Movie Diary: Django Unchained

While in Minneapolis for a week, I was sure to take advantage of the cheaper movie prices in my fair city and check out Django Unchained with some friends. I loved it. I'll just give the grade up front and get to my favorite aspects below: A.

So, maybe my opinion of the film carries more weight because I'm black, maybe it doesn't. But I don't think Quentin Tarantino was overly flippant with the subject matter at all. In fact, I this might be the least Tarantino of his films yet, and I think it's better for it. Outside of some western motifs (Tarantino has claimed that this is not a Western, but a Southern), the film is incredibly unique. Unlike some of his other films (I must say of which I am a fan), there is no list of tropes to check off because this is not an homage. Revenge film doesn't even cut it. It's something entirely to itself, and I don't even know if it can be replicated (and if it could be, I don't know if I'd want to see it).

The film is tight where it needs to be. It's really in three parts: 1) Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. Schultz (Christophe Waltz) meet and establish their working relationship; 2) Django is good at what he does, and after helping Schultz with his bounty-hunting, they set off to save Django's wife, Broomhilda; 3) Django saves his wife. It's a three hour movie, but Tarantino is succinct when he needs to be, trusting the audience to understand that parts of Django and Schultz's relationship was necessarily built offscreen, and that Django has eagerly picked up on some of Schultz's influence to add to his own strong character.

In fact, one of the strongest parts of the movie to me was the singularity of Django's character. There aren't only white people to whom we can compare his character; there are other types of slaves, too, who see Django with jealousy, hatred, and fear, and rightly so. If I was a slave and saw Django, a free man on a horse with a gun, I'd think he had a death wish, and I'd wonder who he'd sold his soul to to gain that position. I wouldn't trust him with a ten foot pole. And that's just from the field hands' and Mandingos' point of view. One of the really interesting characters is that of Samuel L. Jackson's head house slave, Stephen, who is simpering and sycophantic and blind to the depths to which his owner's disdain of blacks extends. I've read and heard about the peculiar position of the house slave, about how the close relationships between master and slave were perhaps genuine but could only go so deep. We watch Stephen's devotion knowing that if the positions were reversed, the results would most likely be devoid of his effort and emotion.

This brings me to another aspect of the movie I really liked. This was not a self-contained romp, unlike Tarantino's last "revenge film," Inglorious Basterds. There is no vanquishing of a mighty spectre, no cathartic killing of Hitler. Instead, a tension permeates the entire film, the knowledge that Django is stuck, that he is one man in the south, surrounded by people who hate him and a society that systematically degrades him. I was constantly anticipating his capture and his murder knowing that that would be it, all they had to do is kill him and it would be over. The reason I think this film did not treat slavery flippantly is that the scale was just right: large enough for us to cheer for the hero but small enough to remember how far-reaching slavery was (and its legacy is). In the end, Django freed only three slaves outside of himself (the two house slaves and his wife, although I guess there's something to be said for what happens to those on the plantation after the end), and he attacked only one plantation. That there were hundreds of plantations and hundreds of thousands (millions?) of slaves puts a strange twist on the ending of the movie for me and effectively ends the fantasy right where it should. There's no "if only" for me, just some badass triumph for a well-deserved character in a complicated and hateful time period.

I will say, though, that I agree that this movie probably could not have been made by a black person now. After all, how many black filmmakers are there, and of them, who is equipped to take on slavery by the horns, without a maudlin or saccharine lens, with an interest in empowerment and complicated race relations outside of a good vs. evil/black vs. white paradigm? I don't think anyone else out there, maybe even outside of the black community, was ready to give this kind of view to the time period. I've always maintained that Tarantino's movies are love letters to his various interests, and I don't think this entry in his oeuvre is any different. It means he treats his subjects with a care and subjectivity that really shows through in his work. He's less advocating for his subjects than he is showing them a portrait of how he views them, in this case strong, singular, taking one fight at a time to battle something much bigger than oneself. Although this film may be less derivative than his others, I think that's a through-line worth maintaining.