I've seen the movie, and though I loved it, it is certainly not the film that a black filmmaker would have made, even one as obsessed with the spaghetti western sub-genre trappings, as tarantino is.
The narrative power of the film is diluted by insistence of shoehorning a slave drama into the spaghetti western structure. It's not that the "low brow" sub-genre denigrates the theme of slavery, it's just that the spaghetti western sub-genre (in Tarantino's hands) is too narrow a scrim to view a slave narrative through because it automatically (unnaturally?) limits the range of events that could potentially fit such a film.
As the lovingly recreated Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Leone inspired scenes unfurl on the screen in all their gleaming recycled freshness, we are in equal measure delighted by the director's aesthetic largesse, as we are deprived by the inherent stinginess of the director's approach. Our minds lag behind, detained by some throwaway detail on the periphery of a scene, or distracted by some interesting narrative event that raises issues that director didn't deem fit to explore beyond the need move the story forward, leaving the audience to weave our own speculative narrative parellel to the one on the screen.
Indeed, the rigidness of the any container serves to define what resides within it as well as what resides without. And even as Django and Shultz traverse the arid sun scorched landscapes typical of spaghetti westerns, we, as an audience, thirst for more detail on the texture of slave life -- the plantation politics, the mechanics of fleeing a plantation, and underground railroad, etc. In short, anecdotes and scenes that were more morally provocative in their depravity and brutality than just ones that lent themselves to a splashy presentation. In that sense the film just was not deep enough -- even for an exploitation film.
Apologists would say that there is no way that Tarantino could have fit more of these evocative details without compromising the flow of his film. A false claim that brings us to the other problem of the film: it's bloated running time.
Clocking in at an inflated 165 minutes this Spaghetti Western less pasta and more push-ups. Rambling dialogue scenes (which the director uses increasingly as a narrative crutch in lieu of narrative event) go on interminably and should have been truncated. There is nothing in this film, despite what amnesiacs in the critical community say, that is as good as Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction, though all of the actors acquit themselves admirably. (Jamie Foxx's understated performance is film's best)
Adding further to the empty calories are the films extraneous endings. Would that the script were tighter and ended in the first shoot out at the plantation house. Indeed, one feels that the these scenes were tacked on not for narrative reasons, but to indulge Tarantino's need to serve more desert after the desert had already been served. Those precious minutes could have been used to depict Hildy's thirst for freedom, her courage craftiness in fleeing the plantation, and the tragedy of her eventual recapture.
That may have robbed us of the narrative punch of the hotbox surprise, but it would also have added some honestly earned emotional weight the story.
Given priority Tarantino places on the spaghetti western tropes over the narrative content, however, it is not surprising that subtlety is sacrificed for surprise in this instance.
That being said, if with Django Unchained Tarantino has served up a spicy but rather modest repast instead of the sumptuous holiday feast that we expected, it's probably because this spaghetti western could have used a little less red sauce and a lot more meat.
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