By Brett Blake THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a helluva cinematic experience. For good or bad, director Quentin Tarantino has crafted an explosive, wicked, and tightly-wound exercise in tension that eventually launches outward like a shotgun blast to the face. It’s a film that is totally singular, and one that challenges its audience with tough characters and even tougher violence, all while still maintaining its director’s trademark jet-black humor. Especially with this movie, that’s a tough balance, and one that I’m not sure Tarantino fully managed to pull off, but the gleeful insanity and nastiness is orchestrated at such a high level that it’s hard not to be at least a little impressed. The film tells the story of John Ruth (Kurt Russell), a bounty hunter transporting wanted fugitive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) by stagecoach through the snowy Wyoming countryside to the town of Red Rock, where Daisy is to be executed. Along the way, the pair pick up Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) - himself also a bounty hunter - and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), the newly-appointed sheriff of Red Rock. With a strong blizzard chasing them, the group takes shelter in Minnie’s Haberdashery to wait out the storm. Inside are Bob (Demián Bichir), Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), and ex-Confederate General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern), each of whom may be hiding deep and terrible secrets, secrets which could come to threaten the lives of every person inside Minnie’s. That’s all that one should know going in, as the screenplay is superbly constructed to parcel out both questions and reveals in totally engaging ways. Boiling it down, THE HATEFUL EIGHT’s story is pretty much Quentin Tarantino doing an Agatha Christie mystery in the Old West, and nothing more need be said about the nature of the plot. It should go without saying that - just on a cinematic level - THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a wonderful piece of work. The cinematography, which has been justifiably lauded, is beautiful in every way, from usage of color and shadow, to framing, to camera movement. The decision to shoot what is a fairly intimate story in 65mm may have seemed counterintuitive to some, but it absolutely pays off in the movie’s distinctive visual look. The costumes and production design are impressive in the way they help sell the movie’s 1870s setting, while also being just slightly heightened to give the film a touch of “Old Hollywood” flavor. And then we have Ennio Morricone’s musical score (his first for a western in 40 years), which gives the movie an air of dread and menace - in fact, much of it sounds like it could be for an out-and-out horror film - while also lending certain sequences a kind of quirkiness. This is the first Tarantino movie with a substantial original score, and Morricone’s work shows that it was the right call for this project, as it gives the film a tonal temperature that is very different from Tarantino’s previous films. But by now, you might be asking, “Well, is the movie any good?!” Speaking for myself, I am genuinely - honestly - totally unsure of how I feel about the movie. It’s possible I could wake up tomorrow morning thinking it’s a masterpiece. It’s equally possible, I believe, that I could wake up tomorrow morning thinking it’s perhaps Tarantino’s worst and most indulgent film. On a certain level, I’m impressed by this: the movie is so densely crafted, and so precisely calculated to pull the audience in diametrically-opposed emotional directions within the span of mere seconds (and it does this almost constantly throughout; a moment of legitimately uncomfortable, despicable, distressing violence will almost inevitably be followed in short order by humor) that Tarantino was clearly attempting to elicit the kind of conflicted feelings that are plaguing me. To populate a story almost entirely with characters who are truly awful people is a risk (and make no mistake, these people are awful; never has the title of a Quentin Tarantino film been so apt), as it leaves the audience without somebody to root for or to attach some degree of moral righteousness to. Certainly Tarantino has had unlikable characters at the hearts of his movies before, but characters like Max Cherry in JACKIE BROWN, The Bride in KILL BILL, Shosanna in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, and Django and Dr. Schultz in DJANGO UNCHAINED place those films into a relatable and identifiable emotional landscape. THE HATEFUL EIGHT has nobody to fill that void, so the result is a movie almost entirely lacking in conventional emotional connection. Yes, on a basic level it is terrifically entertaining to watch this seedy assortment of characters slowly wipe each other out, but why should we care? Whereas Tarantino’s previous two films, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and DJANGO UNCHAINED, are very much crowd-pleasers (i.e. the “good guys” pretty much win), THE HATEFUL EIGHT is not interested in satisfying the audience in that way. It’s a film that seems to want you to be entertained by the disgustingly violent mayhem (and on a certain level I definitely was), but also to then sort of feel bad about how much you perhaps excused the rampant racism, misogyny, and brutal sadism displayed by the characters. In that sense, it’s a tremendously thought-provoking movie, both in the way it deals with gender and race relations and also in the way a mass audience will process those ideas if buried under an entertaining veneer. In fact, future viewings may (may) reveal this to be Tarantino’s most thematically rich and intriguing work yet… but they may also reveal that - without a more conventional moral or ethical heart - it is his most hollow story thus far. Whether I wake up tomorrow loving or dismissing the movie, at this moment I cannot deny that it was an incredibly powerful time at the movies, and among the most one-of-a-kind sort of experiences that the films of 2015 offered me. In an age where entertainment is so often produced to pander to the lowest common denominator, to have a movie truly give me pause and force me to turn it over and over in my mind is something to be celebrated.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
January 2023
Categories
All
|