The Hateful Eight,
directed by Quentin Tarantino.
Judging by the advertisements littered
with exclamation points by the usual exclaimers and the raves by the usual
ravers, Quentin Tarantino’s newest movie, The
Hateful Eight, represents yet another success for the writer-director. Sporadically a darling of the reviewers, his
peculiar penchant for excess and his delight in spilling blood, for reasons I
cannot fully understand, endear him to many commentators. His debut film, Reservoir Dogs, represents just the sort of amoral, brutal nihilism
that launched his career; an attempt at a big caper flick, it features an
ensemble of actors who turn up in his later work, and enough blood to paint a
whole room red. One memorable sequence
shows a man bleeding to death for practically the whole movie, with a red tide
washing all over the set; another shows a man, Michael Madsen as I recall, in
an apparent attempt at grisly wit, shouting into the severed ear he holds.
Now
in The Hateful Eight the director
employs some of the standard devices of the Western, along with a few other
forms, to create a complete bloodbath, with something like a dozen corpses
littering the scenery, a kind of Reservoir
Dogs with horses. The title itself
suggests his take on The Magnificent Seven,
an ironic inversion to show his cleverness.
The movie begins in a time-honored manner, with a long panorama shot of
a magnificent Wyoming mountain landscape covered with snow, as a solitary stagecoach
traverses the screen. Blocking its path,
Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a bounty hunter, sits on a stack of
corpses, evidence of his success and proof of his prowess. In the coach another hunter, John Ruth (Kurt
Russell), holds Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in handcuffs; he plans to
bring her, a murderer, to the nearest town for hanging.
The
three of them, along with a couple of others, stop at a saloon/restaurant/
lodging house called, for some reason, Minnie’s Haberdashery, where the bulk of
the movie’s action takes place. Inside
the Haberdashery, a stagey situation unfolds, where another half-dozen actors
play cat-and-mouse games of identity and motive with Warren, and several of
them refight a battle in the Civil War, where Warren’s troops opposed the
Confederates led by another inhabitant of the bar, General Sanford Smithers
(Bruce Dern). The action settles into a
violent, profane version of an Agatha Christie whodunit, with a cast of likely
suspects marooned in a secluded location while Warren determines, through
available evidence and reasoning, who poisoned a pot of coffee, which results
in a couple of spectacular deaths; he also works out some of the truth about
the assorted characters and their reasons for visiting the Haberdashery.
Tarantino
divides the very long movie into chapters as if it were indeed a detective
story, then adds his own voice-over narration, showing a series of brutal
killings that created the present situation in Minnie’s Haberdashery. The narration accompanies flashbacks to
events that explain the identities of the characters, the evidence that Major
Warren uncovers, and ultimately, the fate of all the people in a film that,
oddly, combines incessant violence in language and action with as much
talkiness as some polite British drawing-room comedy.
The
violence includes the graphic murders, complete with buckets of blood, of
almost everyone in the cast, a couple of bloody projectile vomitings, the
amputation of an arm, the explosion of a head, and a slow strangulation by
hanging. The acting for the most part
meshes nicely with the action, with the prize for the highest ascent over the
top won easily by Samuel L. Jackson. His
presence, by the way, underlines the status of Tarantino himself, who has now
gone all self-referential, employing actors from his previous movies, like
Jackson and Michael Madsen in this one, and in effect repeating himself in
echoing the situation and action of Reservoir Dogs. As for Jennifer Jason
Leigh, the poor woman serves as something like a punching bag for Kurt Russell,
who slugs her almost every time she opens her mouth, applies a bowl of hot stew
to her face, then vomits blood all over her.
(For this she attended drama school?).
The crude violence she endures, along with the elaborate verbal and
visual exposition, serve well to sum up the meaningless, sadistic, and
essentially juvenile vulgarity of Tarantino’s vision.
