Django Unchained (2012)

*** ½ out of ****

Tarantino often walks a very fine line with his filmmaking. He loves to pay homage to earlier films and directors, often to the point of making parts of his own films silly or close to caricatures. I found he went over that line with the “Kill Bill” films (especially the first one) and got it just right in “Inglorious Basterds”. With “Django Unchained” he dances right up to the line quite a bit, but never goes too far. Which leaves “Django” as a wonderful, violent, gruesome, offensive western that is almost endlessly entertaining.

Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave in 1858 being moved across Texas, when his group encounters “King Schultz” (Christoph Waltz). Schultz is a bounty hunter who needs Django to identify a couple of murderers he is seeking that Django had known at an earlier plantation. As Schultz hates slavery he makes a deal to offer Django his freedom in exchange for his help. But over the course of seeking these bounties, the two men become good friends. And when Schultz finds out that Django's wife has been sold to other slavers, he offers to help his find her again.

After investigating they find at Django's wife Hildy (Kerry Washington) was sold to a large plantation owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo Dicaprio), one who would never deign to worry about a single slave. So Schultz and Django hatch a plot to seek out Candie and make him believe they are interested in the “Mandingo” game so that they can get close to him. “Mandingo” is the name given to (for lack of a better analogy) slave “cockfights”, where each slave-owner offers a combatant to fight to the death. In reality it is largely considered fictional, but here the Mandingo game becomes one of the central parts of the second half of the film. Schultz and Django try to convince Candie they want to buy fighting slaves when really all they want is to buy Hildy and whisk her away.

While some have complained that “Django Unchained” is unnecessarily violent and gruesome, I tend to think that it's because this is such an unconventional western. And there are times when it dances right up to the line of good taste, especially in it's gore and over-the-top treatment of most of the slave-owners. While these guys were villainous historically, they are universally ridiculously villainous here. Tarantino had to work very hard to make those characters real rather than caricatures, and I feel he did it very well. In particular, Don Johnson's role as “Big Daddy” is not only effective, but borderline hilarious.

Everyone in the cast is fantastic, but Christoph Waltz as King Schultz is the real star of this film. His two turns in Tarantino movies (he was also Hans Landa in “Inglorious Basterds”) are possibly the best roles played by anyone in any movies in the past ten years. Foxx and Dicaprio really shine, but it's Waltz that runs away with it. Sam Jackson as “Stephen”, Candie's head house slave, is also delightfully evil in his role.

If you only like westerns like the old John Wayne flicks, you probably won't know quite what to make of Django Unchained”. But it is a truly excellent piece of movie-making, and a worthy addition to Tarantino's catalogue. Don't miss it.