The Hateful Eight

Synopsis: In the dead of a Wyoming winter, a bounty hunter, John Ruth (Kurt Russell), and his prisoner (Jennifer Jason Leigh) are forced to take shelter in a cabin occupied by a collection of nefarious characters.

The obvious question facing anyone about to see The Hateful Eight is will Quentin Tarantino be able to top his previous film, Django Unchained. The short answer is that he doesn’t. If anything he takes that film's genre form, the Western, and marries it to his iconic 1992 debut, Reservoir Dogs in what feels like a loop-closing  showcase of his signature style. Fine if you like that kind of thing, but slightly worrying from a director who has generally demonstrated an impressive ability to extend himself with each new film.

In this respect The Hateful Eight is a relatively deadlocked affair with any extensions belonging to the presentational form rather than the content itself.  Most prominent here is the use of the Ultra Panavision 70mm format. This widescreen format worked well for panoramic epics like The Greatest Story Ever Told and Lawrence of Arabia and does so here when cinematographer Robert Richardson is lensing the stark-white, snow-blanketed landscape of the Canadian Rockies, standing in for Wyoming where the story is set, but it is less appropriate when dealing with the single interior where most of the action takes place, resulting in gratuitous 180 degree pans and lots of shots in which the backgrounds are noticeably out-of-focus due to the format’s shallow depth-of-field. Tarantino’s use of an overture and an intermission,are also part of the ambitious scale of the film and although he deserves some credit for his boldness in reviving devices typical of 1960s epics which he clearly (and understandably) loves, it is hard not to see the results as more over-blown than momumental.

This latter aspect extends to his telling of the story which, to quote John Ruth, “like molasses” assembles his characters, most of them embodied by stalwarts of cult cinema.  He takes the best part of half an hour just to describe the stagecoach ride that introduces Kurt Russell’s character,  his prisoner, the villainous outlaw Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a rival bounty hunter. Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), and Chris Mannix (a scene-stealing Walton Goggins), the man about to be sheriff of the town where they are all heading .  

To avoid an oncoming blizzard these four take refuge in an outpost with the catchy name of Minnie's Haberdashery (no sign of sewing kits that I could see however) where they encounter a motley crew of no-accounts including a bearded Mexican (Demian Bichir), a former Confederate general (Bruce Dern), a voluble  hangman with a toffy English accent (Tim Roth), and a gunman (Michael Madsen) penning his life story.  Pretty much this takes us up to the intermission. As it’s not particularly taxing stuff we don’t really require a breather but when the film resumes we get an odd voice-over (by Tarantino as an unidentified character) setting us up for the final act and, let’s face it, what we've all been waiting for, the climactic bloodbath. This is where the Reservoir Dogs element comes in (both Roth and Madsen are alumni of that film). If the film has been peppered with (largely misogynistic) violence to this point, it turns really ugly now.  

As the title economically states, Tarantino has made a film about eight hateful characters. His fans will lap up the blood, the salty dialogue with its “nigger-this” and “nigger-that” jive talk, the smart-ass provocations (male-to-male oral rape, the abominable treatment of the Leigh character standing out in this department) and its roster of disreputables. But for a more demanding audience the problem will be that all this occurs within a narrative with no dramatic texture or moral contest. What made Django Unchained so rewarding was Tarantino’s inventiveness with his characters and the way in which he wrought an intricately complex story with them. In The Hateful Eight all the characters are reprehensible, more or less lacking in the barest of redeeming qualities, and the story of a vicious moll journeying to her death stretches in an unbroken line (bar a brief back-track after the intermission) from portenteous beginning to bloody end.

I have generally found that the first time I see a Tarantino film his juvenilely voyeuristic sensibility turns me off (Django Unchained being the exception) yet when returned to at a later date, the smarts of his film-making skill win me over.  Perhaps this will happen with The Hateful Eight but on a first viewing, I was turned off, über-stylishness notwithstanding. 

So...if you’re a Tarantino devotee you should be well-pleased with his latest offering.  If not, you should probably check out the more impressively economical Reservoir Dogs first and decide whether you really want to see that film repackaged in Western garb and inflated to prodigious proportions.

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