By now, everyone knows Quentin Tarantino’s deal. He packs himself a bowl filled with movie history and smokes it like he’s in an Amsterdam hash bar—and his films are getting longer and longer. He doesn’t seem to be able to make anything other than epics anymore. Even his homage to slasher movies—a genre that’s best when it’s lean and mean—breaks the two-hour mark. That’s okay, for the most part. Tarantino loves exploitation films and he steals from them brazenly, but he doesn’t want to be an exploitation filmmaker. So, he breaks one of their essential rules, which is brevity (which they maintain mostly for economic reasons). Jack Hill never would have made a three-hour movie. Nor Larry Cohen or Lucio Fulci or Ruggero Deodato. Meanwhile, Tarantino stretches out in his movies like a stoner on a couch with a bag of cookies within arm’s reach.
Tarantino can remain articulate when he’s high as a kite on film though, and people love him for it, but he can still slip sometimes, which is why Django Unchained kinda drops the ball. It doesn’t help that Tarantino is repeating himself. His previous movie was a Jewish revenge story against the Nazis; here it’s a 19th century black slave’s revenge against mint julep-sipping plantation owners. It’s a worthy cause, but Tarantino has used up his best material already. There are great moments here, but also a tedious shell game between Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio in the middle that makes you REALLY feel the heft of this film’s two-hours-forty-five. The good stuff: Christoph Waltz, in a part clearly written for him, slinging out his lines like music; Samuel L. Jackson, twitching and bowing and parroting as the hateful house negro (Jackson glowers in the background like an actor who knows how to own the screen, but is not going to do it this time); the blood that spurts like water; the stench of the 1800s that Tarantino transmits through the screen.
Anyway, I close this review with a rough transcript of a conversation I had when I worked at a restuarant around the time this movie came out.
It’s about 5:30 PM. Early January. Business is slow. A black man, probably in his 60s, suit-and-tie, comes in and orders a vodka cranberry. He quips about the cold weather and makes me laugh already. I like him. He’s going to be the joker in this exchange and I’ll be the straight man. Cool with me.
Him: Hey, have you seen Django Unchained?
Me: No, but I want to see it.
Him: I’m about to go see it again.
Me: It’s that good, huh?
Him: Yeah, but maybe you shouldn’t see it. You might root for the wrong side. You’ll walk out and start talking about niggers all the time.
Me: (after a blast of laughter) I don’t know about that.
Him: Well, I’ll be watching you