Tarantino's pre-Civil-War revenge Western. Christoph Waltz's second Oscar, the most-debated use of the N-word in modern American cinema, and the film that made Spike Lee refuse to watch.
1858, Texas. Django, a slave, is freed by Dr. King Schultz, a German bounty hunter, who needs Django's help identifying three brothers wanted dead. The two form a working partnership and become bounty-hunting partners through the winter. In the spring, Schultz agrees to help Django free his wife Broomhilda, who has been sold to Calvin Candie, a charming Mississippi plantation owner who runs an illegal Mandingo-fighting operation.
The two men arrive at Candyland under cover, posing as Mandingo-fight buyers, to negotiate Broomhilda's purchase. The plot is discovered by Candie's head house slave Stephen, and the second half of the film is the violent collapse of the deception and the revenge that follows.
Tarantino had, since the 2000s, talked about wanting to make a film about American slavery that worked in the visual language of the spaghetti Western. Django Unchained is the result. The film consciously cites Sergio Corbucci's 1966 Django, with Franco Nero (the original Django) appearing in a brief cameo. It also cites the entire 1970s blaxploitation tradition.
The film's argument is that the Western — a genre overwhelmingly built around white American mythology — can be retold from the perspective of an enslaved Black man whose violence against the slave-owning system is morally defensible. Audiences mostly accepted the argument. Critics divided on whether the film's pleasure in its own violence undermined the moral weight of what it was depicting.
The dinner scene at Candyland — Schultz and Django sitting across from Calvin Candie as Candie delivers a phrenological lecture about the supposed inferiority of African skull structure — is one of the most-tense set pieces in Tarantino's career. DiCaprio's Candie is openly performing his racism for the room; the room is performing its acceptance back at him; Schultz, the European liberal, is barely containing his disgust.
DiCaprio cut his hand on a broken glass during the take that was used in the final film. He kept performing through the bleed. The blood visible in the scene is real. The performance was, after the film's release, widely regarded as the best of DiCaprio's career to that point.
Spike Lee announced before the film's release that he would not see Django Unchained, calling the film 'disrespectful' to his ancestors. Lee did not change his position. The argument has continued for over a decade: whether a white American director using slavery as the setting for a revenge entertainment is doing serious moral work or is, in effect, profiting from suffering he has not earned the right to dramatise.
Tarantino's defenders, including Samuel L. Jackson (who plays Stephen), have argued the film's moral seriousness is in its refusal to soften what slavery actually was — the whippings, the brandings, the violence between enslaved people forced into combat for entertainment, the casual dehumanisation. Lee's position has not lost ground in the years since. Both positions are textually defensible. The film is meant to provoke this exact argument.