Once again, Tarantino is on his post-modern road trip, barreling through his favorite movie genres. This time he has picked on the Western -- but not the John Ford, Howard Hawks studio product of Hollywood's Golden Age, and not even the dark psychological films of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. It's the spaghetti westerns that emerged in the 1960s that's getting the Tarantino treatment here: films such as Sergio Leone's "Dollars trilogy," a lesser western all'italiana titled Django by director Sergio Corbucci, and the countless grindhouse schlock that came out as the genre started to exhaust itself by the mid 1970s. These neo-westerns were rougher, earthier beasts, and Tarantino is a master at capturing the good, the bad and the very ugly stylistic stereotypes of the genre with ease: the hungry zoom lens racing to focus on an immense closeup of a craggy European actor playing an American desperado, the uneven sound synchronization of dialogue due to Italy's tradition of post-dubbing, and the memorable music by Ennio Morricone and countless lesser imitators who gave the spaghetti westerns their funky but memorable edge.
But that same edginess unfortunately seems to follow Tarantino right into the structure and theme of this film, which quickly puts away its western trappings and suddenly turns into a period blaxploitation flick. We leave behind the dusty western towns and snowy vista landscapes, and suddenly we are in a Southern antebellum plantation where a young patrician named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) fights his strongest slave specimens, one against the other, in a historical fictitious gladiatorial practice he calls "Mandingo fighting." He brings to mind, of course, the film Mandingo, the Dino De Laurentiis 1975 stinker that's reportedly one of Tarantino's favorite films, and which has my favorite tagline of all time: "He is more than man, he is Mandingo." They just don't write them like that anymore.
For the fiery finale, Django and Dr. Schultz attempt to rescue Broomhilda, who just happens to be one of the rebellious house slaves at Mr. Candie's plantation, aptly called Candie Land. Here, Tarantino aims to recreate the massacre at the end of The Wild Bunch, a seminal western that is itself a hybrid of the old and the new. But Jamie Foxx lacks the gravitas of William Holden, drunk on violence, ripping Mexicans apart at the helm of a machine gun. The results are less Sam Peckinpah and more John Wood, which is not a bad thing.
Before all of this, though, we meet Stephen, a cantankerous ancient house slave that has been keeping the status-quo at Candie Land for decades. Stephen is a truly perverse creation, and Samuel L. Jackson is in top form as he embodies this larger than life monster. At times, Tarantino's dialogue in this film feels stilted, as if period and genre bind him to a set of rules he doesn't want to follow. But when it comes to Mr. Jackson, the gloves are off, and the dialogue comes alive, even when half of what comes out of his mouth is contemporary ghetto street more worthy of an L.A. rapper than a house slave in the Old South.
The late American and spaghetti westerns had one thing in common: they were mostly about the end of an era. They portrayed the end of the West where both lawman and outlaw were running out of dusty trails to roam as civilization was slowly creeping in. Django Unchained like Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is about the beginning of something: the future of America as a land free of slavery. Django Unchained may not be the perfect homage to the spaghetti western genre, but nevertheless it is an entertaining journey through Tarantino's movie-fueled imagination.
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