From dusk till yawn - why Django Unchained was a bit of a grind-horse

What happens to your relationship with a Quentin Tarantino film when you start to find it... boring? If you aren’t seduced by the kinetic energy of a Tarantino movie, by a nonstop flow of razor-sharp dialogues and terrifically paced action sequences, is there anything worth sticking around for? (This is a serious question. Weigh in, QT fans.) I ask because I went into Django Unchained without the reservations that so many people have about Tarantino’s work – that it is shallow or derivative (as long as it’s good shallow and good derivative, I don’t mind) – and yet, much as I wanted to love it, my attention wandered as the film plodded on and on.

Even those who don’t think too highly of Tarantino give him credit for certain things, such as his limitless enthusiasm for cinema, his imaginative use of references and tributes, and the hip, ironic writing – the love of flamboyant dialogue for its own sake – which achieves a poetic force in his best work. Watching a Tarantino film with prior experience of his work, we anticipate the interplay between the long wordy scenes and the sudden bursts of violence, the former leading up to the latter; we brace ourselves for the eruptions.

The first few scenes in Django Unchained have this quality, most of it courtesy the erudite bounty hunter King Schultz (an author-backed part, perfectly played by Christoph Waltz), who uses words like “acolyte” and “parley” with the same ease as he draws his gun. English is not his native language, but lines like “If you can keep your caterwauling down to a minimum, I’d like to finish my line of enquiry” and “On the off-chance there are any astronomy aficionados among you, the North Star is that one” trip off his tongue. You don't take the character, and the way he speaks, at face value, but all this is just as enjoyable as the incongruously sophisticated banter between Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction.
 
Many intriguing things happen in this story about the adventures of Schultz and the freshly liberated slave Django (Jamie Foxx). The triumphal, wish-fulfilling aspect of Tarantino’s cinema has been on full display in his two most recent films (Inglourious Basterds being the one before this), which present alternate-universe versions of slavery and the Holocaust in terms that a good-hearted little boy with an appetite for fast talk, gore and contemporary music might want to see them presented. (If Woodrow Wilson, or whoever, said of The Birth of a Nation nearly a hundred years ago that it was “history written in lightning”, Basterds and Django are history rewritten in celluloid, by someone who is more interested in cinema’s past than in the real-world past.) But the idea of the underdog who must prevail – through the magical power of film – was there in the earlier, non-period works too. For instance, Kill Bill played like a long psycho-dream of vengeance achieved against impossible odds; if we suspend our disbelief enough to buy that The Bride can singlehandedly overpower dozens of Yakuza fighters, it is largely thanks to the power of choreography and editing. And even Pulp Fiction (still for my money Tarantino’s best film, however unfashionable that view might be) used its sinuous, non-linear structure to provide the illusion of a happy ending, by “resurrecting” one of its most likable characters after we have seen him die midway through the film. It showed a new dimension of cinema’s capacity for supplying the feel-good moment.

In reaching for its own happy conclusion, Django Unchained moves between two meters: there is an apparently serious effort to depict the moral codes and assumptions of a long-past age (the American South in the 1850s), to show people being confronted with new possibilities that can upend their established way of life and are therefore threatening. “Why come into my town and start troubling? These are nice people,” a sheriff asks Schultz (the “nice people” being townsfolk who have been shaken up by the mere sight of a black man riding a horse as if he was one of them). But this being Tarantino, the social commentary goes hand in hand with cartoon violence, nods to B-movies and slapstick comedy: how could he possibly resist a broad comic skit about the unfeasibility of the white hoods worn by the Ku Klux Klan? So here is a film that revels in gratuitously “funny” bloodletting as well as super-fast zoom-ins and zoom-outs during dramatic encounters (in imitation of low-budget spaghetti westerns full of “HUH?!” and “OUCH!” moments) – but also attempts the self-consciously languid pace of a Sergio Leone film, and provides over-sentimental moments such as the one where Django fancies he sees his lovely wife everywhere he goes. (Incidentally, for most of the film, Django himself is less a hero and more a foil, being humourless and relatively inarticulate – and remember, in the Tarantino universe, inarticulacy is a character flaw.)

For me, these clashing tones didn’t work as well as they did in the earlier Tarantino movies; the first 40 minutes or so were terrific, but the lack of energy in the film’s second half was surprising. After a point, the pauses and silences, instead of being exercises in anticipation – the lull before the explosion – become merely...pauses and silences. The dialogue is not as crackling as it could have been, the pacing is dreary (the scene where the Leonardo Dicaprio character gets phrenological could have been so much smarter, but I got the impression that Tarantino was content with setting up the sight gag of the skull on the dining table) and the performances, though good, aren’t enough to cover the holes. (In his early scenes, Samuel L Jackson is brilliantly hysterical as the old slave who is just as keen to maintain the status quo as his white masters are; but after half an hour or so, I wanted him to shut up and stop doddering around.) Even the Ku Klux Klan setpiece – which is funny in a Monty Pythonish way, and makes a practical point in addition to exposing the banality of Evil – goes on for longer than it needed to.

Late in the film, in a casting decision that typically combines self-indulgence with self-deprecation, Tarantino appears in a short role as an Australian slave-driver. The character gets a spectacular, explosive end, much the same way as the film eventually does – but he also looks as flabby and distracted as Django Unchained so often is. And his accent is way off.

[Did a version of this for Business Standard Weekend]