★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Quentin Tarantino is admired by many as an adventurous
director, someone who never lets himself feel trapped by the traditional
constraints of narrative film-making, but if you’ve been following his career
closely, you’ll often find he’s been directing ‘by-the-numbers’ for a long
while. This manifests in several forms, be it the obsessive cataloguing of the
films he’s proud of as ‘The xth
Film by Quentin Tarantino’ or referring to sequels as ‘Volume 2’. Even the
project he likes to write out of his history is titled Four Rooms. His latest film, The
Hateful Eight, arrives adorned with similar legends: ‘The 8th
Film…’, ‘see it in 70mm!’ etc.
Sticking with the numerical theme, the questions I wanted
answered going into the film were limited to just two:
1) Would the super-wide, 70mm Panavision lend itself well to
what is essentially a bunch of people grumbling at each other in a hut?
2) Is there some justification for the three hour-plus
running time besides pure self-indulgence?
Personally, the answer to both queries was a resounding
‘no’, but that’s certainly not the be-all and end-all of the experience.
First, the set-up: we open in the dead of winter in Wyoming,
post-civil war. Bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and prisoner Daisy
Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wend their way towards Red Rock, where the
latter is set to face the rope. They are joined by Major Marcus Warren (Samuel
L. Jackson) and soon-to-be Sherriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) before taking
refuge from the approaching blizzard in Minnie’s Haberdashery. Inside, they are
confronted by a host of deceitful characters, one or more of whom secretly plan
to spring Domergue. And with that, the stage is set for a sinewy, snowbound
game of Cluedo, where the smallest detail and movement cannot escape scrutiny
as each patron and their every move are placed under the watchful eyes of Ruth,
Warren and Mannix.
Admittedly, the very idea of post-nineties Quentin Tarantino
heading up a self-contained story relying heavily on small signifiers seems
about as natural as Brian Blessed crooning a lullaby, and is often just as
subtle. Yep, that means shrieked expletives aplenty! The post-civil war setting
could feasibly lend itself to a narrative thick with relevance, but one feels
more often than not that any comment on race-relations is suffocated by showboating.
The deliberately outrageous, black-versus-white nattering comes to a head with
a typically grim and grotesque story told by Major Warren to embittered general
Smithers (Bruce Dern acting everyone else off the screen with his eyes alone).
Jackson slips into his commanding role as if taking a seat
in his favourite armchair and Russell carries himself with rough-hewn charisma,
but the limelight is snatched feverishly by Leigh as Domergue, spitting out
great hunks of scenery from between her toothy witch’s gape. Goggins’ southern
drawl garners a smattering of laughs early on, before the comedy crown is swiped
by Tim Roth, sporting a British accent so ludicrous it makes the Queen resemble
a cockney.
The much-advertised 70mm cinematography, far from framing
the haberdashery and its occupants as an all-encompassing eye taking in a stage-play
(indeed, the first performance of the screenplay was itself a stage reading) refuses
to stop fidgeting. We flit from the face of one actor to another as they spew
forth one outrageous line after the next, or simply circle the proceedings as a
partially interested bystander.
The fast and loose emphasis on framing, character and
dialogue permeates the first half: ninety minutes seem to crawl by. Rather than the spicy back-and-forth and quick-fire taste
for blood we expect, the initial chapters are weirdly slack and occasionally
dull, giving us an inscrutable build right up until Warren’s tale: the very
epicentre of the film. Before…WHAM! Cut to the intermission.
When we pick up the story with a catch-up narration from the
director himself, it’s almost as if the Tarantino who sent us to sleep in Deathproof and stretched Inglorious Basterds way past its due
takes a shotgun blast to the chest. His body is kicked aside by his younger,
fiercer self to make way for a second half that has everything we actually
wanted: there’s tension, excitement, intrigue, a furious race to the finish
line and before we know it the last hour has raced by in a sea of blood, sweat
and fear. Agatha Christie meets Wes Craven, essentially.
All the pretence of holier-than-thou, film geek prestige
melts away and the Quentin we all know and love shines through…I only wish it
hadn’t taken an hour and a half to do so. As a singular piece, The Hateful Eight serves as a passable
romp, but more effectively as a showcase of a director at his best and worst.
