The Hateful Eight

“Clue” with blood squibs? Well, sort of…

In terms of genre, The Hateful Eight is difficult to define. Its backdrop is that of a Western, but most of the action takes place in one room. It has the air of a murder-mystery à la Agatha Christie, but with more shooting and talking than red herrings. As with most Tarantino films, it’s a little bit of both. Taking place shortly after the Civil War in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, The Hateful Eight is ambitious. Like most Tarantino films, it’s a love letter to movies past and present. Kurt Russell with his formidible muttonchops has the accent and the body movement that takes much inspiration from John Wayne, deliberately so much that one has to question whether Russel and Tarantino made this choice together. Even though he’s an avowed John Ford hater, Tarantino instead brings Ford’s penchant for shooting wide landscapes that dwarf characters to a much smaller scale, opting for long, wide takes once everyone gets into the cabin.

The plot is fairly simple enough. Eight strangers wind up at a cabin in the middle of nowhere Wyoming during a blizzard. Since this is the American West in the late 19 Century, survival comes first for our characters as they size each other up and attempt to judge whether they can be honest with each other. Of course, since this is a film, everyone is hiding something, which makes it more Agatha Christie than anything else, and even has shades of Hitchcock at times.

But most of what makes the Hateful Eight work, for the most part, is the fact that it borrows quite a bit from stagecraft. Characters move into other spaces, positioning themselves to create picturesque tableaus that work well with the 70mm format, which I saw the film in. It also borrows very much from theatre in the sense that space and the confines of that space are so imporant for such a wide format. It’s as though John Ford was given a script where he had to make a room feel like a vast expanse, but also claustrophobic, and used the ultrawide lens to capture everything so that everyone in frame feels small and big all at once.

And finally, we have Tarantino’s trademark dialogue. Love him or hate him, his dialogue is always interesting and revealing in the way that it forces characters to reveal things about themselves to other characters in order to advance the plot. If there’s one thing that I’ve always admired about Tarantino, it’s that his conversations propel his plots in such a way that by the end of one conversation, something significant has happened onscreen, even if nothing has happened. One of my favorite scenes in Inglorious Basterds is when Shoshanna Dreyfus, a young Jewish girl hiding in plain sight in Paris, ends up having a very brief conversation with Col. Hans Landa, the SS colonel who murdered her family at the beginning of the film. She’s visibly terrified. She clearly remembers him, but does he remember her? Is the so-called “Jew Hunter” merely having an off-day? To this day, I still can’t tell if Landa is being deliberately lazy in his duties or if he’s merely overlooking something that he percieves to be ultimately trivial, and that’s the thrilling part of the whole scene. Landa almost behaves just like he did in the beginning of the film, tellingly ordering a glass of milk, the same drink that he drank shortly before ordering his goons to riddle holes in the floorboards the Dreyfuses were hiding under. It’s a scene that only has gotten better with age.

The Hateful Eight’s script does the same amount of work. Everything that’s revealed about the characters comes back into play. Our eight principles are tight-lipped and suspicious of one another, as this is a Western after all. A harsh place where words have even more significant weight than they otherwise would. It’s here that the film really shines, albeit with some tarnish.

It’s here that I think I was a bit queasy about Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character, who is often hit by Kurt Russell for being rude to other people, or for talking out of turn. There’s also probably going to be a long, drawn-out conversation about whether this depiction of Leigh is inherently misogynistic. It can undoubtedly be read and felt that way. I can’t deny that I was nervous about her character being the only significant female character in the film after Kurt Russell elbows her in the face for referring to Maj. Marquis Warren, not by his name, but as “nigger,” a term that she uses over and over again in a fruitless attempt to goad Warren, who doesn’t care for her opinions, but is more concerned with the racism of the other characters and how that will affect his ability to survive as a black man in an environment with people that want him to be dead. In her own strange way Leigh becomes a Shakespearean fool type of character, albeit without much humor, but her position in the heirarchy is in such a way that she has nothing to lose by saying whatever she wants. She’s already accepted the fact that she’ll most likely die, so she has little incentive to make her last moments pleasant for her captors. Leigh’s acting choices serve the wide shots well, as she can often be seen hovering in the background, almost imp-like and mischievous, relishing the opportunities she has to disrupt or thwart others. She’s everything that I would expect in a Tarantino character in her circumstance to act, so much so that she’s captivating with her ability to be more resolute with the more teeth that get knocked out of her head.

But while this film is an ensemble piece, it’s really Samuel Jackson who carries the film. Of course, this isn’t surprising, given that Jackson is an expert at making every one of his words count in a picture, it’s an interesting symbiosis to say the least, given that Jackson is also starring in Chiraq, directed by one of Tarantino’s biggest critics.

There’s a popular theory out there that every third Tarantino picture in a particular cycle, and this theory can be somewhat rough, serves as a palate cleanser of sorts. Tarantino of course, has things in his wheelhouse, and characters that he’s particularly good at writing, but this film feels like a palate cleanser in a way. These characters feel somewhat cobbled together from various other scripts at times, which is fine for Tarantino, a director who engages in a kind of gleeful cannibalism that is unabashed in any way. But as the film wore on, I instead found myself wanting these characters to be on Broadway on a stage moreso than on a big screen, and perhaps that’s why this film will go down as one of his weirder pictures. The Hateful Eight is more of an interesting closet drama something that comes close to holding a candle to Inglorious Basterds, though if Tarantino has a gift for anything, it’s the ability to provoke and get reactions out of his audiences, even if those reactions are vitriolic, he seems to have done what he’s set out to do.