Django Unchained stirs up memories of dozens of other movies (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, Lawrence of Arabia, Taxi Driver, Gladiator), but what it reminds me of most is Huckleberry Finn. In his consideration (it’s certainly not a review) of Django in the New York Press, critic Armond White makes the same comparison, although derogatively, saying that, like the book, the movie “gratifies some people’s entrenched racial prejudices." The first half of the movie, which is lyrical, tender and hilarious, follows the slave Django and his owner, the German-born dentist Dr. King Schultz, as they meet in the ante-bellum West and travel to the South on horseback. Along the way they learn how to talk to one another, how to work together, and something about who the other is. And while there is, as in Huckleberry Finn, an obscene imbalance between the men in their status, security, and means of expression (Django remains uncomfortably silent most of the time, while King never shuts up), the men become like best friends, like teammates, like father and son. This, the first part of the movie, is a love story.
It is also an ecstatic vision of the American landscape. Interspersed with the comedy and action set pieces there are wide, distant views of Django and King riding their horses, across prairies dotted with wildflowers, beneath ranges of stony, snow-capped mountain, and down allees of knarled, centuries-old, kudzu-draped trees. These views are cliched (probably deliberately so), over-familiar from landscape paintings, westerns and car commercials, but it's stunning to see these different American landscapes depicted so simply and expansively. The images aren’t prettified; they’re raw and shadowed, alive with motion. They give a feeling for the horizon, and for the vastness and wildness of the terrain. In one passage the two men, after a snowfall, on their horses, approach a herd of grazing bison. It’s part of a lighthearted montage, with an old, worn pop song playing on the soundtrack, that’s meant to express that time is passing but nothing important is going on. But as I watched I felt that image, which is very loosely composed, as if looking on from a ladder’s height about twenty feet away, fall straight into my subconscious. The men move slowly, like the animals, comfortable on the land and in the presence of one another, without speech and without purpose. They might each never belong anywhere in American but they both, at this moment, belong right here. At the end the movie turns into exactly what one expects, a profane and comic bloodbath. But when Django and King are traveling alone together across forest and field the story is splendid. Just as it was following Huck and Jim drift down the Mississippi, I wanted these men to keep going.
