The Hateful Eight

Prologue: Deconstructing Ryan

“Any plans for the weekend.”

“I’m going to visit my friend’s new baby and then go and see the new Tarantino movie.”

“Oh, I’ve heard good things about that.”

“I have too. Hopefully it lives up to its billing.”

This conversation is verbatim. Unfortunately, I actually say things like ‘lives up to its billing.’ You might also notice I’ve referred to a film by its director – and not its title – and should therefore appear in Shoreditch Crown Court charged under the Dangerous Hipster Act. If you feel this way, please now let me plead extenuating circumstances. You see Tarantino isn’t like most movie directors. His chat-show appearances and combative news interviews (“I’m shutting your butt down!”) make him more famous than the actors he hires. He is the millennial answer to Alfred Hitchcock: the celebrity auteur that people pay to see.  With this line of defence, I hope I've now earned your conditional pardon. I understand your honour that if I tell my colleagues next week that ‘I’m going to see the new Lenny Abrahamson picture,’ then I deserve to be garrotted with piano wire.

The only thing standing between me and this hirsute grooming regime is my marking workload.

Prelude to Pacing

The new Tarantino film is an amalgam of what’s come before: it has the ensemble of Reservoir Dogs, the narrative shifts of Pulp Fiction and the Civil War setting of Django Unchained. In essence, The Hateful Eight is Tarantino’s ‘Greatest Hits’ with added bonus tracks. The bonus tracks being a more ponderous pacing that has divided critics into two camps: a sign of growing maturity, allowing the subject matter to breathe or a symptom of Tarantino’s atheism, disavowing the existence of an editor. Ever the Worzel, I appreciate both points of view.

The Story

The Hateful Eight could be seen as a sequel to Django Unchained. Django was Tarantino’s first shot at a Western, an experience he enjoyed so much that he vowed to make more. Where Django was set before the American Civil War, Hateful is set after. The story begins in a blizzard on a stagecoach journeying to Red Rock. Within is John Ruth, a bounty hunter, handcuffed to him his bounty, Daisy Domergue. On route a man, Major Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), waves them down, explaining how his horse didn’t survive the difficult terrain, which leaves him needing a lift. Like Ruth the Major is a bounty hunter, so in the spirit of shared experience Ruth acquiesces and allows him to board. Further on, another man on foot signals the stagecoach to stop. Initially, the bounty hunters are resistant to share their journey with a southern hee-haw that doesn’t share their sensibility; but when he announces that he’s Sheriff Chris, the new incumbent of Red Rock, they agree, aware they won’t get paid if they don’t get this man to town. 

Allowing the Sheriff to board is the jumping-off point for simmering tension, a beginners guide to the racial fall-out of the Civil War. You see, Major Warren served for the North and was interned in a prison camp; Sheriff Chris, on the other hand, belonged to the rival faction 'the Confederates,' a separatist group unhappy with President Lincoln’s proposal to emancipate slaves amongst other things. The two share the coach and their war stories in the spirit of détente, but is this cooling of enmity going to last? Or will the fires of battle rage again? Finally, the four arrive at their stop-over Minnie’s Haberdashery, but instead of Minnie welcoming them they’re greeted by a Mexican called Marco and three other patrons (a hangman, a general and a grizzled man allegedly travelling home for Christmas). The Mayor, a frequenter of Minnie’s, eyes the scene with distrust: is it indicative of the wariness black men felt in any environment or particular to this one?

I would take my chance with hypothermia over riding with this pair.

Pacing

The first half of Hateful Eight is slow. To use an apt analogy, Tarantino is pulling the stagecoach at a glacial pace. Even when the action moves from trot to canter in the second half, there are lounguers that don’t seem to have the requisite tension. Given Ennio Morricone, the great conductor of the Spaghetti Western, is enlisted for the film, I felt more could have been done with the score to punctuate tension. The camera is largely still in the movie too; it doesn’t jump with the verve that Tarantino’s earlier works did. Undoubtedly, the exterior world of The Frontier is expressed beautifully, so too the dim lit interior of the chamber piece second half, but I wouldn’t have minded some of the brio that Sergio Leone brought to his Western directing. That said, an argument could be made that Tarantino has come of age and no longer depends on tricks and flicks to satisfy his audiences. Indeed with the largely one-set location and emphasis on talk over action, our postmodern director has done something new in dispensing with style over story, invoking classics like Twelve Angry Men and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.

Despite the numerical difference, The Hateful Eight would take Twelve Angry Men.

Epilogue

The Hateful Eight is a grown up piece of cinema from the enfant terrible of cinema. The film retains Tarantino’s impish obsession with vulgarity and violence, yet says something quite profound on the big questions: does war excuse all barbarism? When is a lie necessary? Can justice ever be administered with violence?
In turning his gaze in, it might be our 52-year-old boy has all grown up.