The Hateful Eight’s 70mm Roadshow: An Essential Cinematic Experience as Opposed to an Essential Film
In the advent of increasingly high ticket prices and the ease of video on demand, going to the cinema feels less and less like the most essential, exciting way to see a new movie. Industry bigwigs grow anxious with the knowledge that moviegoers are content to stay at home with Netflix — especially when fantastic films like Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation are readily available on the streaming service, elevating on demand from a dumping ground for cinematic mistakes to a legitimate way to release much-anticipated movies. Going to the movies has to be reinvented as an experience on par with seeing a Broadway show. For this to happen, there need to be more films that make the most of the medium.
Quentin Tarantino, a film scholar as much as a filmmaker, knows this. Like the earliest directors back when film was something exciting and new, Tarantino is still infatuated with film as a visual medium and doesn’t waste a frame of it. By shooting his eighth feature film, The Hateful Eight, on 70mm and then paying painstaking attention to each and every expansive shot, he and his go-to cinematographer for five films now, Robert Richardson, have made a movie that must be seen on the biggest screen in order for it to be fully appreciated. And while it is by no means Tarantino’s best film, seeing the 70mm Roadshow edition of The Hateful Eight in all its widescreen glory at New York’s classic Village East theater is one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had at the movies and one that could never, ever be replicated at home.
From the opening bars of the legendary Ennio Morricone’s epic score playing out over a sinister, blood-red-and-black “Overture” slide, The Hateful Eight announces itself as having more kinship with David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia than it does with the majority of movies in multiplexes today. Former Union cavalry major turned bounty hunter Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) is stranded in the snow-capped mountains of Wyoming with three dead bodies and no means of getting them to the town of Red Rock so that he can collect his reward money. He talks his way aboard a stagecoach occupied by fellow bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and his living bounty, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Ruth is known as the Hangman for his insistence on delivering his bounties alive so that they can meet their ends at the hangman’s rope, despite the danger inherent in transporting desperate criminals who still have some fight in them. A third passenger, former Confederate militiaman Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) comes aboard and immediately butts heads with Warren over his skin color and military record. Despite their differences, because of a nearly apocalyptic blizzard they are doomed to spend the next few days cooped up inside a general store with a small selection of other seemingly unsavory characters, including quiet cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), smooth-talking British hangman Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), former Confederate General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) and Mexican shopkeeper Bob (Demian Bichir). Many of the men fought on opposite sides of a Civil War that still smolders in their recent memories, and none of them trust each other. Soon, paranoid Ruth becomes convinced that at least one of the men cooped up in the store with them is working with Daisy to set her free — the question is, who?
Watching The Hateful Eight frequently feels more like watching a theatrical performance than a film, though this is of course emphasized when one is watching the film in a former Yiddish folk theater underneath an ornate chandelier. Minnie’s Haberdashery, the claustrophobic one-room building where the majority of the film takes place, feels like a stage, while the actors all seem to be projecting straight out of the screen to the audience. Indeed, the acting is as big and bombastic as Morricone’s score, with so much scenery chewed that one expects the haberdashery to collapse into rubble around the characters. One wishes that Tarantino had found more subtle and interesting ways to illustrate the simmering racial tension and hatred between these characters apart from pervasive, nonstop use of the N-word, which the actors all take a bit too much joy in swishing around their mouths and spitting out, over and over again. As Warren, Jackson probably gives the most subtle and restrained performance — not something one ever expects to say about the man who once fought snakes on a plane. As for the showiest: Roth does his best Christoph Waltz impression as Mobray, stepping into the role of token European that was his in the Tarantino universe well before it was Waltz’s, while Goggins takes the despicable role of Mannix, all dimwitted, smarmy racism, and elevates it to campy comedy.
In addition to these theatrical touches, The Hateful Eight has all the hallmarks of a great Tarantino movie: chapter headings; long, drawn-out scenes of pure dialogue that somehow manage to not feel long at all; a story that, thanks to some well-placed flashbacks and mixed-up chronology, allows at least one character to appear alive again in the film after their demise; a Mexican stand-off so frantic that it makes the audience dizzy trying to keep up; and, of course, buckets of blood. The first half of of the film is remarkably quiet and dialogue-driven — imagine if the tension-filled tavern scene in Inglourious Basterds lasted an hour and a half — while the second half is pretty much pure carnage. Dividing the film in half via an intermission, as the 70mm Roadshow edition does, works well considering how different the two halves are; to go straight from one to the other would be incredibly jarring. As is, the first half is vastly superior to the second, which is so cartoonishly violent that it borders on slapstick (and does incite quite a bit of sick, twisted laughter from the audience). However, there was one element missing from The Hateful Eight that, for me, is typically one of the most enjoyable things about a Tarantino film, and was unfortunately missing from his last film, Django Unchained, as well: complex female characters.
Daisy Domergue, despite an utterly unhinged performance from Jennifer Jason Leigh that involves so much snarling and sneering that she may have been channeling Linda Blair in The Exorcist, is a disappointment. The audience knows little about her apart from the fact that she is a murderer and, like several other characters in the film, a racist. We don’t know who she murdered, or how, or why. We don’t really know anything about her other than that she deserves to hang — and because of that lack of characterization, it’s really hard to care whether or not she actually does. While other characters in the film are given opportunities to have their war-torn backstories revealed through scenes of pure exposition that only Tarantino could make feel natural, Daisy remains a cipher. Like Kerry Washington’s Broomhilda in Django Unchained, she only exists to bring the men of the film together and incite them to violence. Considering that she is the only female character in the film to survive longer than one scene, this is a unfortunate. In addition to fleshing out Daisy more, one wonders why Tarantino could not have cast another member of The Hateful Eight as a woman — perhaps replacing Madsen with another one of his muses, tough-as-nails Uma Thurman, or perhaps the stuntwoman Zoe Bell (who does appear in The Hateful Eight, but in a small role that wastes her considerable talents). We know that the filmmaker who gave us Kill Bill’s Beatrix Kiddo and Inglourious Basterds’ Shosanna Dreyfus can do better — so why has he chosen not to for his past two projects, both reinventions of that traditionally testosterone-driven genre, the Western? Needless to say, the lack of compelling female characters is one element of classic cinema that should be relegated to days gone by, not resurrected.
Visually and sonically spectacular, the 70mm roadshow edition of The Hateful Eight is an essential theatrical experience, the kind that we need more of in order for outings at the cinema to maintain magic and mystique. I just wish that The Hateful Eight itself was a more essential movie.
