Where I really take issue with the script is that Foxx’s character, who he recently described as a cross between Richard Roundtree and Clint Eastwood, is really more of a second fiddle character to Tarantino’s latest muse, Christoph Waltz. Waltz’s character in the film is essentially the same character he had in Inglourious Basterds- only this time he’s on the side of the (figurative) angels. Much of the first half of the movie will be “The Christoph Waltz Show,” with Foxx’s Django character playing sidekick with handfuls of mumbled, monosyllabic lines, interspersed with several (pretty harrowing) flashback scenes of his life as a slave.
Like all of Tarantino’s work, Django Unchained is a pastiche of traditional movie tropes and genres, turned on their heads. In this case, it’s borrowing heavily from the spaghetti western, as well as from the blaxploitation flick, much in the way Kill Bill borrowed from cult kung fu movies. That exploitative quality certainly rings true throughout, primarily with Kerry Washington’s character Broomhilda, who is the second pointI take major issue with in the script.
Unlike the Shoshanna character in Basterds, Broomhilda is written as a sympathetic but totally inert character. She spends much of the movie being abused, and waiting for rescue from her lost love Django. In a movie about slavery, I can admire the impetus to go straight Passion of the Christ on our asses with the pain and suffering, the realityof what that suffering looked like and meant. But here, Broomhilda’s abuse, which includes several beatings and rapes, seems gratuitous. Her character is treated as merely a physical entity, a naked body to be gaped at by the audience rather than understood.
Something else that was sorta “whoa there”, something that I feel must also be said, is that reading Django Unchained struck me sort of like watching the “Dead Nigger Storage” scene in Pulp Fiction on loop. Obviously, in this context you understand, on some level, why the word is being thrown around with wild abandon from the Southern racists and the “good guys” alike - it was a “different time.” But there is still the same uneasy sense, as with the “Storage” scene, that Tarantino is just really excited that he gets to write the word “nigger”, which at some points isn’t even used as dialogue but as scene directions that could just as well have been “SUDDENLY A GROUP OF HOUSE SLAVES APPEAR”. It’s like when ‘Niggas in Paris’ comes on and you see certain folk get way more hyped than seems totally necessary.
The Problem With 'Django Unchained': Why Tarantino’s Latest Film Does Nothing for Race in Hollywood - AFRO-PUNK: