Django Unchained

The law of diminishing returns has caught up to Quentin Tarantino with a vengeance on Django Unchained, a sloppy, irresponsible and unarguably pointless film.  The reason Inglorious Basterds worked so well was because it smartly never juxtaposed holocaust imagery with its pulpy, history-rewriting tale.  To see the atrocities and mindset of slavery so gleefully paired with a simple minded revenge story drowning in ridiculous, balloon-sized squibs is jarring and a bit offensive at first before settling into interminable routine and ultimately becoming numbing and dull.

Nobody has told Tarantino no since Pulp Fiction, and while that artistic freedom has admittedly inspired the genius of Kill Bill Volume 1 and Inglorious Basterds, it has also ushered forth the excruciatingly drawn out, self-indulgent tedium that is Kill Bill Volume 2 and Death Proof.  Django Unchained falls into the latter category while also serving as a distressing sign of Tarantino's inability to grow as a film maker or grow up as a human being.

Django is at least 45 minutes too long with unnecessary asides shoehorned in to facilitate cameos from actors Tarantino likes.  It was kind of funny to see Lee Horsely and Ted Neely in there, but they had no characters or point.  It's frustrating to watch a potentially good film get bogged down because the director wants to play with his genre toys above telling a story.  He's not resurrecting careers anymore as in Pulp Fiction or Jackie Brown, all Django's leads are bona-fide stars.  The casting in Django is pure gimmick, a showy stunt to prove his movie-nerd credibility.  I'd think 20 years into his career, he'd have satisfied this juvenile urge by now.  But that's the problem with Tarantino, isn't it?  He's little more than a jittery, over-excited assemblage of juvenile urges, and for a dude mere months away from turning 50, it's a less than charming personality trait.

I'm the guy who has tirelessly lavished praise on Human Centipede 2, so don't take me for some prude.  I just feel that Tarantino missed a major opportunity here to comment mightily on and dish out a sobering reminder of a sore spot in American history.  Unfortunately he couldn't help himself from entertaining his most salacious and controversial impulses instead of focusing on story and characters.  He didn't even bother developing the characters into real people.  Django's backstory amounts to a 30 second flashback and his wife Broomhilda has naught to do but smile prettily or sob pitifully.

Everyone else in the film is playing their one dimensional roles as one-note schtick.  Especially Waltz, who is charming of course, but King Schulze is little more than a toothless, sanitized version of his Jew Hunter from Inglorious.  Dicaprio and Jackson are fantastic though and a much better film could have been fashioned from maturely exploring the implications of their character's relationship.  Instead we get the same old bloody revenge saga we're familiar with, an easy film to make and one that's sure to please a crowd. 

I still think Tarantino has more great films in him.  He's an innately talented film maker and peerless as a scriptwriter when his florid prose is imbued with purpose.  Inglorious Basterds was a huge step forward for him, so I'm pained by Django's two steps back.  Inglorious exemplified masterful directorial control and pristine storytelling while Django is a lazy wallow in overly familiar territory, essentially Tarantino in an old-west outhouse drunk on the smell of his own farts. 

The final moments of Django Unchained are a perfect parable for Tarantino's calcified artistic sensibilities.  Django leading his horse in a prolonged strut, a display of superfluous showboating.  Defiantly proud grandstanding for a heinous act of violence that proved nothing save for the fact that the abused can become as vicious and ugly as their abusers.