained” is surprisingly straight for a Tarantino movie, very well acted but a tad ponderous, collapsing under the weight of its own controversy. Of course Edmund Burke kicks Tarantino’s gun-toting, shoot-em-up, revenge philosophy well into touch: “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”