The Hateful Eight

The Hateful Eight is a great Tarantino revival and, after a long time, a film for which I would not regret paying a higher ticket price (though I’d still rather pay more for a screening from a 70 mm print). Faces familiar from Tarantino’s previous films, a return to the intimate “whodunit” concept of Reservoir Dogs (despite the epic establishing shots and imaginative use of spatial partitioning, which best stand out on the big screen), references to its own universe (Red Apple tobacco), division into chapters (which, in addition to rhythmising the narrative, serve to reveal new information and redirect the viewer’s expectations), the non-chronological organisation of the narrative (which doesn’t break up the film, but contributes to its overall integrity), visual and motif references to spaghetti westerns (Jackson stylised as Lee Van Cleef) and John Ford’s westerns, as well as to (slapstick) splatter flicks and Carpenter’s The Thing, variations on narrative formulas from blaxpoitation and samurai films, not individual scenes but almost the whole film based on waiting (ours and the characters’) for something to happen (and when something finally does happen, there is – in the roadshow version – an intermission followed by a flashback with Godard-esque commentary) and whether it turns out at the end that some of the characters were connected to each other by something other than a chain. The constant delaying of action and the use of dialogue to draw out scenes of simple actions, which the aforementioned Godard enjoyed using to test the patience of his viewers (see the magnificently retarded scene from Breathless with Belmondo and Seberg blabbering in a hotel room) make The Hateful Eight a unique film not only in the context of contemporary Hollywood production, which offers viewer satisfaction much more quickly, but also in Tarantino’s filmography. The first half of the film is not just a sadistically long prelude. The director uses various delaying tactics from beginning to end and even lets the characters provocatively point that out (“Let’s slow it down”). Regardless of the large number of identified (self-)references, this is a masterfully written and acted film in which everything elegantly clicks into place in the end; it just intentionally takes longer than would have been necessary, which would seemingly work as well only as a stage play (the film is aware of its theatrical structure and thematises it with gusto). Most of the characters play a certain role and the film derives much of its tension from the characters/viewers not knowing who is pulling which end of the rope. Though basically everyone is a lying bastard (those who aren’t won’t survive long), your sympathies will constantly shift from one character to the next depending on what Tarantino reveals about them. As much as to the detailed distribution of power (consisting not only in who has a loaded gun in their hand, but also in who knows what – see all of Chapter Four), the film owes its dynamism to the fast-paced dialogue, the energetic acting and camera movements (drawing our attention to important motifs), the lighting, the refocusing, the work with the depth (height and width) of the space and the editing (taking into account who is looking at whom and how). Even more than Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight would like to be a political allegory in the style of the subversive counterculture westerns of the 1970s, using not very sensitive means to draw attention to the parallels between racism and capitalism. The literalness of the film’s ideological level (lines like “When niggers are scared, that’s when white folks are safe”, the division of the bar into individual American states) contrasts with the much more subtle means by which Tarantino builds tension, creates an oppressive atmosphere of distrust and communicates essential information about who is an ally or an enemy. Even so, this is a brilliant allegory that offers very disturbing and not entirely unambiguous commentary on a different interpretation of law and justice. Tarantino has made an extremely nihilistic western that successfully creates the atmosphere of an era in which people are united mainly by their hatred of a common enemy. Primarily, however, it abounds with the narrative skill of the best Agatha Christie novels. I believe that, like Christie’s books, The Hateful Eight will only get better over time. 90% (01/08/2016) (less) (more)