Django Unchained

  

     **********************************SPOILERS AHEAD***********************************

   Exciting is the day when a new Tarantino script hits the internet.  There, at our fingers, handwritten coversheet and all, is the latest genre love letter from the geek extraordinaire.  I have read three of Tarantino’s scripts long before the films were released: Django, obviously, Inglourious Basterds, and Kill Bill when it was still a massive one installment movie.  Bill was the most exciting.  At that point (late 2002) it had been five years since there had been an official peep from Tarantino.  Jackie Brown had done okay, but was shrugged off by the public.  The movie has gained an audience in the years since, time preserving it at Tarantino’s most human film.  Kill Bill was a u-turn, a mish-mash of everything the director had watched from birth to adulthood.  It read like fireworks, every page dripping with love for the movies.  It was a pumped up, caffeinated, neon fever dream.  There’s one great unfilmed sequence that I always remember.  The battle with Viveca A. Fox happened in the middle of the movie and, after the blood-letting ended, the Bride fled through the neighborhood, taking shelter in a treehouse to tend to her wounds.  Bill’s goon find her and massive battle takes place in the suburban streets with cars and vans exploding all around.  The movie then segued into what became the beginning of Volume 2.  It was as badass of a scene as The House of Blue Leaves slaughter.

   Inglourious Basterds was a different ball of wax.  What had been hyped as a “men-on-a-mission” movie proved to be a dull read; too many characters came and went and it seemed as though we had shifted in time every other page.  It was cumbersome, the dialogue reading flat, the thrills lacking, and the ending with the murder of Hitler making little sense.  Only the opening scene with Hans Landa and the farmers crackled with any energy.  I wondered if perhaps this was a first draft and Tarantino had patched up the holes in the script.  If he hadn’t, the film was going to be a dreary slog and could really trip up Tarantino’s momentum.  I also read this script after sitting through the mess that was Death Proof a year earlier; that’s a whole different rambling review. I wondered if he had turned into a self-parody.  It happened to Welles and Bogdanovich; super producer Robert Evans disappeared in the eighties only to return in the nineties as a taxidermied former self, his skin waxen and eyes curiously flat.  Perhaps Tarantino had been surrounded by sycophants for too long, closed off in his Hollywood home and writing to appease the fanboy base he had cultivated through his love Italian zombie gut munchers and Yakuza flicks.

   I happily ate my words as Inglourious Basterds flickered before me.  With each progressive movie, Tarantino has become more and more visual.  The characters still hang out and bullshit, but his cinematic vocabulary has grown.  Basterds was a script that relied heavily on its images to feel satisfactory.  The movie is by far Tarantino’s most intellectual, a clever treatise on the power of film and propaganda; the simple act of watching it and cheering Hitler’s execution served as a powerful punctuation on everything that came before.  We became the Nazis, cheering an event that never was.  It was living theater, the audience the most important facet of Tarantino’s creation.

   The filmmaker announced his next film would be a “southern,”  meaning his riff was to take spaghetti western tropes and plant them in an environment they rarely, if ever, traversed (Tennessee, Mississippi, etc.).  For Tarantino to finally make a full blown spaghetti western was thrilling.  My father rented about every  Italian cowboy flick our mom-and-pop video store held.  Whether it was Leone or Corbucci or some English name that was really an Italian alias, my father soaked them up.  My fondness for them grew as I got older.  Long written off as peabrained exercises in gunplay and blood, the really good spaghetti westerns were great myths that dealt in extremes and could get away with it.  The players were fallible gods; the environment wasn’t a mere desert or mountain range, but world’s end itself; the stakes went beyond simple life and death.  The bombastic soundtracks, usually supplied by Morricone, added more of a godly quality.  Like the horns summoning the Rapture,  the piercing brass and massive chorus gave weight to a struggle that would alter the earth’s axis. They could be sweaty or frostbitten in setting, but a truly great spaghetti western soared in ways no mere action film could.

   Which leads to Django Unchained.  The film is still nearly a year away and we probably won’t even see any advertising for another four months, but, if the script is any kind of a barometer, this could very well be the best film not only of the year but of Tarantino’s career.  It’s the first straight ahead narrative he’s done since Jackie Brown and that works like gangbusters for Django.  Aside from one sequence that details what happened to Django’s wife, Broomhilda, after a slave auction, the script eschews the novelistic nature he so often uses.  Gone are the chapters that made up Kill Bill and Basterds; absent is the time jumping that juggled the audience about; characters aren’t given to us in slam-bang fashion.  This, and I mean this in the most complimentary way, is Tarantino’s most old fashioned picture.

   The narrative switch that felt fresh in Pulp Fiction has now been used by countless movies, television shows, and commercials; Lost was built on hop-scotching time and character.  While there is nothing wrong with that device in good hands, it gets beaten and wacked and used to death by hacks who want to seem hip.  It was refreshing to see that while Tarantino can use it well, he doesn’t have to; he can write without those maneuvers and still create a better movie than most people in Hollywood ever could.

   It’s also his most emotionally rich film since Jackie Brown.  Kill Bill was a crazy grindhouse mash-up that, while boasting some of the most impressive action scenes in years, never grabbed me; too much was coming off the screen to be able to really invest emotion in Uma Thurman.  Death Proof was…Death Proof.  As I mentioned earlier, Basterds was his most intellectual movie; intellectual and emotional, however, are two different games and, as satisfying as Basterds is philosophically, it still never hit the gut.  Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction are his two most emotional movies; Brown with its muted longings and real desires; Pulp, which transcended its genre confines through Samuel L. Jackson’s speech in the end.  Again, it goes back to the narrative device.  Tarantino employed it for a reason; were Jackson’s speech to fall in the middle of the movie, gone would be the weight and heart.  It would simply be a gleeful, well-made crime movie.  Ending on that note transformed it entirely.

   The basic plot line of Django Unchained boils down to a slave uses his freedom to track down his kidnapped wife and enact revenge against crackers.  It’s a risky venture for a white guy like Tarantino, a man Spike Lee once said “likes to use the word ‘nigger’ because he thinks it makes him an unofficial black guy.” (That’s a paraphrase; gone is the Entertainment Weekly issue that came from.)  If handled wrong, this thing could have been Mandingo for the 21^st century.  Race is still a sensitive issue in this country (witness the recent CPAC gathering, which invited white nationalist  Peter Brimelow to take part in a panel called “The Failure of Multiculturism”).  Americans like to think of our forefathers as noble men rather than the upper class, slave-owning, whore-mongering sexist bigots most were.  To steal a joke from the brilliant George Carlin, “These were unelected white men who said, “All men are created equal.” Yeah, except Indians, niggers, and women.  Need to use that authentic American language.”  This was a nation not founded by messengers of God looking to spread democracy; they were rich people pissed at having to pay their taxes.  In other words, they would have loved the Bush sanctioned tax cuts. 

   The blood spilled on this land has yet to dry because there are still unfortunate souls who cling to the daydream of an America that never was.  Anyone not white and/or religious still finds themselves the recipient of a blasé dismissal; a casual mental handwave that brushes them from the concerns of Rockwellian nostalgists.  To possibly make a film that fans the flames of this stupidity would be a borderline crime.  Thankfully, the Django script reads as catharsis.  It doesn’t take back the pain, anguish or embarrassment brought on by slavery, but it does act as a two and a half hour vent.  As I made my way through the script, my excitement grew with each page turn; I longed for Django to beat these mothers raw.

   I won’t spoil the climax or any major plot turns; partially cause I don’t want to ruin the whole movie for anyone; also because my ass isn’t getting sued.  I have squat for money and, while you can’t get blood from a turnip, I’m not gonna run the risk of having multi-millionaires try to squeeze that blood out.

   The script starts out with Django pulled along in a chain gang.  His back is ripped apart by whip beatings and the letter ‘r’ has been burned into his cheek for ‘runaway.’  He has was Tarantino refers to as SPAGHETTI WESTERN FLASHBACKS, meaning the hazy, brutal memories of Django watching Broomhilda get sold on an auction block burns through him like fire while the soundtrack pounds.  As two guys called The Speck Brothers lead the slaves through woods, a German bounty hunter named King Schultz rides up.  He asks for Django’s assistance in leading him to the Carrucan Plantation, a former home to the slave and tended to by Schultz’s bounty, The Brittle Brothers.  The Speck Brothers don’t take kindly to the German.  Schultz shoots one in the face and blows the brains out of the other’s horse, breaking the man’s leg as he goes down.  The German takes Django’s freedom papers and the two men ride off.

   As I first started the script, I furrowed my brow at white/black pairing.  Was that cliché really going to be trotted out again?  How could Tarantino turn this on its head?  Well, he does it in a very subtle move: the men are just good, decent people.  Schultz never talks down to Django or acts as some kind of White Savior or vice versa.  It doesn’t rehash the same crap or pat itself on the back for being progressive.  They are equals.  Django doesn’t talk much at the beginning, a nod to so many of the Men With No Names that populated spaghetti westerns; it goes beyond that, though.  This is a real man who doesn’t talk for a reason: opening your mouth gets you beaten or killed.  It’s not a matter of being stoic.  It’s a matter of staying alive.

   Django leads Schultz to The Brittle Brothers and a fight ensues.  Afterwards, Schultz presents Django with a proposition: stay with him for a few months and allow Schultz to train him in the ways of killing; when Django has learned, he will join the man in going to Mississippi to free Broomhilda.  The former slave agrees and begins preparing for war.

   How Schultz and Django pinpoint Broomhilda is interesting; seems she was bought by a German couple when she was a baby and they proceeded to raise her as such.  She speaks fluent German, which assists Schultz later in the script.  Being that she’s the only known slave to speak the language, word has spread of her sale.  A white couple buy her for their son, a nervous twenty-something virgin.  Broomhilda is treated as part of the family within the house; outside she’s just the help.  When the son loses her to a man name Calvin Candie, she is taken to his Mississippi plantation, appropriately named Candyland.


   Candie is a rich, nasty, vile sonnavabitch who deals in “mandingo fights.”  He buys slaves that seem to have potential as fighters.  Those who don’t make the cut find themselves on the wrong end of a gun, knife, or even dog.  That Candie is being played by Leonardo DiCaprio is shocking.  He’s always been one to go for heavy dramatic roles, but Candie is the sickest and cruelest bastard on film in years.  If his hateful nature comes through on screen as well as it did on paper, audiences are going to be stunned by DiCaprio.  Every third word out of this guy seems to be ‘nigger.’  The word is used frequently, obviously since the film deals with slaves, but once Candie enters the picture it flows like water.  I didn’t count, but I would feel safe saying that ‘nigger’ appears multiple times though the last seventy to eighty pages, mostly from Candie.  You never become numb to it because this grotesque fuck finds ways to use it differently; each utterance grabs you as boldly as the last time.  Given all of this, he makes a great, great villain.

   Schultz and Django gain entrance to Candyland by posing as a potential fight manager and his “black slaver.”  The script takes on a whole new level with the “black slaver” angle.  Django is forced to keep up this ruse to find his beloved, but raises the ire of the slaves in Cadyland because there is nothing more reprehensible than a black man who sells out his own.  It tightens the screws on Django and Schultz; they are truly by themselves; to tell even one slave what was really going on could cause the whole operation to fall apart.  This plays out sadly when Candie and his overseers catch a slave named D’Artagnan who attempted to runaway.  Bought in the hopes he could win five fights, D’Artagnan is so busted and worn that he would rather run than try to fight anymore.  Candie shows his “concern” in the below line:

CALVIN CANDIE: 

Well the way he looks now a blind Indian wouldn’t bet a bead on him.

(to D’Artagnan)

Boy, you done made yourself as useless as a tail on a teddy bear.

Candie taunts the man; trappers and overseers laugh; dogs snarl and froth trying to break their chains to get at D’Artagnan.  Schultz can’t bear the horror anymore and snaps out of character, offering to buy D’Artagnan.  Everyone is puzzled.  Django, sensing that Candie will figure out the jig, tells the white owner that his German friend isn’t used to American savagery and insists that Candie do what he feel is right to his “property.”

   It’s a sickening scene.  It’s not violence that’s cool or hip or thrilling; it’s a savagery that hurts worse when one remembers such scenes were still taking place a scant fifty years ago.  Django takes his hatred and buries it deep, knowing it will burst forth sooner rather than later; his hatred is only multiplied when they actually reach Candyland.

   It’s the introduction of Stephen that I most remember from the script.  I’ll let Tarantino’s own prose explain.

“Who’s STEPHEN? Stephen is a very old black man, who with his bald pate and tufts of white curly hair on the sides, looks like a character out of Dickens – if Dickens wrote about House Niggers in the Antebellum South.

Stephen has been Calvin’s slave since he was a little boy. And in (almost) every way is the 2^nd most powerful person at Candyland. Like the characters Basil Rathbone would play in swashbucklers, evil, scheming, intriguing men, always trying to influence and manipulate power for their own self interest. Well that describes Stephen to a tee.

The Basil Rathbone of House Niggers.”

   “The Basil Rathbone of House Niggers” is one of the strangest yet strongest lines I’ve ever read to introduce a character.  This is where Tarantino really soars; he has this bizarre ability to really paint the most vivid picture of characters.  Actually, not painting them but burning them into your brain.  The “Basil Rathbone” line is more powerful than any dialogue anyone, including Tarantino, could ever write.  Before Stephen has uttered a line, I’ve got his number and it’s a doozy.  Samuel L. Jackson is playing him and I would imagine his reaction would be the same; whatever else Jackson brings to the character must be shaded by that line.  Suffice it to say, I loved the angry back and forth between Django and Stephen.  The old man does his soft shoe routine for Candie, the two acting as a comedy duo, always jabbing at one another in “fun”; with Django, Stephen drops the Sambo routine and gets real.  He doesn’t appreciate another “free” black guy coming in and giving him lip.  Candie and Stephen have a nice set-up and the old man isn’t about to have this young buck screw it up.

   (There is a very satisfying scene in Django’s bedroom between the two of them; Stephen gets a good taste of reality.)

   Upon arriving at Candyland, Django and Schultz spot Broomhilda being led out of a hot box built into the ground.  Django fights the urge to go medieval on their asses.  Later, a dinner takes place between Candie, his sister, Schultz, and Django;  Broomhilda and Stephen serve them.  Stephen starts thinking something is up between the woman and Django.  What follows is a nerve-wracking scene; it’s not very violent, but there’s a hammer and it’s all fucking scary.

   I won’t go into further detail since that would spell out who lives, dies, and what’s left of them.  A few script reviews have felt that the movie starts out slow and have been disappointed that Django isn’t pure badass from beginning to end; I think they’re missing the point.  When we first meet him, Django is about as broken down as a human can get.  Given the racial climate of the country, he’s not just going to get free five pages in and go on a rip-roaring killing spree.  That’s what makes him interesting.  He isn’t a bulletproof avenger; he’s a human.  In a torture scene, Tarantino notes that Django “doesn’t take torture silently and stoically.  This shit fucking hurts…”  It would be callous to make him a black Terminator, roaming the south and picking off honkies without any historical or emotional honesty.

   The rapport between Schultz and Django is wonderful; a true sense of camaraderie.  In spite of the serious overtones, there are moments of Tarantino’s gallows humor; in particular, an attempted raid on Django and Schultz by Klan-types is thoroughly bungled when the masks they adorn don’t fit properly and block out their eyesight.  It’s The Birth of a Nation meets The Apple Dumpling Gang.  In a rare move for the director, there isn’t a huge female lead.  Broomhilda is an important part, but is nowhere near Melanie Laurent or Uma Thurman; it’s the most male-centric movie since Reservoir Dogs.   The film takes its time building these characters, the first half devoted solely to Schultz and Django’s adventures as bounty hunters, building to the exciting and emotionally exhausting climax at Candyland.  When the smoke clears, audiences should be as limp as noodles.  It’s a grim world Tarantino has created: people are shot, stabbed, hatcheted, ripped apart by dogs, and blown up by dynamite (multiple times).  By the credits, Django’s freedom feels truly earned.