There’s a wordless sequence in Quentin Tarantino’s anti-bigotry neo-Spaghetti Western exploitation comedy Django Unchained in which Jamie Foxx, as recently freed slave Django, hitches up his horse and, along with the man who bought him his freedom — Christoph Waltz’s Dr. King Schultz — sets off on an elegiac amble through a snowy western landscape. It’s one of the most gorgeous sequences of any film this year, a reverie borrowed, with love, from rare snowscape Westerns like McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 The Great Silence.
The beauty of that scene may get lost amid the debate of how many times the n-word is used in Tarantino’s script. But it shouldn’t. Django Unchained is by turns exhilarating, hilarious, horrifying and poetic. In other words, it’s a picture that’s full of everything, and if it takes significant liberties with history (as Inglorious Basterds so gleefully did), it also faces certain historical truths head-on. And the harsh reality is that a word that’s never used today in polite company was, in 1858, used by all manner of people who fancied themselves polite.
One of those people is a central character in Django Unchained, a gentleman plantation owner (and thus slave owner) named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) whose syrupy civility barely disguises his cruel streak. Candie, it turns out, owns the woman who is Django’s wife, a German-speaking beauty named Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). (You were warned that Django Unchained is, among many other things, a comedy.) King Schultz is a bounty hunter who originally bought — in a manner of speaking — Django’s freedom to enlist his help in tracking down certain criminals. But as the two work together, their bond deepens, and he agrees to help Django free Broomhilda from Candie’s clutches.
As with most Tarantino movies, the plot mechanics are merely things on which to hang the dialogue and action, like the sturdy branches of a Christmas tree. Django Unchained doesn’t skimp in either of those areas. The banter between King Schultz and Django is relaxed and jovial, but there’s an acid edge to it, too — both of these men know they’re fighting a losing battle, though the picture’s shootout finale is triumphant in its own way. Tarantino and his cinematographer Robert Richardson map out the action — and the violence — with conscientious clarity; when there’s a man down, you always have at least some sense of where the bullet came from.