As the opening credits tell us, Django Unchained is a film by Quentin Tarantino, and it doesn’t have to play very long for the auteurship to show. Which is lovely, because we’re talking about Quentin Tarantino, after all.
But something odd happens three-fourths of the way through. With one fateful plot development, Django Unchained loses all it’s got going for it but the flash, and Tarantino’s seventh film seems taken over by a bit of a hack who’s going in for Tarantino-style violence and wacky lines of dialog but has little grasp what a great piece of writing a film like Inglorious Basterds is.
The good news is that for over 90 minutes Django Unchained is clearly by the same guy who did Inglorious Basterds—and, almost as notably, Kill Bill: Volume 1—as Tarantino unfolds tale of Django (Jamie Foxx, definitely the right guy for the role), a slave acquired (in decisive Tarantino fashion) by bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, whom you just love to see act) for help with a job. Schultz has deplores slavery, and the two become partners. To call Django a quick study is an understatement, and this pair of impossibly good marksmen (a fun part of this Tarantino universe he creates and not stupid) are more or less unstoppable in the plying of their trade.
It’s not just because Django’s wife is named Broomhilda (Kerry Washington, who both glows and gains our empathy in her moments of suffering) that Schultz, who knows his Nibelungenlied, offers to aid with Django’s quest to liberate her. But it doesn’t hurt. “For a German, it’s a pretty big deal to meet a Siegfried,” he says, with the charm and deftness of the screenwriter of Tarantino’s sixth film.
Part of that deftness is fleshed out in the characters, and in Schultz we see the evolution of a conscience, from a man who is contemporaneously both good and callous to a person with genuine empathy. “I’ve never given anyone their freedom before,” Schultz explains to Django. “I feel kind of responsible for you.”
The film has been flawless as the team heads down South, destined for Candyland, the fourth-biggest plantation in Mississippi, run by the dandyish but dastardly Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, who continues to deserve having been let out of the pretty-boy purgatory of public perception). Tarantino has done his usual wonders with music and tension, and you laughed your ass off at the ride of the wannabe KKKers. Now you’re in Candyland, where you get not only DiCaprio but Samuel L. Jackson being his hilarious self. How can anything go wrong?
But a switch seems flicked when one character makes a specific choice that just doesn’t ring true, after which point Waltz and DiCaprio are completely wasted, and all we’re left with is a bunch of shoot-’em-up with none of the cleverness and congruity of the Kill Bill‘s showdown at the House of Blue Leaves (despite a couple of direct references to it).
What happened here is far from clear. In the DVD commentary to finale of Season 4 of The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin, who left the show after this episode, speaks of having led his successors to a jumping-off place—or a cliffhanger, if you will—where all kinds of neat stuff were going on, and from where there was all manner of possibility. It feels as if Tarantino did here, handing off the screenplay for completion. But whereas The West Wing‘s Season 5 writing staff was up to the task, the author of the last quarter of Django Unchained is not equal to the task, and all that lovely work is succeeded by not much of interest—even technically. Music is now laid on a bit thick; fabricated tension is just a recognizable gimmick; the laughs are fewer and farther between; and interesting or even clever dialog is completely absent.
If you think $11 is a reasonable price to pay for 90+ minutes of Tarantinoesque (the guy has earned his own adjective) cinematic fun, then you can’t go wrong with Django Unchained. But sometimes you can get your money’s worth and still be frustrated or annoyed, or just downright puzzled how an artist so good, so on it, can suddenly shift into a lower gear right before your eyes, driving his grand cinematic stagecoach down far easier and less interesting roads. It’s hard to think of Quentin Tarantino as lazy in any aspect of filmmaking, so that’s probably not what happened here. But as a screenplay, Django Unchained feels hastened to a conclusion without much pause for inspiration.
Too bad, because you’ve got no choice but to see it. Don’t fret: you can have a lot of fun in 90+ minutes.
Django Unchained is playing at the Art Theatre of Long Beach (2025 E. 4th Street, LB 90804). For info on show times call (562) 438-5435 or visit arttheatrelongbeach.com.