Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight declares war upon us all
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Something awful must have happened to Quentin Tarantino in the past couple of years. The writer-director’s new The Hateful Eight echoes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s punishing Salò — it’s a perfectly realized indictment of the malign foundations that prop up so much of history, written big and blood-red across the breathtaking, snow-covered hills and plains of America the Graveyard. Tarantino’s largely set-bound Western takes deliberate care to show the lies that underpin so many period pieces, which try to coddle audiences with onscreen surrogates who incarnate contemporary perspectives.
Tarantino has always had a gift for the way that words reshape life. Here he fixes an unforgiving eye on who we are as people and the distance between that abject truth and the narratives we construct around ourselves. He eschews much of the leavening (and distancing) material that allowed his previous two historical fantasies, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, to become international hits. Instead, he confronts the utter fucked-up-itude of now — racist impasses, centuries-old resentments, “heritage” as a euphemism for unyieding bigotry — with fury and disgust.
The setting, Minnie’s Haberdashery, stands alongside a moderately treacherous pass. A monument to business ingenuity and Manifest Destiny politics — not to mention an evocation of every cinematic Wild West trading post, despite being as spacious as a Swiss chalet — it is sensibly built and sturdy, capable of weathering the occasional blizzard. And the sundry bunch who have sought refuge in it while waiting out a particularly nasty storm would be just fine, if they didn’t each embody America’s intricate web of success, horror and guilt, each a dog at another dog’s throat.
Everything pivots around a condemned woman arriving by stagecoach, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh, goddess of the game pod, having a fantastic year), and the bounty hunter (Kurt Russell) determined to bring her in alive. She’s a battered and bruised backwoods master of emotional chess, playing a long game against law enforcement (Walton Goggins), Civil War veterans from both sides (Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Dern), and a natty hangman (Tim Roth). But with a relentless storm and other strangers introduced into the mix, what starts as a chamber piece with a visual sensibility worthy of Barry Lyndon becomes a pitiless survey of the depths of human depravity.
Earlier this year, after Tarantino appeared at a Black Lives Matter rally, he was denounced by police organizations across the nation. It’s no coincidence that The Hateful Eight is charged with more race and class consciousness than any film he has made since Jackie Brown, and it’s no surprise that he’s going to put you through it. The Hateful Eight is a bloodcurdling scream from the guy who has been the life of the cinematic party for more than 20 years, and it’s going to piss off everyone. Racists and anti-racists will be equally horrified. You will identify with characters who make your skin crawl. Your heroes will disgrace you. The ideological adversaries whom Tarantino creates do not offer you the courtesy of being one-dimensional. Even with the film shot in superwide Ultra Panavision 65, you cannot claim distance.
The result is the most cathartic American film since The Paperboy, though in truth, its maelstrom of racist hostility and eruptive bloodshed make that film seem almost demure. And though you may need to spend some time in a progressive, pleasure-positive utopia afterward to feel at least a little OK about the world — I recommend Magic Mike XXL — no one interested in the legacy of national identity should miss this vicious jewel of a film.
The Hateful Eight opened Christmas Day in its 70 mm roadshow version at the AMC Town Center 20. The digital, nonroadshow version (running seven minutes shorter and without the overture or the intermission) opens here January 1.
