What happens to someone like Quentin Tarantino when he becomes... boring? If you aren't seduced by the kinetic energy of a Tarantino movie, by the unending flow of razor-sharp dialogues and terrifically paced action sequences, is there anything worth sticking around for? I ask because I went into Django Unchained without the reservations that many people have about Tarantino's cinema - that it is shallow or derivative - and yet, much as I wanted to love it, my attention wandered as the film ploughed on and on.
Even those who don't think highly of Tarantino give him credit for certain things, such as his imaginative use of cinematic references, and the hip, ironic writing which achieves a poetic force in his best work. Watching a Tarantino film with prior experience of his work, we know about the rhythmic interplay between the long wordy scenes and the sudden bursts of violence, the former leading up to the latter; we welcome the eruptions, brace ourselves for them.
The first few scenes in Django Unchained have this quality, most of it courtesy the erudite bounty hunter King Schultz (an author-backed part, perfectly played by Christoph Waltz), who uses words like "acolyte" and "parley" with the same ease as he draws his gun. English is not his native language, but lines like "If you can keep your caterwauling down to a minimum, I'd like to resume my line of enquiry" trip off his tongue. All this is just as enjoyable as the incongruously sophisticated banter between those chatty hitmen Jules and Vincent in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
The triumphal nature of Tarantino's cinema has been obvious in his two most recent films, which present alternate-universe versions of slavery in the 1850s (Django Unchained) and the Holocaust (Inglourious Basterds) in a way that a good-hearted little boy with an appetite for fast talk, gore and contemporary music might want to see them presented. But one could see the motif of the underdog who must prevail - through the wish-fulfilling power of cinema - in the earlier works too. For instance, Kill Billplayed like a long psycho-dream of vengeance achieved against impossible odds. And even Pulp Fiction (still for my money Tarantino's best film) used its sinuous, non-linear structure to provide the illusion of a happy ending by "resurrecting" one of its most likable characters, Vincent Vega, after we have already seen him die midway through the film.
In reaching for its own happy conclusion, Django Unchained moves between two meters: there is an apparently serious effort to depict the moral codes of a long-past age, to show people being confronted with new possibilities that can overturn their established way of life (and which are, therefore, threatening to them). "Why come into my town and start troubling? These are nice people," a sheriff asks Schultz (the "nice people" are townsfolk who have been shaken up by the sight of a black man, the freed slave Django, riding a horse as if he was just one of them). But this being Tarantino, the social commentary goes hand in hand with slapstick comedy, cartoon violence and nods to B-movies: how could he possibly resist a broad comic skit about the unfeasibility of the white hoods worn by the Ku Klux Klan?
So here is a film that revels in gratuitous bloodletting scenes as well as super-fast zoom-ins and zoom-outs during dramatic encounters (in imitation of those B-westerns full of "HUH?!" and "OUCH!" moments) - but also provides over-sentimental moments such as the one where Django fancies he sees his lovely wife everywhere he goes. For me, the clashing tones didn't work as well as they did in earlier Tarantino movies. The pauses and silences, instead of being exercises in anticipation - the lull before the explosion - become merely... pauses and silences, where the dialogue is not as crackling as it might have been, the pacing is dreary and the performances, though good, aren't enough to cover the holes. Late in the film, in a casting decision that typically combines self-indulgence with self-deprecation, Tarantino himself appears in a short role as a slave-trader. The character gets a spectacular, explosive end, much the same way as the film eventually does - but he also looks as flabby and distracted as thefilm so often is.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
