Quentin Tarantino’s latest picture, “The Hateful Eight” — a meticulously crafted Western thriller set in Wyoming and shot on 70mm Panavision — is an odd duck: both admirable and frustrating. While it contains familiar “Tarantino-isms,” it feels very different from his other works.
In a lot of ways, it’s his darkest, most pessimistic feature and his most politically charged (it’s critique on racism in Post-Civil War America is far more scathing and didactic than it was in “Django Unchained,” his Blaxploitation/spaghetti western set in the Antebellum South).
It contains plenty of gratuitous violence and has a dark comedic bite as ferocious as a grizzly bear’s. Traditional notions of “good” and “evil” are nowhere to be found.
In Tarantino movies, there are no truly innocent characters, but in “The Hateful Eight,” they range from kind of bad to just plain vile. And, yet, my reaction is mixed: I love certain aspects of the film, but it also has flaws that are too big to overlook.
The film moves at a leisurely but comfortable pace; Tarantino is in no hurry to tell his tale, and he shouldn’t be. After opening with epic wide-angle shots of the gorgeous snow-covered Wyoming landscape, we’re taken into the confines of a stagecoach. There, we meet bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell, doing a John Wayne impersonation of sorts), who’s taking criminal Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the town of Red Rock to hang. Along the way, he picks up fellow bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren (Samuel Jackson) and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), the new sheriff of Red Rock.
Due to an impeding blizzard, the stagecoach stops at Minnie’s Haberdashery for the night, currently full of other weary travelers. For this motley crew, Tarantino has assembled an impressive cast with the likes of Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern and Demian Bichir.
From here on out, the action is confined to Minnie’s.
“The Hateful Eight” is Tarantino’s stagiest film: Robert Richardson’s crisp cinematography magnifies the cramped interior of the place, making it feel more like a theater stage than a real haberdashery in the West. Meanwhile, the actors give eccentric theatrical performances, taking turns speaking and going on intellectual, articulate, Tarantino-esque monologues that occasionally ramble.
In the first half (before a 12-minute intermission), Tarantino creates an entertaining, multifaceted atmosphere of intrigue and suspense, partly resembling an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, sans the murder. Deep-seeded tensions (between Union and Confederacy, black and white, etc.) come screaming to the surface.
There’s a persistent lack of trust among the characters — just about everyone has something to hide. Even the characters who know one another still aren’t totally happy to see each other again.
The actors look like they’re having a grand, old time chewing scenery in their western getup (Russell can wear the hell out of handlebar mustache). And it’s fun to watch them mingle, trade insults and pass the time, while the storm rages on outside.
Frequent Tarantino collaborator Jackson is the best of the bunch. Warren is consistently the most compelling character: easy-going but extremely perceptive and intelligent at the same time, catching on to things long before other characters do, and of course, he has plenty to hide.
In terms of screenplay and story structure, the first half of “The Hateful Eight” is close to brilliant. Tarantino has an uncanny ability to craft tense sequences that stretch like a rubber band before finally snapping. In “The Hateful Eight,” Tarantino’s handling of subtle shifts in power among the eight, secret alliances forming on the side and major character revelations is near-flawless and difficult to do when everything takes place in a single location and is primarily driven by talk.
Tarantino is renowned for his punchy, energetic dialogue, but his precision and dedication to story and scene structure is a crucial component in crafting said dialogue. Details and anecdotes that seem superfluous at the time comeback later on in a major way.
After the intermission, however, things take a peculiar and not entirely successful turn. The tone darkens considerably, and Tarantino hammers home his political agenda. The film comes off heavy-handed, almost didactic at times, the dialogue feeling too on-the-nose.
On top of that, in terms of a mystery/thriller, the second half is considerably less intriguing; major moments feel more telegraphed than they should. A lengthy flashback sequence depicting what happened at Minnie’s before Ruth’s party arrived lacks the surprise and tension of anything in the first half.
And at three hours and seven minutes, the movie is too long. Tarantino is one of the privileged few directors who has free reign over his work, and this time it hurts him. There’s a lot of excess that could be trimmed from this half. Tarantino wants to create an epic Western experience, but for a single-location narrative, three hours is too long. He should have taken advantage of the rugged, beautiful frontier environment more, instead of keeping the narrative so contained — that may have justified the length.
There are other issues, like the depiction of violence. In general, Tarantino uses violence intelligently. He can go overboard sometimes, but he rarely uses it haphazardly, and he recognizes the distinction between cartoon-y genre movie violence (Nazis being scalped in “Inglorious Basterds”) and disturbing, realistic violence (a runaway slave being ripped apart by dogs in “Django Unchained”); he knows when each type should be used and how it should be presented.
But in the second half of “The Hateful Eight,” he goes overboard on the cartoon violence, and it doesn’t fit at all. “The Hateful Eight” isn’t revenge fantasy or a twisted fairly tale like “Basterds” and “Django” but a very bleak, politically charged picture, so the excess of silly cartoon violence (along with slow-motion and other stylistic flourishes) feels inappropriate and sloppy and confuses the tone.
And then there’s Domergue, the film’s only primary female character. During the first half, she resembles a rabid animal more than a human and spends all her time at Ruth’s side, occasionally getting punched and being laughed at.
Leigh does the best she can, but her character never really takes off. She has a handful of great moments, but she kind of fizzles out and comes off looking pathetic, which is surprising, considering Tarantino has written a number of strong female characters in the past.
Furthermore, while Domergue definitely isn’t a saint, her treatment at the hands of the male characters comes off a little too mean-spirited; oftentimes, the violence toward her is played for laughs.
Tarantino can take pieces from a wide variety of old movies (mainly low-budget exploitation pictures) and blend them together to form something boldly original. In fact, there are aspects of “The Hateful Eight” that I loved: It’s beautifully shot, the acting is top-notch and the first half is great. But the movie loses its way in the second half and never fully recovers.
Note: “The Hateful Eight” is being released in two versions: The first is a 187-minute cut that’s being shown in 70mm in select theaters on Christmas Day; it comes complete with an overture and an intermission. The other version is a 167-minute cut that will be released wide on Jan. 1. The film reviewed is the 70mm version.
(Rated R for strong bloody violence, a scene of violent sexual content, language and some graphic nudity.)