Given the huge deal Quentin Tarantino, the writer/director of The
Hateful Eight, made about his once-in-a-lifetime roadshow, particular aspects
are decidedly underwhelming. Take for instance the promise of the movie being
shot in Panavision Super 70 mm filmstock. Tarantino gushed about how it was the
largest widescreen format that ever existed and that it had not been in use
since the 1950’s and 1960’s for such epics like “Ben Hur” and “Cleopatra.”
Well, that is wonderful if the vast majority of The Hateful Eight’s three hour
run time had not taken place within a single room. This movie is no epic. So I
guess its cool that he used that obsolete film stock but he sure did not need
to. Or take for instance the presence of additional footage in the movie. Given
that the movie is almost entirely composed of people talking in rooms, I’m not
sure this movie needed more of that. In fact it probably would have been better
with less. It had a new Ennio Morricone score and that’s cool because Morricone
made the best Western scores of the 1960s, but this score is not as good as
those old scores. The program was pretty cool except that the movie was not a
timeless masterpiece so I doubt it will be a piece of memorabilia in great
demand.
“The Hateful Eight” for all its grandiose presentation is decidedly a
small movie. A bounty hunter named John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is taking a
prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to hang in the near town of Red
Rock. His carriage picks up two more passengers, another bounty hunter named
the Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and the supposed new sheriff of
Red Rock, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). There is a blizzard that will
intercept them on their journey so they decide to wait it out at Minnie’s
Haberdashery. They do not find Minnie at the Haberdashery. Instead they find
Senor Bob (Demian Bichir) looking after the place, Oswaldo Mobray the supposed
hangman (Tim Roth), General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) an ex-Confederate
officer searching for his son, and Joe Gage (Michael Madsen) who is in town to
visit his mother. John Ruth makes the splendid observation that one of these
men is not who they say they are. Minnie’s Haberdashery is composed of a bar, a
kitchen, a general store, several beds and a place to sit by the fire, but it
is all one room. The blizzard sets in and everybody waits for shit to start
happening.
It takes awhile. By my count it takes about an hour and a half, which in
my humble opinion is too long. Most of that time is exposition, that is to say
it is people talking about what other people have done in the past. Something
along the lines of one character saying to another, “Don’t you know who this
so-and-so is, they did some crazy shit during the war.” I wrote about this sort
of thing earlier in my “Steve Jobs” review. Movies are a show not tell medium.
Lots of scenes where people talk about what happened in the past are more
appropriate in the play medium where it is necessitated by the lack of ability
to go all over the place but rendered harmless by the immediacy of the action.
“The Hateful Eight” would probably make a great play. Very little would have to
be changed. As a movie it can be, from time to time, <ahem> boring. There
I said it. Boring, especially during the first half. It also does not help that
Tarantino, though admittedly funny and cool, is not as funny and cool as he
thinks he is. Some of the look at me funny and cool lines fell flat because the
movie had not yet become cool or funny enough for them.
In the meantime and through to the end there is plenty of use of the
word nigger and a lot of punching the woman in the face. We can take these one
at a time because Tarantino does interesting things with the first one and not
so interesting things with the second.
It is fair to say that the cinematic relationship between Samuel L.
Jackson and Quentin Tarantino is a special one that does something more than
simply transcend the race line. For other white writer/directors it is simply
enough to make a sympathetic black character that has a rounded personality and
isn’t merely an appendage to the white people. Jackson and Tarantino do more
than that. They create black characters in the midst of terrible racism that
are also complicated to the point of being bad men themselves. It is tough to be a despicable black character when
everybody else in the movie is calling nigger. In this movie, we are drawn
preternaturally to Major Marquis Warren’s side because he is the ultimate
underdog, the one black guy in Wyoming. We judge the goodness and badness of
the other characters by how they treat him. If they have respect for him, like
John Ruth, he is a good guy. If they do not, like everybody else, they are not
good guys. The most interesting thing about this movie is that by the mid way
point, the audience may start wondering whether Major Marquis Warren is
somebody to cheer for at all. Samuel L. Jackson has I believe only been nominated
for one Oscar (Pulp Fiction). I believed he should have won for Django
Unchained. If he is nominated for this movie, it can be said it was deserved.
He is the reason why the movie should be watched at all.
Now for the gratuitous violence done towards the woman in the story,
Daisy Domergue. She is a course rude bitch with a mouth on her. In the past she
has murdered people and she deserves to be hanged. For as much insight
Tarantino has had about the history of race relations, he shows a general lack of
knowledge about the history of women. I have not yet heard of a 19th
century (or before) story about a woman like Daisy Domergue. Nor am I likely
too because no such woman or very few of them have ever existed. Tarantino has
this false notion that feminism in movies consists of giving a woman a weapon
(gun or sword or kung fu) and having them kick ass. It does not work that way.
You see women are physically weaker than men. At some point it does not matter
how good at kung fu they are. They will generally lose battles to guys who have
50 or 100 pounds on them. The astute feminist screenwriter will then give their
female characters what historical women have always had, shrewdness and wiles.
They will not simply make them another man. When Tarantino made “Django
Unchained” he paid attention to the psychology of a slave. Jamie Foxx did not
just start out badass and plucky. He had to be rehabilitated from a society
that would inflict physical and psychological harm on him if he did anything
out of line. When making a historical period piece about a woman it should be
required that their respective psychology is taken into account because women were subject
to societal pressures as well. Tarantino ignores this and his reason for doing
so is to make it okay for this particular woman to be punched in the face a
bunch. That is to say he has made this particular woman more of a rotten bitch
than she historically has any sense in being and he did it in order to make it
okay for terrible things to be done to her.
I remember there was a time when Tarantino’s movies were violent but not
as violent as people thought they were. When I watched the DVD extras of
Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, a big deal was made by how the violence merely
felt gratuitously violent because of superior moviemaking. Like in Reservoir
Dogs you don’t actually see the ear being cut off, or in Pulp Fiction the
samurai cut is below the screen. Contrast that with Tarantino’s last several
films where the blood being spilt is generally more extreme than what it would
be in real life. One could reasonably question whether if say someone blew off
someone else’s head three or four feet away from Jennifer Jason Leigh would she
really be splattered with that much
blood and brains? I doubt it and I’m
pretty sure it is in there less for realism and more because Tarantino wanted
to see a woman’s face splattered with blood and brains. It sure makes one
question about early Tarantino’s professions of not being as violent as people
said he was. As soon as he got a decent budget to splatter blood all over the
screen he went whole hog.
