Django Unchained

DJANGO-UNCHAINEDIn the march to the Oscars, Quentin Tarantino has swept up a swag of nominations for his wacky way-out Western, DJANGO UNCHAINED (MA).

This wayward oater is up for the main prize, Best Picture, as well as Best Actor in a supporting role, Christoph Waltz, Best Screenplay, Cinematography, and Sound Editing. And deserves every goddamn one of ‘em.

What Tarantino did with the war movie in INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, he does with the Western in DJANGO UNCHAINED. It’s a revenge and retribution saga, an oppressed people taking vengeance against a brutal ruling class. This is truly a yarn about the good, the bad and the ugly, and for a few dollars gore!

Set some years before the American Civil War, Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave emancipated by a German dentist turned bounty hunter who buys Django’s freedom so the slave can help him identify his quarry.

Instead of filling molars, King Schultz, played to the teeth by Christoph Waltz, prefers to fill felons full of lead till they are dead and claim a big bounty. There is more cash in corpses than cavities.

A bizarre relationship blossoms between the dental as anything bounty hunter and the story takes its cue from the legend of Brunhilde, in a convoluted but compelling yarn of slaying dragons and rescuing damsels.

With its big, bold red titles and large chunks of Bacolov and Morricone music, Tarantino sets this square in Spaghetti western territory but with the awesome prevailing and pervading presence of Christoph Waltz, it’s also a strudel western, and with the arrival at Candie Land with its vile Francophile, Calvin Candie, played with maladjusted arrested adolescent malevolence by Leonardo Di Caprio, it becomes a patisserie western.

Eloquent, audacious, funny as hell, and violent, DJANGO UNCHAINED has a resurrection role for Don Johnson as southern slave trader and cotton tycoon, called Big Daddy, a kind of Colonel Sanders finger lickin flesh trader and fledgling Klan commander. Tarantino sends those sheet wearing pillow case capped bigots gutless and they rightly get their comeuppance.

Samuel L Jackson as an Uncle Tom lackey of Calvin Candie is wonderfully despicable and John Jarratt joins Tarantiono as two Aussie blokes several lambs short of a sheep paddock, members of the Le Quint Dickey Mining Company.

Bloody, yes, but bloody funny too, and at right on three hours it doesn’t drag the chain.

© Richard Cotter