MD- Django Unchained

Django Unchained marks a new threshold for Tarantino. While it delivers the expected sparkling and irreverent dialogue and stylized violent interludes there is solid and powerful storytelling resonate to its historical events. Where his version of WWII colorfully wrote large the black and white of Nazi vs. Ally, here there is more nuance. Django’s characters have motivations for their actions contextualized by their place in time; and aided by – in a movie first for Taratino – an outsider through whose eyes we can understand this world and see the repugnant absurdity of slavery.

The supporting cast is superb. Christoph Waltz's outsider is elegant, ruthless and brings the spark of genuine humanity; despite being a bounty hunter with scant regard for repentance. DiCaprio’s plantation owner Calvin Candie oozes menace not just to the newcomers and his slaves, but through complex and contradictory relationships with both his sister and the Uncle Tom figure of Stephen (an extraordinary Samuel L Jackson); and through his love of bare knuckle fighting. It’s a complex characterization hinting at personal fatalism and repressed homosexuality. It is he that ponders the question of why slaves don’t rise up and overpower their masters.

Somewhat unusually for recent Tarantino the women characters are muted and trophy-like, which becomes the movies biggest failing. A cameo by the original Django, Franco Nero, is fun and even when the director himself enormously and jarringly lumbers in with a strangulated Aussie accent the audible groan of the audience is soon rewarded with a wonderful payoff.

Jamie Foxx has to hold centre stage and does so admirably with a character that is essentially a foil. Whilst the shift from barely literate slave to an articulate facsimile of a slaver and the 'fastest gun in the South' stretches credibility it is nevertheless underpinned by his driving desire to avenge – not based on any altruistic strive for equality or freedom but simply for the love of his wife. He is a solid and simplistic focus for the events that revolve around him.

The exploration of the complex relationships within the strata of slaves on the “Candieland” ranch is laid out for us to draw our own conclusions. A ‘Stanford prison’ type assimilation, something more akin to a caste system or just the only mechanism for self-preservation? More widely this movie intrinsically ridicules an American past, contrasting European cultured egalitarian to the extraordinary crassness of the ‘wild wild west’; and in the cruelest of contemporary serendipity we see how that attitude prevails through the countless imbecilic gun owners still harking back to the period as being the touchstone of individualized freedom. Taratino doesn’t shy away from the ‘N’-word either. Where his liberal use in previously films often seems deliberately provocative, here he parks it in a true context and crafts the language and its use by all characters with meaning so it becomes a rhythmic counterpoint throughout the dialogue.

Django Unchained is Tarantino’s most accomplished movie. It has wonderful cinematography, the usual musical surprises and a rich stream of nuanced characters whose violent and contradictory actions sit within a complex moral framework. And it’s great fun.

9/10