I just viewed Quentin Taratino's latest, "The Hateful Eight"
and, for all the excesses and repetitions of favorite gimmicks that
seemed, to me, half-hearted and coasting with his last two films ("Inglorious Basterds", "Django Unchained"),
his new western is something of a return to form. Not that he's knocked
off any of those tricks that made him famous--unnaturally formal
dialogue cast in different accents and idioms, a surfeit of
action-stopping siloquies, title cards and the "Pulp Fiction"
trick of letting the narrative unexpectedly backtrack to reveal
elements that were at first withheld. "Hateful Eight", though, sees
these elements deployed with a conviction and a sure hand that lures you
closer to the prolonged doings of these trapped miscreants even as your
wishing the pace would pick up.
Not to give too much away, but
the plot concerns a bounty hunter , played by Kurt Russell, transporting
a condemned prisoner, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, to Red Rock,
Wyoming for hanging and to collect a reward. Due to a horrible winter
blizzard blasting over the mountain , the private stage coach the
Russell character had hired for the transported unexpectedly takes on
more passengers stranded along the pass and the coach is forced to stop
at a way station until the storm passes, a station already filled with a
collection of characters no one would not want to witness in the same
room. Tarantino is generous with this loquacious dialogue and the
exceptional cast each have their turn introducing who their characters,
revealing a back story and a chance to reveal an articulate, if
demented, world view and how it came to be formed. This does, of course,
slow the film to a pace that is painfully slow, and this verbosity
could easily have been pared back a good fifty minutes without
sacrificing Tarantino's uncanny knack for giving the various kinds of
evil a voice and a rationale, an ethos.
At times the movie becomes
work to stay seated for. Still,there is so much that is being done
right here, from the camera work and editing,the way scenes are framed,
the absolute sizzle of the dialogue when the verbal build up between one
character to another builds to secrets that are revealed, and yes, the
violence. Tarantino's tales are revenge plays in large part, a genre
that he's exploited brilliantly and less well, but he exceeds his best
work by the deceptive complexity. There is a multiplicity of duplicitous
motives; this is a pit of angry rats justifying their inevitable urge
to kill everyone in the room with a the kind of deliciousely gratuitous
locution that is foremost among Tarantino's script writing hall marks.
Smartly, Tarantino's tone for each of the way station inhabitants, none
of the speeches go so far in their waves of expressive finery to
suggest sympathy or provide a clue who the film's eventual hero maybe;
the impressive accomplishment of the film is that what we have here is a
story populated mostly by personas that would normally be treated as
villians; as with Shakespeare or canniest of the Revenge Play tragedians, a prime Tarantino makes the guilty among the roster of characters sufficiently
complex without romanticizing the life as means for transcendence. He
doesn't let you forget that each of these folks are heading for a bad
end.
The camera is an untrustworthy narrator, recording what
is revealed with regards to motivations, the insanity of well argued
dualistic , black and white points of view coming to a head. Agendas are
exposed, but they only give clues to secret agendas , undisclosed
machinations that themselves camouflage other plots . There are no
heroes, everyone has committed sins against everything we consider
righteous and just, and everyone shows that are more than they at first
seem, unpredictable, capable of anything. And rest assured , there is
plenty of the famous Tarantino violence, gruesome, ironic, unsparing. If
nothing else, QT's film world is a universe of verbal characters who ,
despite their ingenuous habits of expression, are not able to talk their
way out of the dour fates they've made for themselves. Theirs is a case
of talking a great game to justifiy their horrific acts, but the
universe seems not hear not a word of the self-serving eloquence . The
universe, rather, greets human action with consequences that cannot be
negoiated with.This film, not quite a masterpiece, is still a definitive
piece in this film maker's oeuvre.