HATEFUL

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.