The Hateful Eight
The first thing that was abundantly clear before I even took my seat for the screening of “The Hateful Eight” I went to was that it was the first time in many years that I had seen a movie projected on film. Watching Quentin Tarantino’s film in it’s 70mm “Roadshow” presentation, complete with Overture and Intermission, it’s striking how different the experience of film projection looks and feels after so many years of watching digital presentation. There is a warmth to the picture that the crispness of digital lacks, but as someone who has worked projection in both the film and digital era, I also know there are more chances for traditional film presentation to go wrong, and pitfalls that need to be avoided you don’t worry about with digital. That gave the screening a greater sense of suspense that will be missing from regular screenings, and made the experience that much more special.
None of what I’ve written has to do with the film itself, though, but is important to mention for the sake of my personal experience with the film. Thinking about how I had to be convinced by friends who saw and loved “Pulp Fiction” before I finally gave in to seeing it myself, it’s amazing to consider now how there was actually a time when a Quentin Tarantino film was not required viewing for me. I certainly don’t love every QT film equally, but each one has it’s own charms and qualities I love, and “The Hateful Eight” is the same way. Gorgeously shot on Cinerama 70mm film by Robert Richardson (Tarantino’s cinematographer since “Kill Bill”), with a brilliant and quintessentially Morricone-esque score by the legendary Ennio Morricone, “Hateful Eight” is both Tarantino’s biggest and smallest film to date in scope, and that duality immediately makes it more intriguing than the likes of “Inglourious Basterds” and “Django Unchained,” although I don’t know that it is a better film than either of those are when all is said and done. Three hours for what is, basically, a closed-door drama is difficult, even with this set of great actors relishing every line of Tarantino’s wickedly entertaining script.
The film begins with a horse-drawn carriage riding in the snow, trying to stay ahead of a blizzard, when it comes along a man with three bodies. The man is Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), and he’s a bounty hunter who is trying to get to the town of Red Rock to collect the bounty for these three bodies. As it would have it, the carriage (driven by O.B., played by James Parks) is headed in that direction, and for the same reason. Within it’s walls, the carriage is taking John Ruth (Kurt Russell), better known as “The Hangman,” to Red Rock with his bounty, the beaten and bloodied Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh); he wants to bring her in alive because he doesn’t want to deprive the hangman of the chance to do his job- plus, a bullet is too easy a way out for Daisy, in his opinion. After much debate between the two, Ruth allows Major Warren to join them in the stagecoach on the explicit orders that he will see to it that Daisy, who enjoys goading John Ruth on, hangs. They continue on their way, although not without a few bumps in the road, one of which involves picking up a famous bandit from the war (Chris Mannix, played by the wonderfully loopy Walton Goggins), who claims to be the new sheriff of Red Rock, along the way, and arriving at their stopping point, Minnie’s Haberdashery, with no sign of Minnie, but with four strangers (played by Bruce Dern, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen and Demián Bichir) doing the same thing Warren, Ruth, Mannix and Domergue are doing. They’re in for a long night together.
So the big aesthetic question is, was there a reason for Quentin Tarantino to shoot this particular film in 70mm? Since much of it takes place in a single location, the easy answer would be no, but the wide screen and detail in the images Richardson and QT put on-screen would argue otherwise. Much of the first half of the film takes place on the road to Minnie’s, and the tactile warmth of the images, as well as the lonely shots of snow-bound isolation, are a thing of beauty to experience. (I’m so grateful I got to this film in it’s “Roadshow” release, although I can’t wait to see the film again to just look at it again.) Matching Richardson’s visual acuity beat-for-beat is Morricone, writing his first Western score in 40 years. Whatever spat Tarantino and the master composer had after “Django Unchained” is set aside for a larger creative purpose, and the composer’s artistry is in top form with as big and bold a musical statement as he’s made in his career. One of Tarantino’s primary influences for this film was John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” which Morricone collaborated on, and there are definitely moments that feel like his work on that, but in the end, it’s also of a piece with his work in spaghetti westerns, and can stand toe-to-toe with the likes of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Once Upon a Time in the West” without shame of seeming “inferior.” Morricone is at the peak of his powers, and even though much of he film takes place in one location, there’s plenty of tension in the score to make each moment rung for maximum suspense.
Ultimately, though, it’s the interplay between the characters that determines how much a Tarantino film succeeds, and there’s definitely some juicy moments to take in here. The key here is to not look for a “hero” or a “good guy.” Sure, there will be characters we come to like and, dare I say, “care about” more than others, but nobody here is innocent or the protagonist. Think Daisy is innocent because she’s a woman? Ha! Her heart is as black as her eye, and she seems willing to take whatever punishment John Ruth has for her. Some have cried the call of misogyny against Tarantino for the brutality that is dolled out, almost gleefully, against Daisy, but do you really think the director behind Jackie Brown, The Bride (two of the best and toughest characters in modern cinema) and the female gang of justice in “Death Proof” would suddenly turn woman hater? Even when they are as diabolically evil as Daisy, there’s always a method to Tarantino’s madness in character development, and his male characters- John Ruth (played by Russell in another subversion of his good guy image by Tarantino), in particular- don’t look at Daisy as inferior to them, but see her as equal to any man who’s been on the hanging side of a noose- they know not to underestimate her, and indeed, almost immediately after entering Minnie’s, Major Warren senses something off about things. Jennifer Jason Leigh was the ideal actress for the role, and she is a rowdy and riotous pleasure in every scene, with her only real vulnerability on display when Daisy picks up a guitar and sings a haunting story that seems to mirror her own situation. It’s a grace note in the Tarantino tradition, and it gives the film a moment of soul that wouldn’t necessarily feel in place for any other character to have. Character is key for Tarantino, and if you think there’s no reason other than a gratuitous one for something in his films, then you’re more concerned with the surface than what’s underneath. Let’s look at the most common charge levied against Tarantino- his more than liberal use of the n-word. Damn near every character in this film says it at one point (and multiple times, in fact) towards Major Warren, and trust me, they aren’t using it in a friendly way. This is midwestern American after the Civil War- do you really think white men (and women) wouldn’t have said it towards a tough-minded, and strong-willed black man? While Tarantino is interested in creating his own cinematic universes on-screen, with the type of creative liberties that allowed him to have Hitler die in a movie theater explosion in “Inglourious Basterds,” and have a free black man blow up a plantation in “Django Unchained,” he isn’t interested in whitewashing historical truths for his films. Every utterance of the word is vulgar and offensive, but that’s the point, especially when it comes out of the mouth of Dern’s General Sandy Smithers, a Confederate officer whose army met Warren’s battalion in the Battle of Baton Rouge. At the midway point in the film, there’s an exchange between Smithers and Warren that is as riveting as any Tarantino has ever scripted, as Smithers can no long ignore the black man he’s forced to share Minnie’s with for the next couple of days through this blizzard. Smithers is here on the way to the place where his son died three years before. As it turns out, Warren just might know how that came about, and the monologue QT gives Jackson (in one of his finest performances for Tarantino) is hypnotic. Warren is putting this old racist in his place by playing into his fears about what a strong black man might have made his son do, and Dern’s face tells us everything we need to know leading up to the moment of truth these characters have right before intermission. You think Tarantino is racist for his use of the n-word in his films? He’s illuminating the cancer of casual racism in this film, and the way he gets his payback is deeply satisfying, and devastatingly hilarious. You don’t go to a Quentin Tarantino film looking for good, clean fun, but rather stories that will take you someplace no one else can take you, in a way no one else is capable of doing it. Sometimes, the realities that permeate in that story aren’t comfortable, but they are necessary to get to the harsh truths Tarantino peppers his story with. “The Hateful Eight” is no different, and even if it feels long for the story it’s telling, Tarantino is not a filmmaker who does things the easy way. Instead, he does them his way, and you know what? He may not be working at the peak of his powers like he did with “Pulp Fiction” or “Jackie Brown,” but so long as he’s realizing his vision, I’m not going to argue if it falls short of his best work once in a while.
