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I’m not sure what about this particular script screamed 70mm to Tarantino, but it’s there, and only of benefit in the outdoor sequences. The claustrophobic set, or well it should be, looms too large, and like many things throughout this movie, is far too in love with itself. This has been a frequent problem of mine with Tarantino, a deep love affair he has with his own writing, an inability to edit, and a preference for coded racial language and hyper-stylized carnage. Sometimes this can be fun, like both volumes of Kill Bill, but The Hateful Eight takes three hours to say vague things, and uses one character as a literal punching bag.
The Hateful Eight is something of a confirmation of my opinions of Tarantino’s art, which is that of cartoonish, emotional stunted violence wrapped in a specific language. The film is more like a play in that it is nothing but a series of drawn out monologues and passages upon passages of dialog. A sense of the creator looking down upon his dialog and gleefully thinking it was the greatest thing ever written.
But what is the point he is trying to make here? Is it about racial tensions? Is it about revenge? It’s all so vague, and it goes nowhere very slowly. Bodies contort and fly as ribbons of blood fly out of them, but to what end? For us to just scream “Fuck yeah!” in mindlessly entertained fashion, I suppose. A director like Martin Scorsese uses violence to illustrate points, not merely for shock value or entertainment. Scorsese makes bullets look painful, Tarantino makes it look like gleeful play acting.
Even worse is the obsession the various male characters have with beating on the lone female, who has been made the focus of a good deal of violence. Daisy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has no agency, no memorable personality, and is most likely to linger in your mind for the excessive amounts of violence she’s subjected to. No matter how great Jennifer Jason Leigh tears into the role, and she is fantastic, going all in on her character’s spitting, manic laughing, and indulging in the subhuman wraith-like characteristics, what exactly did her character do to get singled out for the most amount of violence?
Quick deaths happen for many characters in the movie as bullets rip their bodies apart, but Daisy get a series of punishments. Within the first fifteen minutes she’s sported a black eye, been pistol whipped, and punch in the face. As the movie the progresses, she’ll get her two front teeth knocked out, get blood vomited on her, her nose broken, have the viscera of a character’s exploded head smother her face, and get the most horrific death in the entire film. Other characters are far worse, and deserve more karma aligned fates, but Daisy enters the film chained to her captor, and she exits the film in a similar manner. Daisy is never let off of the chain for long, and even when she is, she’s at the mercy and machinations of the men orbiting her life.
The only character who is as memorable as she is, and equally for questionable reasons, is Samuel L. Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren. He’s the smartest character, the closest thing we have to a moral center in this nihilistic hellhole, and yet…. Tarantino gives him a monologue, which Jackson tears into with gusto, about the rape and murder of another character’s son. Repeatedly forced to use the word “dingus,” which I guess is to make us laugh at a black character’s description of his genitals, the whole monologue just feels ugly, and childish. Tarantino is well-known as a lover of racial questionable language, his scripts are peppered with the word, but it sometimes felt as if it had a larger point. Here he just feels like empty provocations, made all the more glaring by Jackson’s delivery of the line about black folks only feeling safe when white people are unarmed. Even worse, so many of these provocations don’t feel like they’re building to a larger point, but simply stoking the fires towards reactionary moments.
I said I didn’t know what Tarantino was building slowly towards, and I still don’t, and The Hateful Eight plays out like a series of interconnected set pieces. The scenes become formulaic after a while. We know they’re going to play out with large passages of dialog, then erupt in violence, go back to being calm, then more dialog, another kill, stillness, and repeat until end credits. The pacing is off, and it wanders all over the place.
Which is a damn shame because there’s a few things to admire about the whole thing. Sure, the choice of 70mm, which is great for a large scale outdoor epic, is odd, but his production designers, costumers, and makeup artists brought their best work. Even better is Ennio Morricone’s first original western score in decades, and it plays everything for dread and creeping violence. And some of the performances, even if the characters are half-baked in the script, are truly wonderful, Leigh and Jackson are the standouts, but Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins, and Tim Roth all delivery great work.
I’ve long felt that Tarantino was nothing more than a pastiche artist, more inclined to sensationalism and knockout set pieces than making truly great films. He makes nice entertainments, but he didn’t earn any of his provocative word play or scenarios in this one. The swagger is there, but this is just ugly and hateful, spinning out gore and profanities to not greater point. Much like Daisy’s monologue in the final chapter, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all one long bluff, a mask for an angry, dark work trying to say something. But I don’t even think it knew what it wanted to say.
