One sentence synopsis: Eight strangers find themselves stuck in a cabin together in 1870s Wyoming.
Things Havoc liked: I don't know if Quentin Tarantino has spent the last twenty-five years
going increasingly insane, or if he was already raving mad and has
simply been revealing that fact to us for a quarter-century. A lot of
people look at him as screaming, indulgent egotist, who makes movies
comprised entirely of style with no substance whatsoever. I understand
that opinion, as the maddening unevenness of Tarantino's work can be
frustrating as all hell given the generally high-level of cinemacraft he
displays in producing it. The last half-hour of
Django Unchained, for
instance, came close to ruining the previous two hours, which were a
veritable masterclass of restraint, pacing, and alternately rich and
claustrophobic cinematography, while Inglorious Basterds was, in many
ways, a highly-unfocused mess of a film elevated by a handful of
standout scenes and actors. But for all of that, my view of Tarantino
has always been a crazed, fanatical
artiste
filmmaker, whose obsessions are so prominent that they will not permit
him to make anything but highly original movies, movies which sometimes
overreach, but are always interesting to watch. All the paraphernalia
he surrounded his latest film with, the touring pre-release roadshow,
the intermission, the film brochure handed out to everyone on walking
into the theater, from any other filmmaker, this would smack of
unreasonable arrogance. But Tarantino has been operating at that
precise level of arrogance since I was in High School, and alone among
modern filmmakers I know of, he possesses both the willingness to engage
in lunatic stunts like this, and the film pedigree to back it all up.
Who else, after all, would I willingly sit through a three-hour,
seventeen-minute film from after their last two movies had been
underwhelming? With what other filmmaker's work could I convince
someone else to come and do the same?
Maybe nobody. Maybe several. But all that matters is that I did these things, and boy am I ever glad I did.
The
Hateful Eight is a masterpiece, of what I'm not entirely certain, but a
staggering achievement in the realm of pacing, cinematography, and the
firework potentials that can arise when you take a bunch of good actors
and stick them in a room for a few hours. It is a relentless, bloody
film about awful people doing terrible things to one another, delivered
with all the grinning cocksureness that Tarantino is known for with far
less of the over-indulgent twelve-year-old that we all know resides
somewhere within his soul. It is a masterful work delivered by a
masterful hand, whose flaws, of which there are quite a few, only serve
to underlie just what surety guides Tarantino's directing, and what
faith the actors who know him place within his ability to make anything,
from subtle dialogues to quotidian acts like nailing a door shut, into
tense, style-dripping setpieces. It is a very long film that doesn't
feel very long, and one of the best movies that Tarantino has ever made,
a movie where half of the moviegoing audience that exists out there
will hate it,
because they are intended to.
Not being part of that half of the audience, I can only applaud the
gall with which Tarantino has produced this awful, brutal, repellent
thing, and praise it as is its due.
The Hateful Eight is in many
ways a deceptively simple film. Eight people, two bounty hunters, a
condemned murderess, a newly-minted sheriff, a confederate general, an
English hangman, a cattle drover, and a Mexican hosteler are trapped by a
blizzard at a large trail cabin in Wyoming. Many of these people know
one another, often without admitting to it at first. Others have hidden
secrets that they wish to divulge only at the proper time. All are
armed, dangerous, and without exception, are terrible, awful,
rancid
human beings, bigots, murderers, sadists, killers of every stripe and
every sort. If there's anything that his previous films have taught me,
it's that Tarantino has a great affection for terrible people as
characters, and indeed he spends much of the film getting to know them
in their own words, finding out their idiosyncrasies, their
self-justifications, the humanizing touches that enable us as an
audience to empathize with this one or that one. Yet it is all a game,
and Tarantino is the Game Master, as he plays with our modern
conceptions of labels and the color-coded moralities that most films
deal with to make the audience identify first this character as the
hero, then that one as the villain, knowing all the time that there
are
no heroes in this film, no redeemed characters who can rise above their
bitterly-regretted pasts for a cathartic third act, no sympathetic
victims unjustly maligned by the designated bad guys. Only
terrible people trapped in this cabin, and their allegiances and intentions shift and twist around one another like a nest of vipers.
And
of course it's not just Tarantino playing us this way. The film boasts
a wonderful cast full of excellent character actors who know just how
to wring the right notes from Tarantino's ever-poetic dialogue. Front
and center is Samuel L. Jackson, a man who needs no introduction from
me, playing a Civil War cavalry officer-turned Bounty Hunter, who, if
anyone, is the main character of this bloody drama. Jackson is, of
course, a Tarantino regular from as far back as Pulp Fiction, and is in
his element here, luxuriating in long, Poirot-style monologues in which
he deduces the secrets of the rest of the cast or illustrates a lengthy,
horrifying tale about his own past in terrible, graphic detail.
Tarantino gets deserved flack for overindulging in his dialogue fetish,
but Hateful Eight is set up specifically to permit such indulgences
without interruption from plot elements or the requirements of taste.
Jackson's character is as awful as everyone else's, but Tarantino has
always known how to make Jackson look cool, regardless of the
circumstances, and he takes full advantage of that, engaging in swift,
horrific violence at the drop of a perfectly-phrased line. Not that
everyone else suffers by comparison of course. Jennifer Jason Leigh,
whom I've not seen in... well practically ever really, goes full
Charlize Theron as a ignorant, murderous, monster of a woman being
dragged off to hang. Her role involves getting punched in the face a
lot and coming out spitting, something she is so good at you want to
shower every time she's on the screen. Kurt Russell, who is awesome but
manifestly not a great actor, manages to make his Jim Bridger-style
Mountain Man into a raving pastiche of an invincible wilderness man, and
Russell has always been better at pastiches than subtlety. Excellent
turns by Demian Bechir (the best thing from Machete Kills), Tim Roth,
and Bruce Dern all liven the film in their inimitable style, but the
standout performance of the bunch comes from, of all people, character
actor Walton Goggins, one of Robert Rodriguez' go-tos, playing a racist
Confederate raider-turned-sheriff, who is both considerably smarter and
considerably dumber than he passes himself off as being, and who winds
up, over the course of the film, in some of the more surprising
situations I've seen all year.
But then that fact itself
shouldn't be much of a surprise, because Tarantino has stacked the deck
with this one. Having eliminated all notions of conventional
storytelling by ruthlessly exterminating any shred of heroism within our
assembled cast (save for a few red herrings thrown in for fun),
Tarantino is left free to do whatever he wants. His cinematography,
shot on full, luscious 70mm celluloid, is rich and understated, drinking
in the wide-open and yet claustrophobic confines of the cabin and
lingering on evocative shots, such as that of snow swirling through the
front door as the wind howls just beyond. The violence (and rest
assured,
there is violence) is
equally luxurious, whether filmed in slow motion or with one sudden,
gruesome shot. And what should underlie the entire affair, but a film
score composed by the legendary Ennio Morricone, of spaghetti western
fame and so much more, who just two years ago famously declared that he
would never work with Tarantino ever again, and apparently was brought
to change his mind. Morricone's score, his first western score since
the 1970s, places the film precisely in the old-school context that
Tarantino intends, and placing his work in a five-minute overture at the
beginning of the movie probably did a lot to smooth over whatever
feathers were ruffled after Django Unchained.
