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In addition to being an impressive display of film craft and a profoundly ugly movie, Quentin Tarantino’s ultraviolent, ultra-talky sorta-Western “The Hateful Eight” feels like the director is daring his detractors to see it as a confirmation of their worst fears about his art.
Set in the post-Civil War era, the film pits a group of criminals against a group of criminally brutal lawmen in a snowbound Wyoming cabin, where the action takes place. Tarantino takes his time when it comes to putting together his main cast. In the first half-hour, he is taken on a stagecoach ride that introduces him to a mustachioed fugitive tracker named John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell, who sounds like John Wayne); his prisoner, the treacherous outlaw Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is being escorted to Red Rock for hanging; and incoming Red Rock sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), a
When they arrive at the cabin, which is a drinking establishment known as Minnie’s Haberdashery on the inside and which appears as impossibly large as Snoopy’s doghouse on the outside, they are joined by a number of additional characters. One character, named Bob, is played by Demian Bichir, who is also a former Confederate general (Bruce Dern), another is played by Tim Roth, who fills in for Christoph Waltz, and the final character is played by Joe Gage, who is played by Demian Bichir, who is played by Demian Bichir (Michael Madsen, doing the Michael Madsen thing). Minnie, the proprietor of the establishment, has gone missing, and her husband has gone missing as well.
If you include the driver, the total number of characters reaches nine by this point, but he isn’t particularly hateful, so you might as well leave him out of the equation. And if you’ve seen a poster, a trailer, or the film’s IMDB page, you know Tarantino will be adding more cast members, including Channing Tatum, Zoe Bell, Dana Gourrier (True Detective, “Red Band Society”), and Lee Horsley (Nero Wolfe, “Nero Wolfe II,” among others. The problem is that Quentin Tarantino has never been the type of director who makes implicit promises about what he’ll deliver when you buy a ticket.
In “The Hateful Eight,” there are numerous playful and curious surprises, not only in terms of plot twists and character revelations, but also in terms of what might be termed “formal violations,” which give the film an experimental rather than a classical feel. A filmmaker who hires the Mahler of spaghetti Westerns, Ennio Morricone, whose work has been sampled numerous times, to compose an original score, then ladles it onto a film that is not a typically sumptuous revenge Western about characters’ relationships to the land they are battling to claim, but something more like a crisply photographed stage play—think of Tarantino’s debut film, “Reservoir Dogs,” which took place mostly in a warehouse but with Stet
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Four-fifths of “The Hateful Eight” takes place indoors, first in the stagecoach on its way to Minnie’s, then in the cabin and a nearby barn, according to my stopwatch. Robert Richardson, Tarantino’s regular cinematographer, was tasked with shooting in Ultra Panavision 70mm, a format that hasn’t been used since the “road show” epics of the 1960s. Tarantino also tacked on an overture and an intermission to his already-exorbitant running time, while keeping most of the film’s action out of direct sunlight. This is all extremely perverse, but it is precisely these kinds of decisions that distinguish Tarantino from the countless other filmmakers who aspire to be the next Tarantino.
Instead of the way Tarantino tells his story, the problem is with the story itself—or, perhaps more appropriately, with the word “story” in quotation marks because, more so than in any other Tarantino film, and this is saying a lot, what’s onscreen does not feel like an intricately interconnected series of events that all feed into and build upon one another, but rather like a succession of set pieces, the majority of which are tediously repetitive. Talk talk talk talk talk kill; talk talk talk talk talk talk kill; talk talk talk talk talk kill; and on and on it goes. The N-word appears throughout the film; Tarantino enjoys using the slur almost as much as he enjoys wearing bare feet. Although the term’s use in “The Hateful Eight” is more problematic than it was in “Django,” where the term had a whiplash effect; even if you suspected Tarantino of trying to get away with something, the film’s righteous ire (presenting the Confederate South as a miniature Nazi Germany right here in the good old USA) made you think twice before dismissing him as an opportunist.
That is not the case in this instance. The in-depth discussions about the Civil War and capitalism, as well as justice vs. frontier justice, are initially interesting, until you realize they aren’t there to tie the film’s characters to the American Character, but rather to set the stage for killings to take place. The artist is given permission to be nasty and brutish because he or she is working in a nasty and brutish environment.
The Hateful Eight Quiz
When the violence arrives in “Hateful Eight,” it is unmoored not only from any morality espoused by the characters (who, after all, are hateful! ), but it is also unmoored from any morality espoused by the audience. but also, it appears, from Tarantino’s own moral compass—if he even has one, which, after seeing this film, I have serious doubts about—as well. With films like “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction,” as well as his most recent work, he’s given us a mix of proudly amoral and morally struggling characters, then shown us how they work through their hypocrisy and relativism in finely tuned, ping pong style exchanges (like that final Travolta-Jackson conversation in “Pulp Fiction”). Tarantino’s “Hateful Eight” is the first film in his career in which there is no discernible moral framework, in contrast to such brutal, semi-exploitative, but ultimately mournful films as “The Wild Bunch” and “U-Turn,” in which there is no discernible moral framework. A bucket of scorpions is all we’re looking at right now, as they prepare to sting one another, then sting one another, sometimes with fists or guns or other weapons, tearing flesh and coating hardwood floors in blood and brains. [This section contains spoilers.]
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As the only female character in the film, Leigh’s outlaw is dealt a particularly harsh hand: she enters the film with a black eye, suffers multiple fists to the face, and spends the final third of the film covered in blood and missing a tooth. Although she refuses to wipe the blood away, this is presented as evidence of her indomitability, but it comes across as pure provocation: “Oh, I’m a misogynist, aren’t I?” Tough. Keep an eye on me as I leave the blood on her face because I have the ability to do so. The film’s relentless and often comical violence against Daisy, like the film’s never-ending barrage of racial slurs, never feels like it is truly earned. “Well, they’re all outlaws, including her, and that’s just how women were treated back then,” Russell explains in the final scene, which lingers on Daisy’s death with a near-pornographic fascination. “Well, they’re all outlaws, including her,” Russell explains in the final scene, which lingers on Daisy’s death with a near-pornographic fascination. In a film filled with self-centered, deceptive, and murderous characters, hers is the only death that is not only observed, but also praised.
One of the most shocking scenes occurs before the intermission, when Warren describes how he forced the general’s son to march through the snow naked before orally raping him and then killing him, an atrocity that may or may not have actually occurred. Every previous Tarantino statement about feeling solidarity with oppressed peoples becomes suspect because it is so obviously intended to be a “Wow, I can’t believe the film went there!” moment. The scene in which Warren describes his prodigious member to the general comes across as oddly childlike. There is no longer any pretense of political commentary or historical engagement, and you are left with a white filmmaker who has draped himself in the mystique of a black leading man, much like a kid who puts on an Iron Man costume and runs around the house telling everyone he can fly.
Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” arrives at a point in his career when it appeared that he was establishing a new reputation as a director of audacious revenge films about underdogs lashing out against oppressors: women in “Death Proof” (which feels like a more compact but deeper examination of themes from “Kill Bill”); Jews in the World War II fantasy “Inglourious Basterds”; and African-American slaves in “Django Those three appeared to be both joking and serious at the same time, in the manner of such Samuel Fuller melodramas as “The Naked Kiss” and “Shock Corridor” (which you should see if you haven’t already; they’re incredible). Even when Tarantino failed to achieve his goals in “Death Proof” and “Django,” it was always clear what he was trying to accomplish. In “Death Proof,” the protagonists were male murderers and female avengers in each of its halves, prompting you to consider how a storyteller’s choice of protagonist influences who we identify with; in “Django,” the protagonists were radicalized, with violence against slaves being treated as one of America’s original sins but violence against slaveowners (and anyone who profited from slavery) as a morally justifiable skeet-shoot, prompt
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“Basterds,” a lyrically brutal revenge film, was also a revenge film about revenge films and viewer identification. Additionally, it served as the ultimate examination of role-playing in both life and art, a theme that runs through all of Tarantino’s films, beginning with “Reservoir Dogs,” which tells the story of a group of robbers who tear themselves apart while attempting to figure out which of them is secretly a police officer. Every set piece, every line, every shot in “Basterds” was flawless, giving its orphaned heroine ghostlike vengeance against the Nazi war machine, wrapping up with an atrocity that gorily echoed the obscenity of concentration camp tattoos (a swastika carved into flesh with a dagger), and concluding with a line that seemed, to this viewer at least, less a boast than a statement of fact: “I think this just However, despite the celebratory atmosphere that surrounded the film’s conclusion, it was unsettling. It absolved the viewer of any responsibility. It was more than just a night of entertainment. It was a complicated situation, and every second was felt deeply.
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“Eight,” on the other hand, is a half-assed effort that carries itself like another masterpiece, swaggering and stubbing its toe and swaggering some more, like another masterpiece. Even though it contains stunning images and music, as well as stunning set design, and outstanding performances (particularly by Russell and Goggins, Leigh, and Jackson), it lacks fervor, a framework, and justification for its nonstop insults, provocations, and atrocities. It has the mentality of a bully.
Naturally, none of my complaints will be taken into consideration by hardcore fans, who will dismiss any criticisms of the film’s methods and messages with the retort, “Well, it’s called ‘The Hateful Eight,’ so of course it would be hateful!” as if creating a lavishly produced but ultimately meaningless stomping ground for viciousness was a legitimate endeavor as long as the filmmakers were honest about it. The suspicion that, deep down, he believes in nothing but sensation is difficult to shake, and that he has spent the last decade or so stridently identifying with oppressed groups in order to receive a gold star for making the kinds of films he would have made anyway has grown stronger.
In the end, “The Hateful Eight” is less reminiscent of any particular Western than it is of a particular episode of “Seinfeld”—the one in which Bryan Cranston plays a gentile dentist who makes Jewish jokes but insists that it is acceptable because he has converted to Christianity. “I have a sneaking suspicion,” Seinfeld confesses, “that he’s converted to Judaism solely for the sake of the jokes.
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