Quentin Tarantino

Django Unchained (2012)

André Crous

In Quentin Tarantino’s best Western, Django Unchained, a slave set free by a German bounty hunter takes the South by storm.

Django UnchainedUSA
4*

Director:
Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter:
Quentin Tarantino
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 165 minutes

Django Unchained is an unconventional love letter to the Western. It’s not a popular genre today, although the Coen brothers with some modest success tried to revive it with their 2010 film, True Grit. But Quentin Tarantino, the golden boy of cinema for the past 20 years whose name has unduly become synonymous with the gratuitous depiction of violence, has the magic touch and proves his mastery of the art form once again.

The film is excessively violent, but, among the slow-motion explosions of blood as if from flesh volcanoes, there is an incredible story of one man’s quest to find the woman he loves and reclaim her from her owner. With the exception of the film’s climactic shootout, which puts the bloodletting of The Wild Bunch to shame and ends with a manor house whose walls are covered in blood from the floor to the ceiling, the pace is mostly steady and not a single moment is wasted.

What will stir viewers’ attention more than anything else, however, is the language of the film. It is unlikely that the word “nigger” has ever been used this often by white characters in a film. Occurring more than 100 times, it pervades their speech to such an extent that it is tough to remember whether skin colour is ever explicitly mentioned. Tarantino gets away with it because even though the word is used almost as frequently as an article, it never ceases to remind us of the time and place the central character, a freed black slave, is up against.

The former slave is the titular Django (Jamie Foxx), who is set free by the German dentist Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter who travels on horseback, followed by a wooden coffin with a plastic tooth on top bobbing up and down as he crosses the South in search of those wanted by the law.

Schultz is a peculiar creature who doesn’t seem to mind violence – besides, he is a perfect shot – as long as he gets the guy. He forms an instant bond with Django, mostly because he needs Django’s help in tracking down three brothers worth a lot of money dead or alive, and Schultz prefers them dead. But when Django tells Schultz about his wife, Broomhilda von Shaft (yes, of course, the surname is a reference to the big-name ’70s blaxploitation movie), sold to a big slaveowner, the German bounty hunter has a personal interest in ensuring his friend and colleague gets his wife back.

We thus find ourselves watching a quest, and it is every bit as exciting as Tarantino’s two Kill Bill films, in which the central character pierced and sliced her way with a samurai sword until she reached the object of her affection. However, Django Unchained has about 30 minutes of post-climactic appendage that go off on a tangent.

This final act is separated from the film’s first two hours by an extended shootout, bloody to the point of excess, that sees Tarantino struggle to keep things together. He satisfies us with small details in that final part, including his explosive presence as an Australian slaver and some beautiful shots right before the end credits start to roll, but, in retrospect, this last section seems a big digression that doesn’t have the same driving force as the rest of the film.

The duo of Foxx and Waltz sounds like an odd couple, but Dr. Schultz – a character that calls to mind Waltz’s role in Tarantino’s previous film, Inglourious Basterds – has a playful, almost childlike streak that is captivating, if one can overlook his penchant for shooting people through the head.

Foxx, playing a variety of roles that see him as both a slave and a slaver, a lover and an assassin, is by far the coolest cucumber in the story, though Tarantino uses those (Sergio Leone kind of) extreme close-ups on his eyes for poignant moments, and this tactic works like a charm. It is no coincidence that the music of Ennio Morricone, a composer associated with Leone’s films, also features in Django Unchained.

Aside from the many gunshots and the cussing, the film also has some slave-on-slave ultimate fighting to the death, called “Mandingo”, and as the film takes place shortly before the Civil War, there is an epic scene with Klansmen.

It is Samuel L. Jackson who steals the show, perhaps to the detriment of the film. As a slave who has lived with his master, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), for so long that he now shares Candie’s disdain for blacks, he is truly odious, a traitor to all the oppressed people around him, to freedom and justice, too, as he revels in the authority his connection with the white Candie grants him. An Uncle Tom for the ages.

The film is certainly not intended to be a very serious discussion about slavery, but it is a very entertaining one, and it doesn’t ignore the importance of past iniquities. This might come as a surprise to some, but it shouldn’t, as Inglourious Basterds already proved Tarantino a skilled craftsman even when dealing with the suppression and extermination of Jews during the Second World War.

It is no easy feat for a film to keep our attention for nearly three hours, but the director succeeds effortlessly. His style of entertainment necessarily includes people being shot to a bloody pulp, but when they’re all really bad guys, one tends to have fewer ethical objections, especially when everything is so clearly “just a film”.

Mr Tarantino, to quote Calvin Candie, “You had my curiosity; now you have my attention.”

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)

André Crous

In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, his ninth feature film as director, Quentin Tarantino reminds us that even when movies are based on very real events, their stories are in the hands of the filmmaker.

Once Upon a Time in HollywoodUSA
4*

Director:
Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter:
Quentin Tarantino
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 160 minutes

At the end of his Second World War drama and perhaps his greatest film, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino did something shocking: He recast history to give us the successful assassination of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in a movie theatre in 1944. While the viewer often suspends disbelief to follow the story of fictional characters in a recognisable historical setting, there tends to be an assumption that the main events will remain, in large part, intact and unaltered. But Tarantino says (correctly) that the filmmaker is in control of his or her depiction of history: Since a representation is already separate from the original, why not go even further and rewrite history for the purpose of entertainment, especially when there is no risk that anyone would mistake the film for actual history?

In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, his ninth feature in the director’s chair, Tarantino is his revisionist self again: He tells a wholly fictional story within a recognisable context (Hollywood in 1969) with all the meticulous attention we would expect from David Fincher before reminding us that he can change the facts of history because the real world is only applicable to the extent he wants it to be. Many of the characters are very close to their real-life counterparts, but only up to a point. And in the tension between real life and representation lies the possibility to create great art.

Released exactly 50 years after the tumultuous year it depicts, Tarantino’s film is set in Tinseltown of the late 1960s, where we find the curious combination of a yearning for the innocence of yore, the hippy rebellion against the status quo and an invisible sword of Damocles hanging over it all because Hollywood in 1969 means only one name: Sharon Tate. Tate, an up-and-coming 20-something actress, had married Polish director Roman Polanski the previous year, a few months before the release of one of the highlights of his career, the classic Rosemary’s Baby. A little more than a year later, eight months into her pregnancy, she and three of her friends were slaughtered by followers of Charles Manson.

Sharon Tate is played by Margot Robbie in Tarantino’s film, but the real Sharon Tate does show up onscreen when Robbie’s Tate goes to watch The Wrecking Crew at the cinema, and we see Robbie as Tate watching the real Tate play an awkward Danish blonde named Freya Carlson. And yet, while many viewers might notice these are technically different people, the entire setup is clearly one of make-believe, so the suspension of disbelief holds. What has been more controversial, however, is the clear divergence from historical fact at the film’s climax, even though the entire film is, by definition, covered by a “This is fiction” disclaimer.

So, what is this fiction all about? Despite all this talk about Tate, the film is actually primarily interested in her next-door neighbour on Cielo Drive: a former cowboy television star named Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose friendship with his long-time stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), is by far the most intimate he ever allows himself to get with another human being. Missouri-born Rick’s career has gone downhill since his starring turn in Bounty Law in the 1950s, and he is scared of having to pack up his bags and say goodbye to Hollywood. But Cliff, who lives with his pit bull, Brandy, in a caravan next to a drive-in, is always available as his driver, a shoulder to cry on and a constant companion through thick and thin.

The plot, most of which unfolds over two days (one in February, the other in August), follows Rick and Cliff, together and separately, as well as Sharon, who spends most of her day at the cinema watching herself. Rick, who has all but given up on himself, meets a child actress (although she refers to herself as an “actor“) who will change his life. Meanwhile, Cliff gives a young hippie a lift to Spahn Ranch, where mistrust hangs thick in the air. At the ranch, peopled almost exclusively by young white girls, Cliff seeks out an old friend, the owner, George Spahn (Bruce Dern), who has gone blind since Cliff last filmed on the ranch and has shacked up with the most domineering girl in the group.

DiCaprio and Pitt both give some of their best performances ever here. DiCaprio, whose appearance is still strikingly boyish more than two decades after Titanic, conveys the sentiment of being an outsider very well simply by showing up. His character goes through multiple ups and downs, and we can always see the gears grinding behind his eyes during his silences. Pitt, by contrast, is the epitome of cool and easily outshines the character of Steve McQueen, who makes a brief appearance in a very unnecessary late-night party scene at the Playboy Mansion. Channelling the energy (and still sporting the looks) of a man half his age, he is kind to everyone but is not beyond striking a very hard blow, as we find out in a memorable interaction with Bruce Lee and a hilarious flashback with his former wife, whose demise he is very likely responsible for.

A major improvement on Tarantino’s previous film, The Hateful Eight, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood gives itself space to breathe but never meanders. Two of the longest scenes – the one at Spahn Ranch and the wholly immersive production of the television show Lancer, in which the dialogue and the actions run almost indefinitely, without cuts or camera changes – have very good reasons for being there, albeit in retrospect. Spahn Ranch upends our expectations and introduces us to some very important characters, while Lancer marks a major turning point in Rick’s perception of his own potential.

But ultimately, after more than two and a half hours of leisurely comedic drama, most people will only talk about the ending. Those who know the story of the Tate/Manson murders will have a sickening feeling towards the end of the film when we see the eight-month-pregnant Sharon Tate and it appears Tarantino is about to shift from the leisurely fifth gear out on the highway right into first gear. But then, the director intervenes like God to give us a rousing version of history instead. In fact, knowing what really happened to Tate makes the events of the film, by comparison, all the more exhilarating, just as Tarantino had done with Hitler in Inglourious Basterds. He doesn’t skimp on the violence but directs it elsewhere and even borrows a flamethrower from his Second World War masterpiece for added showmanship.

The final moments include one of the most acute examples of dramatic irony imaginable, as Jay Sebring, unaware that in a parallel universe (i.e. the real world) he has just been brutally shot and stabbed in a bloodbath, invites Rick over to Sharon’s house after the Manson trio has been taken away by the police. He has no idea what happened to his counterpart in the real world. But we know. And this discrepancy between the real and the fictional is particularly poignant because, in a sense, these characters are real to us, and the fictional murderers have gotten what was coming to them. When they are killed, we feel like they are punished not only for attacking Rick and Cliff but also for murdering the real Tate and her friends.

It is unfortunate, however, that the film does not make the connection with real life more concrete. While he appears on one occasion, Charles Manson’s name is all but left out altogether (his followers refer to him as “Charlie”, but he is never seen in their company). But perhaps Tarantino wanted his film to exist more in the world of make-believe than as a representation of history, which is why an infrequent and incongruous narration (by Kurt Russell, who plays a minor character here) pops up on the soundtrack.

To take the term used by André Bazin, a representation is always at best an “asymptote of reality” and never reality itself. So much focus has been on the closeness of those two lines as the film draws to a close, but few have extolled the artistic tension that results from that intimacy. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood would have been entertaining enough without the last 30 minutes, but what happens there reaffirms its director’s capacity to amaze us.

The Hateful Eight (2015)

André Crous

In snow-swept Wyoming, the temperature rises quickly when a group of gun-toters is forced to stay indoors.

hateful-eightUSA
2.5*

Director:
Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter:
Quentin Tarantino
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 175 minutes

The Hateful Eight is Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film. It is another Western, just like his previous, devious Django Unchained. It is another work of drama whose flamboyant dialogue has memorable, comedic turns, just like almost every single one of his previous films. And just like all of his previous seven films, this one is not for the faint of heart, as the climax is drenched in blood, guts and pieces of brain. But The Hateful Eight is also Tarantino’s worst film.

Running close to three hours, it is almost entirely contained to a single location, not unlike his début feature, Reservoir Dogs. But while Reservoir Dogs was nearly half the length, it also pulsated with energy throughout, whereas The Hateful Eight spends more than an hour percolating, keeping the audience in less-than-rapt attention before the first shots are fired, and the violence quickly escalates into a bloody avalanche.

Shot in magnificent widescreen and screened in the unusually wide aspect ratio of 2.76:1, which even surpasses CinemaScope in width, this film looks magnificent at the outset. Shortly after the American Civil War, a stagecoach with a bounty hunter and his female prisoner, an alleged murderer, picks up another bounty hunter stuck in the cold without his horse, and then a sheriff. The sweeping vistas of Wyoming are covered in thick white snow, and a blizzard is moving in fast. The four unlikely travelling companions make their way to Minnie’s Haberdashery, where they join at least four others and wait out the cold. But this is where things get bogged down.

It is a long slog, even with more than eight people present inside the open-plan building. Despite tension so thick that even the strike of a sword would not suffice (which, perhaps, is why so many guns are drawn), there is little atmosphere until this talkie turns into a good ol’ murder mystery. The reason things feel so static is that we are dealing with a single location, and because Tarantino’s script is short on quips and more into long-form conversations between the numerous characters.

The other problem is the aspect ratio, as we never get a shot of everyone together, and there are no suitable landscapes to be found inside the wooden building. The only time when the vast amount of screen space is utilised judiciously is during shots obtained with a split diopter, in which foreground action is in focus in one half and background is in focus in the other half.

A quick rundown of the dramatis personae suggests ample room for action, which turns out to be minimal: Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), who alleges he is a personal friend of President Abraham Lincoln; John Ruth (Kurt Russell), the bounty hunter with the stagecoach; Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), his prisoner; Chris Mannix (Walter Goggins), the town’s dimwitted new sheriff; Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a Brit by birth and an executioner by profession who is this film’s version of a Christoph Waltz character before he inexplicably takes a backseat; Bob (Demián Bichir), a Mexican with little to do in the story; Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), a soft-spoken rancher visiting his mother; and General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern), a quiet man who fought for the South and is one of those whites who cannot stand blacks, making the presence of Warren all the more inconvenient.

Jackson has by far the juiciest role in this film, which reminds us time and time again that he is the only black man in a cast of whites. As in Django Unchained, the n-word is casually thrown around, but so is the b-word with reference to the screaming Daisy, who has a disturbing penchant for getting roughed up by her male companions.

But in this film, the racial epithet does not have the same stinging quality it did in Tarantino’s previous film, and its use is therefore not only questionable but downright offensive. Nonetheless, and perhaps not at all by chance, Jackson and Jason Leigh are the two stars of this show, which transforms from a theatre play into a murder mystery into a veritable grand guignol, while Tarantino harks back to his Pulp Fiction days by playing ever so slightly with the timeline.

This latter manoeuvre feels like nothing more than a gimmick, however, and emphasises the element of surprise rather than suspense. By contrast, consider how adroitly Tarantino managed the suspense in the dialogue-heavy but gorgeously staged opening scene of Inglourious Basterds. In his latest film, he dispatches with such poetic terror and instead gives us pages of dialogue before bullets rip through bodies and characters start vomiting ghastly quantities of blood.

The Hateful Eight does not live up to its title, as almost all the individuals trapped inside the haberdashery have their gentle sides and try, mostly in despair, to get the upper hand on those around them. Far from being hateful, they are mostly just bland, and moments like when Joe Gage’s face is revealed in a classic Sergio Leone close-up simply do not match this lacklustre depiction of cabin fever.

Tarantino has great fun sticking it to those characters that are racist crackers, but in a film that takes nearly 90 minutes to gain speed, he is really trying his viewers’ patience, and even the rowdier second half does not do much to improve the tedium of the first. Although The Hateful Eight is Tarantino’s eighth, it is not hateful, but it sure ain’t likeable either.