Django Unchained (FILM REVIEW)
Django Unchained
Film Review
by Kam Williams
Ex-Slave Exacts Vengeance in Tarantino Variation on Spaghetti Western
There’s a sensible reason why nobody
ever wanted to be an Indian whenever we played Cowboys and Indians as kids.
That’s because the white man was invariably the hero of the Westerns on which we’d
been weaned, while the red man had always been presented as a wild savage dismissed
by the dehumanizing affirmation that, “The only good Injun is a dead Injun.”
Sure, a few films, such as Apaches
(1973), The Sons of Great Bear (1966) and Chingachgook: The Great Snake (1967),
flipped the script by portraying Native Americans as the good guys and the European
settlers as the bad guys. But those productions were few and far between.
Hollywood has also promoted a set of
stereotypes when it comes to the depictions of black-white race relations during
slavery, with classics like The Birth of the Nation (1915) and Gone with the
Wind (1939) setting the tone. Consequently, most movies have by-and-large suggested
that it was a benign institution under which docile African-Americans were
well-treated by kindly masters, at least as long as they remained submissive
and knew their place.
Leave it to Quentin Tarantino to put
a fresh spin on the genre, much as he did in the World War II flick Inglourious
Basterds (2009). With Django Unchained, the iconoclast writer/director again rattles
the cinematic cage by virtue of an irreverent adventure that audaciously turns the
conventional thinking on its head.
Set in the South in 1858, the
picture is visually reminiscent of the Spaghetti Westerns popularized in the
Sixties by Italian director Sergio Leone, being replete with both big sky
panoramas and cartoonish, one-note villains who are the embodiment of evil. But
instead of cattle rustlers, it’s inveterate racists being slowly tortured or blown
away to the delight of the audience.
The movie stars Jamie Foxx in the
title role as a slave lucky enough to be liberated
by a German dentist-turned-bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz). Abolitionist Dr.
Schultz altruistically takes Django on as an apprentice, and proceeds to teach
him how to ride a horse and handle a gun.
The
grisly business of tracking down outlaws “Wanted Dead-or-Alive” conveniently affords
the revenge-minded freedman many an opportunity to even the score with folks
responsible for his misery, from the scars on his back, to the “R” for “Runaway”
branded on his cheek, to being separated from his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry
Washington). As you might guess, the action gets pretty gruesome, as is par for
the course for any Tarantino vehicle.
Slavery
reimagined as a messy splatterfest where massa gets exactly what he deserves,
and then some!
Excellent
(4 stars)
Rated R for profanity, nudity, ethnic slurs and graphic violence
Running time: 165 minutes
Distributor: The
Weinstein Company
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