Quentin Tarantino spent years writing a book on Sergio Corbucci, the Italian director behind the 1966 Western Django. That research became Django Unchained, a 165-minute revisionist Western released in 2012 that takes the borrowed name and runs it somewhere else entirely. The tagline: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of vengeance.”
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Jamie Foxx and the Brittle Brothers
The film opens in 1858 Texas, where the Speck brothers are driving a group of shackled men. Among them is Django, played by Jamie Foxx, sold away from his wife Broomhilda. Dr. King Schultz, a German ex-dentist turned bounty hunter, stops the convoy. He needs Django to identify the Brittle Brothers, and offers freedom in exchange for the help.
Schultz kills Ace Speck before the scene is over. Dicky Speck is left to the newly freed men, who kill him. It is a fast, cold introduction to how this film handles violence: suddenly, and without ceremony.
Christoph Waltz and the Apprenticeship
Christoph Waltz plays Schultz as a man of manners and precise speech, which makes his work as a killer stranger rather than softer. He trains Django through the winter. Django turns out to have a natural gift for gunslinging, and collects his first bounty, keeping the handbill as a good luck charm.
Schultz says he feels responsible for Django, having given him freedom. That sense of duty carries the pair toward Mississippi and Broomhilda.
Leonardo DiCaprio at Candyland
The search leads to Calvin J. Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his plantation. Samuel L. Jackson is Stephen, the house servant who sees more than anyone around him admits. Kerry Washington plays Broomhilda, the goal the whole plot bends toward.
The supporting cast is deep:
- Walton Goggins as Billy Crash
- Dennis Christopher as Leonide Moguy
- James Remar as Butch Pooch and Ace Speck
- Don Johnson in a supporting role
- Jonah Hill as Bag Head #2
A $100 Million Western
Tarantino wrote and directed, with A Band Apart and Columbia Pictures producing. Casting began in the summer of 2011, after Tarantino sent his final draft to the Weinstein Company by April 2011. Will Smith was considered for Django before Foxx was cast; Smith later said the role “wasn’t the lead” and was “not for me.” The Weinstein Company released the film theatrically in the United States.
Principal photography ran from November 2011 to March 2012 in California, Wyoming and Louisiana, on a $100 million budget.
The Title Comes From Somewhere
The film is a stylized tribute to spaghetti Westerns, and the title points straight at Corbucci’s Django. Franco Nero, who played that original Django, appears here in a cameo. He pitched Tarantino an idea: a mysterious horseman haunting Django, revealed as his father. Tarantino passed.
What Holds and What Slips
Django Unchained is at its best when Waltz and Foxx are alone on the road, two men building a trade out of a rescue. The Candie plantation section runs long, and DiCaprio’s charm does more work than the writing around him. But the film earns its length. It takes a genre built on myth and makes the myth answer for slavery, without pretending the answer is clean.
The TMDB audience score is 8.2 of 10, from 28,565 votes.
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