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literate they're a little loopy, plays
Schultz as a charismatic benevo-
lent oddball, and he and Foxx, with
that smoky and knowing killer gaze,
make an irresistible buddy team.
Yet the film's first hour is a little ...
basic. There's a funny, farcical
scene with an early version of the
Klan (the joke is they can't see out
of their hoods), butDjango doesn't
spike to full Tarantino fever until it
gets inside the big house of Calvin
Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a
wily plantation owner. One of his
slaves, Broomhilda (a luminous
Kerry Washington), is Django's
wife, and Schultz and Django now
pretend to be slave traders to fool
Candie into selling her.
DiCaprio, having a blast, makes
Candie the equivalent of Waltz's
Nazi in lnglourious Ba,sterds: a racist
STARRING villain who mesmerizes us by elevating his
Jamie Foxx Django ideology into a puckishly thought-out vision of
DIRECTED BY the world. Yet Django isn't nearly the film that
Quentin Tarantino Unchained lnglourious was. It's less clever, and it doesn't
R, 2 HRS., 45 MINS. have enough major characters-or enough of
It would now be a surprise if a new Quentin Tarantino's trademark structural ingenuity-
By Owen
Tarantino movie didn't dip into the well of to earn its two-hour-and-45-minute running
Gleiberman
'70s grind-house cinema. Django Unchained, time. What it does have is Samuel L. Jackson
Tarantino's deliriously kicky and shameless in a pinpoint performance as an unctuous
(and also overly long and scattershot) racial- old house slave who's more layered than he
exploitation epic, is set in the slave days, and appears, and when Django, Schultz, and
among other things, it's a low-down orgy of Candie are sitting around the parlor trying
flamboyant cruelty and violence: whippings, a to outwit each other, the film achieves that
scene in which a man gets torn apart by dogs, QT hypnotic mood. But only for a while.
plus the most promiscuous use of the N-word In the gaudy-bloody last 30 minutes (think
ever heard in a mainstream movie. Is Django over-the-top and beyond), the mood
attacking the cruelty or reveling in it? Maybe vanishes. And Django Unchained becomes
both, and that's what gives the film's best an almost sadistically literal example of
parts their danger-the way that Tarantino, exploitation at its most unironic. B-
with lip-smacking down-and-dirty subversive
gusto, rubs our noses in the forbidden * PRIZE FIGHTE *
spectacle of America's racist ugliness.
What's fun about Django-at least, when
ANTHONY BREZNICAN ON DJANGO
it is fun-is that it's also a liberal-hearted UNCHAINED'S OSCAR CHANCES
revenge Western, with a stoically command- ************************
ing Jamie Foxx in the part ofDjango, a slave NEAR CERTAINTIES
Original Screenplay, Quentin
who is bought and freed by Dr. King Schultz Tarantino; Supporting Actor,
(Christoph Waltz), an abolitionist bounty Leonardo DiCaprio
hunter. He wants Django to help him locate POSSIBLES
Picture; Director, Tarantino;
and hunt down a handful of the slave's former Lead Actor, Jamie Foxx;
overseers. Waltz, speaking in his German- Lead Actor, Christoph Waltz;
Cinematography, Robert Richardson
from-Neptune accent, and in cadences so

50 I EW.COM December 21, 2012