The Hateful Eight film review

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THE HATEFUL EIGHT

Directed by Quentin Tarantino, with Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

REVIEW: Todd McCarthy

MOST of us were raised to believe that cowboys were men of few words, but Quentin Tarantino is out to prove otherwise in The Hateful Eight, a three-hour Western that’s windy both inside and out.

There is absolutely no doubt about who wrote the elaborate, pungent, profane and often funny dialogue that a fine cast chews over and spits out with evident glee, nor as to who staged the ongoing bloodbath that becomes a gusher in the final stretch.

But set mostly in the confined space of a remote haberdashery /stagecoach stop, the piece plays like a weird combination of John Ford’s Stagecoach, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, albeit with a word count closer to Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.

If this makes it sound like Tarantino is moving toward being as much a playwright as a filmmaker, stranger things have happened.

The director’s loyal fans, plus anyone keen to relish Samuel L. Jackson authoritatively stating how things are going to go down as only he can, will turn out in ample numbers. But the wider public might not run out so readily to greet this nihilistic whodunit.

To help create a hot-house atmosphere in a very cold climate, Tarantino and his now-regular cinematographer Robert Richardson shot The Hateful Eight in 70mm — specifically, in the long-disused, buff-cherished Ultra Panavision 70 format with a 2.76:1 aspect ratio. It seems rather perverse to choose this claustrophobic yarn as the excuse to justify rounding up old lenses and getting Panavision to create 2,000-foot magazines to accommodate long takes, as well as oblige Harvey Weinstein to track down and in some cases install antiquated projectors to facilitate a two-week 70mm “roadshow”.

The film’s length notwithstanding, the truth is that T he Hateful Eight would never have been considered roadshow material back in the format’s heyday: It’s not, by any stretch, a spectacle.

The 70mm release certainly represents a very particular type of film buff event, but how special it will be to a generation accustomed to Imax 3D and other modern experiential sensations is questionable.

To be sure, the film looks grand. The mountainous landscapes and snowfall of the opening reels have a dense splendour, as a six-horse stagecoach makes its way through a Wyoming storm bearing bounty hunter John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell) and his pasty prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), shortly to be joined by the imposing and loquacious Major Marquis Warren (Jackson), a former Union soldier now in the same line of work as The Hangman; he’s got some corpses to get to Red Rock, which is where Ruth intends to collect a $10,000 ransom for Daisy.

The two men share a mutual respect — in fact, Ruth once saved the major’s life — as well as some suspicion and a philosophical bent.

The stage gets a little too crowded, and quite a bit more uncomfortable personally, politically and racially, when a fourth passenger climbs aboard. A decade or more after the Civil War, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) remains an unreconstructed Johnny Reb who doesn’t much cotton to Warren or the letter the latter carries with him written by Abraham Lincoln.

Mannix announces that he is on his way to Red Rock to take over as the new sheriff, which could pose some problems for his two cash – and justice-seeking coachmates.

This setup occupies the first two of what ultimately come to be six chapters, the rest of which unfold almost exclusively within the relatively comfortable confines of Millie’s Haberdashery, where several more colourfully unsavoury rascals with recognizably Tarantinoesque vocabularies greet these riders from the gathering storm.

There’s yet another hangman, Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a brash Britisher with a bowler hat; Bob (Damian Bichir), a supposed friend of the absent Minnie; watchful cowboy Joe Cage (Michael Madsen); and former Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern), another unrepentant racist with special reasons to hate Major Warren.

The real test of Tarantino’s decision to shoot in 70mm comes inside, as it raises the question of what advantage a super-widescreen format serves when the drama is mostly limited to one room.

To eyes old enough to remember luxuriating in the brilliance of Ultra Panavision 70 in its heyday (on films including Ben-Hur, Mutiny on the Bounty and The Fall of the Roman Empire), The Hateful Eight offers a different sort of experience.

Up to a point, Tarantino uses the space and blocks the actors in ways that emphasize the power dynamics, raise suspicions and otherwise highlight details that will provoke drama, laughs and surprise.

But where you really notice the difference is in the detail picked up in faces, right down to the pores, teeth and hair. Faces and expressions are uncommonly vivid, and expressively, not unflatteringly so — even when Leigh’s face is covered in blood and her front teeth are mostly knocked out. By contrast, there are moments of distortion, lacking focus, that prove jarring and unnatural.

So was the indulgence of 70mm worth it? If you’re a director with Tarantino’s track record, a fanatical devotion to celluloid over digital and the wherewithal to make it happen: sure, why not? Anyone who loves great images on the big screen will appreciate the experience.

Once all the characters get comfortable under one roof, the film itself settles down into a protracted ‘talkathon’ in which unsavoury connections and resentments bubble to the surface.

A sign that things are going to get more complicated in the 74-minute second section comes with the abrupt arrival of explanatory narration — spoken by the director himself — to the effect that not everything is what it seems. Ever since he first used the device of narrative doubling-back so successfully in Pulp Fiction, it’s been hard for Tarantino to resist pulling that same rabbit out of his hat.

Nifty as it is in casting everything we’ve already seen in different light, as well as in intensifying the drama, the technique can’t continue to deliver the same surprise and impact after multiple uses.

Hardcore Tarantino fans who relish every word he writes will have little problem with the verbosity on display.

But there’s no question that Tarantino has increasingly come to ignore the virtues of brevity and tight construction, whether out of simple infatuation with his own prose or because length has not been seen to be a problem on his last two epic, period-set features.

As ever with Tarantino films, however, some of the performances are lip-smackingly delicious.

A standout because of the outrageous extremity of her role and the relish with which she embraces the very depths of depravity, is Leigh, who ends up looking like she could instantly spawn a child like Linda Blair at her worst in The Exorcist.

Russell also revels in his deep-dish dialogue, while Channing Tatum proves a stellar addition to a crowd of Hatefuls. – Reuters/ Hollywood Reporter