Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

[Brad]

I don't object to the Mandingo bit. Just an illustration of how gratuitous/nonsensical the plot is. And I don't object to gratuitous/nonsensical plots. What I do sort of object to is attempts to intellectually justify them. Just ride with it. Fun film. Go. Laugh. Move on.

[HistoryProf]

HistoryProf, if plot devices aren't logical then that's that, regardless of whether correcting them would change the film's politics.

Not sure I entirely follow...my only point is that for ME as someone who is inordinately susceptible to being annoyed by historical malapropisms, I appreciated many touches of historical truth scattered about. Many might seem like little things, but those little things had a big impact on the overall veracity of it all, even as one big trashy splatterfest. I think what QT managed here is actually quite brilliant, and I wasn't expecting that at all. If only he hadn't tried to ruin it by again inserting himself into it, this time with a horrible aussie accent for god's sake, the silly "i can't see!" scene (complete with a totally unnecessary Jonah Hill cameo), and the Tupac bit, then I'd consider calling it a masterpiece. From Stephen's role as the faithful house-servant, the perverted pleasures of the Mandingo trade, allusions to the "jungle fever" that afflicted most slave-owners, the hatred slaves showed Django when they thought he was a black slave-trader (which did exist), and so many other aspects of the entire way of life are intimately and thoughtfully conveyed even as silly music plays and over the top bloodshed pours forth. It's a powerful film in a lot of ways.

And suggesting Schultz simply just go buy the german speaking slave girl COMPLETELY misses the point. For one, there's an entire dialogue devoted to explaining why that would never work, and for another, the movie is not called Dr. Schultz. As integral as he is to the story, in the end the entire point of the film is to have Django sitting at the dinner table in Candie-Land. I'm not too worried about plot contrivances that make that happen. This isn't a plot driven film anyway, it's a very specific genre experiment, and one that exceeded every expectation I had for it.

Oh, and Don Johnson as "Big Daddy" may be the best role of his career. My wife didn't even realize it was him until we were talking about it at dinner afterwards.

[knives]

Though having a white protagonist and naming your movie Dr. King would be rather perverse.

[HistoryProf]

an awkward aside: as I went to update my dynamic top 10 for 2012 I found that I had Lincoln and Django Unchained at 1 and 2. I split them with Moonrise Kingdom for now. It just doesn't feel right having them next to each other.

[knives]

I ran into a similar situation with Paranorman being the splitter. I wonder what it says about the culture of the moment that two of the best and most prominent American films in theaters at the moment are about slavery and America's dark histories?

[stroszeck]

I have a little bit of time on my hands and was running through the film in my mind. While it certainly is a noble effort on Tarantino's part, especially that unlike other movies where black people triumph ONLY through the assistance of whites (The Help, Glory, etc), he actually had his main character become the focal point of the action. Definitely a lot of funny moments in this one, but the major comedic "set piece," the masks scene went wayyyy too long and would've been fine as a 30 second aside to the raid. Not funny stuff. Now I had read a few reviews and was surprised at how different I alone seemed to feel about what were viewed as the films strengths. I found the character of Dr. Schultz only marginally interesting, and eventually in the last 30 or 40 mins of his screentime didn't do anything for me. That being said I was surprised at how great DiCaprio's over the top performance was and how well it worked. And aside from the poorly done makeup, I tremendously enjoyed Samuel L's Stephen.

Now all the reviews have been praising the film's "epic" feel and incredible cinematography, and yes there were a few dazzling shots here and there but for a film which intended to be an honage to the two Italian Sergios, the canvas painted here was rather limited. Perhaps its to do with the major weakness of the film - the editing. Tarantino's films have never had issues in terms of editing and here it is very obvious the film was truncated from some 3+ hour version. Just in terms of the wasted, useless cameos alone. Now Tarantino is enamored with older, long forgotten actors which is actually one thing I enjoy about his work, that he brings back people like Dennis Christopher or Robert Forster into the mainstream. But I mean come on

Spoiler

Robert Carradine, Jonah Hill, a masked Zoe Bell who I thought would serve some plot point, all very unecessary short cameos. Bruce Dern's performance amounted to like 30 seconds and did we really need to see Amber Tamblyn staring out of a window for a couple seconds? This has to be the film that holds the record for shortest, most unecessary cameo appearances, as if the movie is a game of spotting "whose that actor?" Distracting. And Tarantino should never act again, particularly using ANY type of accent, just dreadful stuff.

I revert back to the complaints of the major plot point, that being the silly idea of them pretending to be Mandingo fighting enthusiasts just to infiltrate Candyland. There are like 10 other ways they could have procured or extracted Broomhilda than use that ridiculously difficult plan, or come with a more interesting plan. Particularly if they had so much cash on hand. After all

Spoiler

German guy finds out about German speaking slave, he can easiliy negotiate something for Broomhilda, no? Didn't Django himself say she's no longer pretty enough to be an indoor slave because of the branding and her whipped up back? Surely he could've negotiated something with Calvin, perhaps through a 3rd party.

The reason why I'm bringing it up is because if the fundamental plan is flawed, which MANY others on this and other boards have brought up, the whole logical pretense of the movie gets messed up and it becomes a distraction, like in horror movies when you yell at characters onscreen who perform unecessary or stupid actions (Yes, I'm looking at you Prometheus).

The next flaw I'd like to point out but again its a matter of taste is the use of music. Now normally Tarantino can pretty much hit that out of the park, but I'm afraid here the use of music was both overbearing (every scene where they travel is supplemented by a bunch of distracting pop music) and did not create a sense of coherent musical setpieces, the way we have seen before in Kill Bill or even Inglourious Basterds. The only song that worked for me was I Got a Name. Tupac? Please...

The final flaw of the film, which others have noted again, is Django himself. Now I have to be completely honest, I have never been a fan of Foxx, so I am clearly biased. But if Tarantino gave more insight into the character, the way he did to Max Cherry or Jackie Brown or Hans Landa or Jules Winnfield, something, ANYTHING, I would have been more interested. The love story doesn't amount to much when you don't have a grasp on the main character and when all you see of the love interest is her occasional popping up behind trees or in hot springs smiling with sad puppy dog eyes. Even in the script form, which I downloaded and skimmed, Django isn't given much personality. Really, I think that's whats missing is he's just kind of one dimensional and not interesting at all. And within an hour he goes from a beaten down slave to the most arrogant dude on the screen (something that's become Foxx's speciality). I don't care how many bounties he's taken or how fast he magically learns to draw his gun, you can't remove a lifetime of slavery in a few months and replace it with Black Charles Bronson. Especially if the movie aspires to be more than just a throwback exploitation movie, which this one clearly aspires to.

One more final gripe which I personally found annoying and not funny was

Spoiler

the whole running gag about the D being silent in Django. I mean I didn't think it was very clever at all. It reminded me of the Ben Affleck character correcting everyone with his stupid name in Gigli

[Murdoch]

Spoiler

Robert Carradine, Jonah Hill, a masked Zoe Bell who I thought would serve some plot point, all very unecessary short cameos. Bruce Dern's performance amounted to like 30 seconds and did we really need to see Amber Tamblyn staring out of a window for a couple seconds? This has to be the film that holds the record for shortest, most unecessary cameo appearances, as if the movie is a game of spotting "whose that actor?" Distracting. And Tarantino should never act again, particularly using ANY type of accent, just dreadful stuff.

The cameos in this were pretty strange, it's almost as if the actors had some time to kill and decided it'd be fun to pop up in a Tarantino film.

Spoiler

Especially Amber Tamblyn, the brevity of her appearance makes me think she had more screen time which was cut. I was also hoping there would be more with M.C. Gainey since he just has that great villainous look, and I was surprised with how quickly he was killed off.

[knives]

Tamblyn was seemingly cast only for the reference.

[Murdoch]

Ah so she was, a quick google search found this useful guide. (spoilers inside)

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

I ran into a similar situation with Paranorman being the splitter. I wonder what it says about the culture of the moment that two of the best and most prominent American films in theaters at the moment are about slavery and America's dark histories?

Scott Poole's excellent Monsters In America connects the dots on that one.

[kupo]

It's interesting to read the thoughts in this thread, because I seem to have such an opposite reaction to some in here in terms of how DU and IB treat vengeance.

I think IB is far and away Tarantino's best movie to date, and his most mature, and it's because I think IB (quite possibly in spite of Tarantino's better efforts) critically investigates revenge, and doesn't treat it as some simple, clear action to be uproariously applauded. I mean, the "cathartic" moment comes as we watch Allied soldiers mow down Nazis from a balcony as Nazis are watching a propaganda film about a Nazi mowing down Allied soldiers from a bell tower. The analogue isn't exactly subtle, but it is extremely effective at complicating that "catharsis"--the film literally dares you to have the same reaction as the Nazis.

Shosanna's metamorphosis into a Satanic wraith bringing hellfire and brimstone upon the theater also complicates matters, so obvious is its imagery. And dressed in Nazi-red she's even very, very obviously visually correlated with the Nazi flag in the Putting Out Fire sequence--an ironic statement on her character's part, or a symbolic statement on the film's? I tend to think the latter, or, both.

But, especially in the final shootout of Django, Tarantino takes a major step back and utilizes splashy, cartoon gore and turns a film that has had some pretty serious and harrowing representations of violence into another exploitation flick (and it feels more inappropriate than ever, since it has been recontextualized by some of these earlier instances), where you are asked to enjoy Django's vengeance, and not to think about it. This all works if you're reading this as a mythic parable as I've seen a lot of people do, especially given the clear Siegfried/Brynhyldr allusion, and the clear archetypal tradition Django belongs to as a character. Slavery is after all a heinous, horrific, unjustifiable institution, so let it all burn. But it doesn't really work for me. It's a much easier, more obvious, less satisfying commentary.

And I do applaud that Tarantino avoided the pitfall of having Schultz be the one to bring Django and Broomhilda to freedom, but he only sort of did that. He technically did that, but not really in practice. Django is just painted as such an incredibly lifeless and dull character, and Broomhilda is barely a sketch, that even though Schultz and Candie are out of the picture by the last act, it never actually feels like Django's film. It still feels like Schultz's and Candie's, and thus it feels like it's well outstayed its welcome.

All-in-all, as ever with Tarantino, I think it's a good film, and a compulsively watchable one. But I don't think it's his greatest success.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

Ah so she was, a quick google search found this useful guide. (spoilers inside)

That's an interesting index of references, some of which I understood at the time of viewing, some of which I didn't. And I think these are precisely the kinds of trivia that Tarantino fans relish in his films, although I would have to say that most of them amount to obscure film recommendations rather than potent intertextual allusions. One thing I missed (that's rather obvious, in hindsight) is the MISSISSIPPI title that sweeps across the screen like the opening title of Gone with the Wind, which adds an interesting dimension/critique to the filmic legends of the South and gamely implicates Tarantino's own film as part of the slavery-as-entertainment cinema legacy. Also, I love the fact that Tarantino casts with the sense of each actor's resume, paying homage to the fact that they had as much to do with the way a particular film or film genre is received by viewers as the more universally acknowledged auteur (i.e., director), even if what they contribute is typically just a peculiarly potent face endowed by DNA rather than talent.
Andrew O'Hehir objects to Tarantino's use of the mandingo fighting that may or may not be historically accurate, but is certainly influenced by Fleischer's Mandingo, a film O'Hehir dismisses as "notoriously dreadful." Personally, I think Mandingo is a fantastic film, outstripping other attempts to reckon with slavery and American racism by Fleischer's contemporaries, and I'm not quite sure why it has a such an abysmal reputation, except that it deals with the attitudes of slaveholders rather bluntly and does so with an incredibly florid story, thus combining high melodrama with brute depictions of slavery in a potentially trivializing manner. With this reference, I think Tarantino successfully combines an elaborate film recommendation with a productive plot element. (Incidentally, I remember Ordell Robbie referring to Max Cherry's partner Winston as a "mandingo," at one point, so I guess the movie has been on Tarantino's mind for some time.) Whether the practice is apocryphal or not, I don't think anyone would say that forcing black men to fight one another is something beyond the moral scope of white southern slaveholders. Objecting to it seems tantamount to saying, "The Inquisition never used thumb screws! Iron maidens, sure, but thumbscrews, never!" Even if there is no historical precedent, it seems like fair artistic license in a work of historical fiction.
Finally, I wonder if Tarantino ever saw (kind of a ridiculous question with that guy) Hellgate (1952), a western starring Sterling Hayden that features a hot box for prisoners that more closely resembles the one in Django; the box is made of iron and lies on the ground, unlike the one in Cool Hand Luke, which, if I recall correctly, is vertical and made of wood. The film is poorly directed, but it has a good cast and a fascinating story with a plot twist revolving around the very construction of the flat iron hot box, a potent cinematic image. Perhaps there are other "hot box" movies, too, that I can't recall.

(Edited for grammar.)

[knives]

I'm pretty sure I've heard him mention Warren so I'm sure he's seen Hellgate.

[swo17]

A hot box plays a pretty key part in Bridge on the River Kwai.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

A hot box plays a pretty key part in Bridge on the River Kwai.

That's right! Forgot about that.

[stroszeck]

Interesting catch on the Hellgate reference. Going back to youtube and watching the trailer, at the 00:30 second mark, there's a shot of two soldiers in the foreground shooting at a man down below in front of his little farmhouse which looks almost IDENTICAL to the shot in Django Unchained where Foxx guns down the "farmer" boy's father.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgn-8Aimbks" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Can't be a coincidence...can it?

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

I suppose the set-up could have wormed its way into Tarantino's memory, depending on how unique such an over-the-shoulder, high-angle, long-distance, executioner-POV shot happens to be in the context of the western. I don't quite remember the precise configuration of Tarantino's version. The film is available on Fandor as well as DVD, for those who are curious about the storied past of hot box films.

[knives]

Just a random thought, but did the dual casting of James Remar bug anyone else? I'm not sure what the point was except to annoy the audience.

[Noiradelic]

Yes, at first I thought the first character he plays had somehow survived (stranger things have happened in movies) and I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

[HistoryProf]

who was he besides the lead Speck brother in the opening scene. when I saw his name in the credits I was actually looking for him throughout and never even spotted him. He's been one of those faces indelibly printed on me since I watched 48 Hrs. 73 times in 8th grade. He's barely recognizable as the slave trader....what other role did he play?

I forgot one major annoyance: The girl among the dog crew at the plantation wearing the mask. When she's looking into the stereoscope and Django returns I'm fully expecting some kind of reveal for her. There are more close ups of her face than anything wide with her in it, so she must have had a larger role at some point. IMDB tells me it was the stunt girl from Death Proof...but what the heck was the point of all that? is that some allusion to another film too?

[knives]

He also played the guy who never took off his hat. I think the character's name was Buck.

[stroszeck]

I initially thought it was some sort of nod to Tarantino's friend PT Anderson and the Paul Dano dual role thing in There Will Be Blood. Alas, I think he just ran out of actors on location and had Remar step in the role. (Similar to replacing Anthony LaPaglia with himself).

[sighkingu]

Just a random thought, but did the dual casting of James Remar bug anyone else? I'm not sure what the point was except to annoy the audience.

I found it a little unsettling if only because I feared Remar would be wasted in the opening scene. I don't think he was used to particularly good effect in either part but I'm always happy to see him get work.

Tarantino also used dual casting on Michael Parks and Gordon Liu in the Kill Bill films so it's not to his first time to do so.

[cdnchris]

I believe Kevin Costner was supposed to play one of Candie's henchman, not sure which one, but he dropped out due to scheduling (if I recall correctly there was a lot of that.) Maybe it was the role Remar took?

[knives]

I'm pretty sure it is the role that Goggins took.