Review: The Hateful Eight

Note: I saw the 70mm "roadshow" release of The Hateful Eight, a version of the movie that includes an overture, intermission, and about 20 minutes of footage not in the regular wide release. Having not seen the wide-release cut, I can't say what parts are unique to the roadshow, so if you see this movie and are wondering what the heck I'm talking about with parts of this review, well, that's probably why.

When I announced on Facebook that the 70mm showing of The Hateful Eight had sold out but that I had secured a seat in a seat for another showing after the new year, several of my friends commented that they wanted to hear my review for the film once I'd seen it. It's not unlikely that these friends just wanted a quick blurb on Facebook ("Michael gives The Hateful Eight two thumbs way up!!"), but it's too late now. It's the last day of winter break, and y'all have released the beast! The reviewing beast, that is. Anyway, I'm also bummed that I saw this movie too late to include it on my Favorite Films of 2015 list, so this post is a sort of corrective to that omission.

For those who don't know, The Hateful Eight is the eighth movie[1] from acclaimed writer-director Quentin Tarantino, a man who most famously brought us the likes of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill and most recently brought us Django Unchained. This guy probably doesn't need that much introduction—at this point, even outside of the cinema-enthused crowds who tend to crown acclaimed writer-directors, Quentin Tarantino is well-known as a maker of witty, self-aware thrillers with a penchant for shocking violence and winking allusions to movie history (particularly B movies and Italian "spaghetti" westerns). That last point makes The Hateful Eight a particularly appropriate entry in Tarantino's canon; he's long flirted with the western (particularly in his last movie, Django Unchained), but The Hateful Eight marks the first time he's completely committed to the genre. And it's glorious.

Plot-wise, you really don't need to know much more than this: at an unspecified time in 19th-century, post-Civil-War America, eight strangers—a crowd which most significantly includes a couple of former Confederate soldiers, a pair of bounty hunters, and their wanted-alive bounty (plus one coach driver named O.B. who for some reason isn't counted in the total—the Death Proof of the cast?)—converge at a lonely outpost in Wyoming at the onset of a blizzard. Armed to the teeth and unsure of whom to trust (that's a recipe for success, isn't it?), these people must hunker down together in the shelter until the blizzard passes.

So yeah, first and foremost, The Hateful Eight is a western: six-shooters, big hats, isolated vistas, long and pregnant pauses, mile-long stares. And the fact that you can call a Tarantino feature "first and foremost" any genre is a huge part of the movie's success. This may be the most straightforward, homogeneous film in the notoriously genre-fluid director's filmography, proving that although Tarantino is most famous for being clever, his true talent lies at a fundamental filmmaking level. While it's not a huge surprise, it is immensely satisfying to see just how well-suited to this kind of fare Tarantino proves to be. His penchant for long, twisty passages of dialogue, a method of joke delivery and pop-culture allusion in his earlier work[2], becomes a classical device for building tension; his deliberate camera movements and framings adapt perfectly to the western inclination for capturing both subtle facial tics and evocative landscapes. Contrary to his reputation, Tarantino is working with very little tongue-in-cheek here. More than any other film in his career, The Hateful Eight is focused on delivering a tense narrative driven by traditional character motivation and few self-conscious bells and whistles.

This isn't exactly a new development in Tarantino's career, although The Hateful Eight is certainly the most committed to it yet. Although he's best known for making flippant, smart-alecky features, Tarantino has been flirting with sincere emotions and character development for most of his career. There's no doubt that Pulp Fiction is an exercise in snake-eating-its-own-tail irony and self-referentiality, but 1997's Jackie Brown, Tarantino's less-seen followup, is a movie almost that, when it's not referencing '70s blaxploitation films, is entirely devoted to straightforward emotional stakes and honest affection for its characters. This trend took a more permanent turn in 2009 with Inglourious Basterds, whose linear storytelling and furiously charged imagery seems to have kicked off a new era of political awareness and character affection for Tarantino that extends through his next features, Django Unchained and now The Hateful Eight. For the first time in Tarantino's career, the violence in Inglourious Basterds has an ethical and emotional sting; the opening scene, in which Christoph Waltz's terrifying Nazi officer interrogates a man hiding a Jewish family, bears a structural and stylistic similarity to the "say 'what' one more time" scene in Pulp Fiction where Vincent and Jules question Brett, but the effect is wholly different. Whereas Brett's death at the end of Pulp Fiction's scene serves as both catharsis and a dark joke, Inglorious Basterds depicts the murder of the Jewish family with a sense of horrifying tragedy, cemented by the image of the fleeing girl. We are invited not to laugh or be entertained but to care about the pain of this violence. This invitation to care about Tarantino characters goes even further with the slaves in Django Unchained, which remains the only QT film that can legitimately be called "sentimental." Significantly, these two movies are also the first openly political movies of Tarantino's career: Django focusing on the idea of reparations for slavery and Basterds pointing fingers at film's complicity in historical tragedies. Once you start regarding human life with empathy, you can only go so far before you start caring about changing things in the world.

Although The Hateful Eight lacks the naked sentiment of something like Django and Broomhilda's romance, there's still the sense that these characters' lives have weight and meaning to them beyond their roles as gears in a cinematic machine. This is very much a sincere political movie in the vein of Django and Basterds, a grim, brooding look at race relations in America cemented by one of the most ideologically provocative final scenes I've seen in ages, one that posits the reconciliations offered by Lincoln as a necessary lie. Like Inglourious Basterds (and, to a lesser extent, Django Unchained), The Hateful Eight is a movie about the half-true historical narratives on which we prop up our notions of social progress. It's fascinating, it's riveting, it's thematically and emotionally complex, and it's one of Tarantino's best films[3].

The downside to this commitment to sincerity and straightforward political and cinematic statements is that it makes the few forays into classic Tarantino territory stick out. The presence of a White Stripes song is an unnecessary anachronism that violates the careful tone of the film's opening minutes, and a post-intermission narration is one step too far down the cheeky meta-artificiality of his '90s features. It's clear that Tarantino is still working out a balance between his classic stylistic quirks and his newfound straightforwardness, and even with a film as accomplished as The Hateful Eight, that balance isn't quite stabilized yet. That said, several Tarantino hallmarks serve this film very well: the tense, talky first half operates like a feature-length extension of the circuitous, monologue-driven scenes from Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds discussed earlier, and the bloody (so, so bloody) second half feels very much like an old-west take on Reservoir Dogs's cramped, gruesome "and then there were none" mechanics. It's also worth noting that for all its gorgeous, American-west imagery, this is by far the most claustrophobic of Tarantino's features, and that closed-in pressure elevates the normal Tarantino techniques to even more riveting and sinister levels than normal.

All in all, I loved it. The Hateful Eight is a fun, stately, significant film that presents an exciting evolution in Tarantino's career. TWO THUMBS WAY UP!!

If any of y'all out there have seen the movie, I want to know what you think, too! Let me know your opinions in the comments, on Facebook, etc.

Until next time!


1] Though this number depends on whether or not you count Death Proof, his half of the double-feature Grindhouse collaboration with Robert Rodriguez—if you want the cool title synchronicity of eight, you gotta ignore Death Proof. You've also gotta ignore the handful of films that Tarantino has had a hand in writing but not directing: this includes mostly '90s stuff like From Dusk till Dawn and True Romance.

2] Think the "Royale with Cheese" speech in Pulp Fiction or the "Like a Virgin" monologue in Reservoir Dogs—not that those two moments were devoid of tension, but it was tension of a more elliptical kind, focusing on mundane cultural elements before whipping those digressions around to surprise with violence.

3] Probably top three for me, right there alongside Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds.