Rating: 3½ stars (out of 4)

Django Unchained (2012): Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.  Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, and Samuel L. Jackson.  Rated R for strong graphic violence throughout, a vicious fight, language and some nudity.  Running time: 165 minutes.

We argue about Tarantino’s body of work, but we seldom talk about what exactly he’s setting out to do.  Is Tarantino simply exploiting the same clichés from his beloved spaghetti westerns, kung-fu movies, and blaxploitation flicks?  Or is he using them as raw material, creating collages that double as novel works of art?  I wonder if it’s not a bit of both.

Wow, is Django entertaining.  And yet incredibly exhausting.  Here the western feels comically cartoonish, wonderfully witty, whimsically artificial, and in glimpses, all too real.  And of course, Tarantino has populated his strange vistas with interesting characters, quixotic dialogue, and torrid violence.  His knight-errant is the enigmatic Django, who finds himself fortunate enough to be rescued in a wild ruse by the equally enigmatic but overtly eccentric Dr. King-Schultz.  Django’s first encounter with the doctor couldn’t help but remind me of Dorothy’s first encounter with the Wizard—the travelling man who seems to have all the answers, or so it appears.  King-Schultz takes Django as his bounty-hunting protege, and gives keen attention to Django’s quest to rescue his wife Broomhilda –a decidedly German quest: “When a German meets a real-life Siegfried, that’s kind of a big deal.”

Django is not only Siegfried—he’s a powder keg.  He rides into a plantation dressed in fancy clothing, a man who chooses to look ridiculous because he can.  Waltz will garner much praise for his role, and he deserves it, but Jamie Foxx does so much with so little—he speaks softly, not unlike Clint Eastwood’s The Man with No Name, but when he does, he leaves quite the impression.

Tarantino’s latest movies seem incredibly self-aware, to the point where we can’t take them literally.  Indeed, the film seems to come from the legends and myths of the antebellum South.  It’s a world of plantations, old white men dressed all in white suits—a place that Tarantino gleefully seeks to disassemble.

Consider a scene in which a mob of white-hooded  horsemen gallop down a hillside, whooping and hollering, torches held high.  When it’s time for the battle speech, what do they do?  They complain about the poorly-cut holes in their masks, which make them practically blind.  It’s like something out of Blazing Saddles.

But Tarantino surprises you with very real threats.  He gives us terrifying and disturbing moments of violence.  He creates two seeming invincible characters in Django and Dr. King-Schultz…then breaks them down in startling fashion.  And he writes a terse monologue for the menacing Stephen (played to the hilt by Samuel L. Jackson) that identifies the terrors of slavery beyond violence.  It’s a tricky balancing act between realism and escapism (and not always a successful one), but one that acknowledges both the mythic exaggerations and  the stark horrors of the American memory.

But don’t worry—Tarantino won’t lecture you.  As a revenge story, it’s more than enjoyable on its own terms, and he fills it with such color and life.  His characters seem to treasure every word and turn of phrase that issues from their mouths—and they have a right to, with dialogue that both celebrates and parodies itself.  And Leonardo DiCaprio shows a new side to himself, radiating pompousness and malice.

It’s true, sometimes the script indulges itself in plot devices that seem to come out nowhere.  And it’s a shame that Kerry Washington, who plays Django’s wife with raw energy and fearlessness, has such a limited role.  Why waste the talent if you’ve got it?   And why not transcend the typical damsel-in-distress routine?  Do I ask too much from a genre-destroying director?  I wouldn’t have minded a bit more character development and slightly less blood-letting, but that’s just me.

Many may dismiss the film as mere slavery revenge, which is how it’s been marketed.  But there’s a kind of knowing irony going on here as well.  If Tarantino seeks to make a point about slavery, he’s also making a point about how we understand slavery, both as history and as myth.  Let’s just say it’s not the kind of lesson you talked about in social studies.