"Django Unchained
" is a listless bore. Save a couple of genuinely funny bits, this
movie continues Tarantino's delusion that his style of hasty cross-referencing
film genres, regardless of the kind of film he is attempting to make, is
revitalizing, hip, and slick. This sloppy, pace-less, talky attempt at ironic effect.QT is
a one-trick pony. You can not even say that he has a style; what he does seem
more like a grab bag of shticks sewn together like Frankenstein's monster. In this
case, what is on the table remains a dead heap. It's no good to blame the
messenger for QT's latest venture in cinematic tedium. I wanted to like the
film very much and kept waiting for some convincing, if stylized, storytelling.
The principal fault was pacing, which was pokey and slack. Although his
dialogue may appear on the page or the computer screen, Tarantino doesn't seem
to have learned that film dialogue, even the conversation we consider
"literate" or "bright," requires a ruthless efficiency.
The constant references to the cheesy tics and tacky tropes
of old exploitation movies in Tarantino's work passed the point of
being homages, tributes displayed in new films that, in themselves, are
legitimate extensions of the durable genre. Cringe as he might, Tarantino has
created his own kind of formalism, a post-modern template in which the
borrowing of elements from other films is no longer a clever, brilliant, and
innovative method of transgressing boundaries and revealing but has instead become
what seems a knee-jerk response to a challenge to make a certain kind of movie.
I agree with the assertion that there is a certain clubhouse knowingness about
his films that distance the typical viewer from enjoying his films; the genius
of genres is that the true masterpieces in Western movies, war movies, crime
dramas, et al., is that they go well beyond the expectations of hardcore fans
and appeal to a greater audience that recognizes something more significant than the
mere satisfaction of genre expectations. The cliquishness is
a buzz-kill and is, I think, more than cynical in attitude. All this mix and
matching, bric-a-brac, and pastiche mongering assume, by design, that
surprise is no longer possible with film narrative. The effect is like a bored six-year-old smashing once-loved toys to bits with a big, fatal hammer. That is not my idea of a fun date.
The characters here,
especially those played by Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio, chatted up
considerable dust storms of hyperpolarization that would be the dialogue equivalent
of a jazz soloist improvising for too long. This is at the sacrifice of
momentum, a quality that isn't achieved in "Django Unchained"- try as
I might suspend my disbelief, I was never convinced that the inevitable
reckoning would result in the catharsis that even a hipster variation of a
Jacobean revenge tragedy requires as a matter of form. Humanity and all its
layered awfulness--lust, greed, avarice, revenge, slavery, racism, all those
rotten instincts that create tension within individual characters who try to
abide by codes of honor, decency, and respect which then are transformed into
something much uglier and wrathful--are summarily smothered by Tarantino's heavy
hand and instead used as premise-giving props as the writer/director hits all
the generic marks. In doing so, QT seems like a less than agile man learning
how to dance, following the shoe prints laid out on the floor, "...one,
two THREE, one, two THREE..."
