The Hateful Eight

There won’t be many comin’ home

Quentin Tarantino and I are sort of like exes.  I remember our best times (True Romance, Jackie Brown, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Death Proof) as fondly as any memories I have; however, every few years, he attempts to reignite our relationship, and because he once charmed me so, I’m always seduced again.  “It’ll be like old times!” is what I hear.  My friends warn me against dating again, or they roll their eyes and say, “Yeah, I’m sure it’ll work out this time.”  And when it comes down to it, I’m never sorry that I gave it another try, but I can’t deny that things have changed, and I’m ultimately left feeling exhausted at how hard I’ve tried to convince myself that things could be the same as they were.

I introduce this piece this way because True Romance and some others meant so much to me on a cinematic level when I first saw them that I’ve since referred to Tarantino as “Quentin” in conversations with my friends about his films.  These conversations (in the past few years, at least) often involve whether Tarantino has “matured” as a filmmaker, which is to say, “Will he ever do a third act wherein everyone doesn’t get blown away?”  These days, it seems like he keeps doing that simply because everyone keeps criticizing it, but let’s explore a little.

The Hateful Eight, referred to in the opening titles as “The 8th film by Quentin Tarantino” (which gives him two more chances, if you’re keeping score) is a western not in the exact style of any other, but that borrows characters who might wander into a midseason episode of Bonanza and take Michael Landon hostage.  The story centers around Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a bounty hunter “open for business,” attempting to hitch a ride with a stagecoach occupied by another of his kind, John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell) and his current prisoner, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is wanted for murder but whose crimes are never explicitly revealed to us.  Through one thing and another, the trio, along with soon-to-be-sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), end up at Minnie’s Haberdashery, where they plan on weathering a blizzard before they head into Red Rock.  However, when they reach their destination, they find that other folks – Englishman Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), Confederate General Sandford Smithers (Bruce Dern), and black-hatter Joe Gage (Michael Madsen) – are already making use of the premises, and caretaker Bob (Demián Bichir) wasn’t expecting another group.  Oddly enough, Warren, who has been to the haberdashery before, has never once seen Bob, and notices that owners Minnie (Dana Gourrier) and Sweet Dave (Gene Jones) are inexplicably missing.  None of this aids the paranoia of the already-paranoid Ruth, who makes a big show of warning the others to stay the hell away from his prisoner.

The film is essentially Reservoir Dogs if the latter took place in the mid-1800s.  It involves several hours of dialogue between very bad people on a single set, initially concerning everyone’s suspicions about one another, and later confirming them in Clue fashion.  It also features Tim Roth not only as a mole, but in a role where he spends a good portion of the film bleeding from the abdomen; and Michael Madsen as another violent maniac who receives the same tracking shot he got in Dogs: walking out of the main set to grab something from his “car” in order to commit another heinous act (and in the process, maybe embracing the fact that he still has not escaped the shadow of Mr. Blonde).

But there’s another layer to The Hateful Eight.  Warren is a black man in America following the Civil War, and is constantly threatened by men like Mannix and Smithers, who resent even sharing a room with him (Smithers, otherwise a kindly-seeming old man, is particularly despicable in that he won’t even speak directly to Warren, instead having Mannix relay the insults for him so that Warren hears them twice).  Not that there are many Tarantino films in which the N-word isn’t employed, but it seems heavily topical in this case, not only for the characters, but in general, when one considers the current social climate in America.

Warren, though, essentially the protagonist of the piece if we have to pick one (making Mannix the deuteragonist), is no Django.  He’s not a straight/narrow good guy simply because he once lived on a plantation.  His actual deeds (if he’s telling the truth about a certain encounter with Smithers’s son) are as bad as those of the other characters, and he’s not shy about relating his experiences in extreme detail while laughing, not to mention using them to goad a feeble old man into a deadly duel he can’t win (not that he doesn’t deserve it).  Samuel L. Jackson once again plays a layered and intense character, and although he has appeared in most of Tarantino’s work in some form, his characters never become repetitive or blend together (something that cannot, sadly, be said for frequent contributor Madsen at this point).

The other real wildcard is Daisy, who acts like she doesn’t much care about being taken to her death by Ruth (although she doesn’t appreciate it much when he blatantly elbows and punches her in the face for so much as talking or singing a song he doesn’t like).  She’s a hardened criminal, but we can’t quite see her as a villain when surrounded by so many other bastards.  Add to that the fact that she’s the only woman among these gruff brutes, and that she’s in chains throughout the entire movie, and she doesn’t seem so bad next to neurotic lunatic Ruth, racist war criminal Smithers, stoic-butcherer-of-innocents Bob, or, y’know, Mr. Blonde.  Regardless, Jennifer Jason Leigh plays what could have been a one-note psychopath as someone that we’re constantly keeping an eye on because she’s just so damn exciting to try to figure out.

Early on, Ruth suspects that someone in the haberdashery was planted there in order to spring Daisy loose, and Tarantino plays curiously close to formula by not only having Ruth be correct, but in some cases telling us what’s going to happen (literally: Tarantino himself voices the narrator who lets us know that “Somebody poisoned the coffee!” while we were watching something else).  Having nearly everyone who was waiting at the haberdashery be involved in the prison-break plot seems obvious and too easy, especially since both Warren and Ruth guess as much two hours before it’s revealed (whereas Mr. Orange being revealed as a cop was a genuine surprise that also made sense with context).  Alas, Gage/Mobray/Bob are all just bad guys who that very morning executed poor Zoë Bell and a cast of the most unsuspecting, likable ingénue-types you’ve ever seen, with the help of Daisy’s brother Jody (for some reason played by Channing Tatum, who seems out of place).  If the intention is to have the result be unexpected because it’s what the audience thought they were supposed to expect, it doesn’t quite work, simply because it’s too tamely handled (even with the vicious actions of the outlaws), and renders some very interesting details we thought we were supposed to be paying attention to (for example, wondering how a pink jellybean wedged between two floorboards ended up where it was) relatively futile.

I’ll give Tarantino this, though: he avoids the extended Django-esque shootout in favor of having each shot fired count for something.  Scenes in which characters are killed take not the form of action scenes, but of old-fashioned duels and straightforward executions.  Appropriate and realistic (aside from the buckets of blood), yes, but still fatiguing after we make it to the end, sitting with the last living characters (who are soon to be goners anyway) and thinking about what we’ve just been through and what it was all worth.  The union of Warren and Mannix is a nice illustration of how things may have been if the South simply looked at slaves as human beings, or perhaps how things could be now if everyone chilled the fuck out and loved one another, but it’s done in such Rocky IV fashion that you have to ask, “What else?” after the credits pop up, even after being in the theater for three hours.

As usual, Tarantino brings out career-highlight performances from the actors, especially Jackson, Leigh, and Goggins, keeps it all hilariously and satisfyingly in-universe (Red Apple Tobacco, anyone?), and leaves us feeling like we’ve witnessed something big happen.  Much like Basterds and Django, it’s not a film I’d probably watch again (something that hurts me to say about a Tarantino piece), but it’s enough to keep me, y’know, casually seeing him.

The Hateful Eight (2015); written and directed by Quentin Tarantino; starring Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Walton Goggins.