by Quentin Tarantino with Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio
And he’s back.
Tarantino is back with a vengeance, and even though this time vengeance is not the centerpiece of the movie, the eclectic director manages once again to revive a genre that needed a boost in popularity. After killing nazis, with Django Tarantino tells a story about slavery from his peculiar and spectacular point of view, maybe exaggerating, maybe twisting some concepts and some historical facts, but most of all not wallowing in his own past. Every movie is a new adventure and a new challenge, experimenting and exploring new genres and eras, but always keeping his coolness intact.
As usual Tarantino’s script whisks together different elements, in this case friendship, love, loyalty, hate, ignorance and violence, and different characters, that grow and change throughout the almost-3-hour-long movie. Django may be the sum of the many spaghetti western from the 60s, but Tarantino has no qualms about showing blood-squirting shootings or putting in his characters’ mouth the n word more times than in a Spike Lee movie. Tarantino is the best at what he does, and that is writing stories and transferring them to film. Who cares if he constantly “pays homage” to films of the past, if some ideas are taken from any of the classic spaghetti westerns, or if he still uses the quick zoom-in, or if he opts for a cheesy ending. He can do whatever he wants and he does whatever he wants, like playing James Brown and 2Pac, or taking shamelessly the music from Trinity. There are no rules.
Django is also visually stunning, the vast prairies and the beautiful landscapes make you feel as if it was actually shot in 1858, and the intense (but relatively few) gory sequences spice up a story that does not rely solely on blood, but preeminently on the way it is told and developed. Obviously there is a sense of foreboding that fills the movie right from the start, and except for a couple of unexpected and sudden twists, you know what’s going to happen. Thanks to its brilliant cast though, Django is one of Tarantino’s best features, with Christoph Waltz as the gently witty dentist turned bounty-hunter, Jamie Foxx as the sturdy and bold titular Django, Leo DiCaprio as the dandy evil slave-trader, and Kerry Washington as the tender and sweet slave Broomhilda, Tarantino relishes every scene and every one of the word he wrote for them. And they do as well.
It’s not Pulp Fiction, it’s not Kill Bill, it’s not like any of his previous movies, and yet it is undeniably and undoubtedly Tarantino.
