Django unchained: A riveting slave tale

Django unchained 

* Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L Jackson

Rating: 8.5/10

Django Unchained unchains a whole lot of shock and awe, and very surprisingly despite its unHollywood length of 2 hours 45 minutes, absolutely stuns you with all its spurty violence, its human emotions in sub-human conditions and with such a nagging story of American slavery that it might just account for worldwide embarrassment for the Americans, much like the Germans under the Nazi era.

Writer director Quentin Tarantino is at his best here in telling a tale of a Black slave and his White bounty hunter friend who buys him so that he could eventually earn his freedom by identifying three brothers White wanted for serial killings and robberies. 

That’s just the facade which hides in it a bundle of explosive energy and situations which throw up characters so weighty that you are unable to decide who the lead is.

It’s Tarantino’s singular mastery of this medium that he has the audience by the scruff of their neck, repelled by the overt violence and yet inexorably drawn towards it. And, mind you, it is not insane, needless violence — all the blood and gore is artistically embedded in a moving story of a time when discrimination was not just oppressive but also wantonly bloody.

This is not the Kill Bill kind of sustained violence. It comes in very short spurts, but just seconds of it are enough for you to stop breathing.

There is also emotion just when the violence gets too much, and humour too. Now to wrap such an intense story of slavery in humour is something only a master can weave in. Tarantino, in that sense, has done the unimaginable — marinated the moving plight of a slave with an infectious sense of humour of his acquired master. Jamie Foxx, who technically is the lead, gets shouldered in by a whole lot of fleshed out performances by Christoph Waltz, the German bounty-hunter, Leonardo di Caprio as the crazy plantation owner who gets high on bloodshed, and Samuel Jackson who is a slave in charge of slaves and who wants all Blacks to be slaves forever. 

It is a surprisingly rivetting story told with such intensity that you get transfixed by the proceedings before you. It is a much filmed era of American history, but it is best showcased by Tarantino and his cinematic brilliance of this genre of cinema. 

Source: Published in The Sunday Pioneer, 24 March, 2013