The Hateful Eight Is Quentin Tarantino at his Most Brutal and Uncompromising
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
My patron-funded exploration of the films of Oliver Stone is full of highs and lows. One of the consistent lows has been finding out just how long Stone’s movies are.
I expect Stone’s movies to be endless and interminable. Yet when I saw how long Stone’s testosterone-poisoned 1999 football melodrama Any Given Sunday was my response was an outraged, “Two hours and thirty seven minutes? Are you fucking kidding me? If I’m going to watch an insanely long drama I might as well watch the extended version of The Hateful Eight.”
Thankfully a patron had chosen the four-part Netflix mini-mini-series version of The Hateful Eight as his Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 choice. So I pulled an audible and decided to watch and write about the only Tarantino movie I had not seen and revisit Any Given Sunday some other day.
When I was a movie-mad seventeen year old video store clerk, I thought Resevoir Dogs was the greatest movie ever made. Pulp Fiction changed my life. Nearly three decades later, Tarantino remains one of my all-time favorite filmmakers. I really like his movies! To put things in Marc Maron terms, he’s one of my guys.
Yet it took a Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pledge to get me to finally watch The Hateful Eight for reasons that turned out to be richly merited.
The title says it all. It’s The Hateful Eight, not The Hateful Eight, The Likable Three and The One Everybody Absolutely Adores. The Hateful Eight was marketed as a long, uncompromisingly grim, violent and profane downer populated by the worst people in the world, set in the deadly winter and confined to two locations. Seemingly only Tarantino could get away with something that purposefully vicious and non-commercial.
It felt like The Hateful Eight was a movie that Tarantino had to get out of his system rather than a story he had to tell. Tarantino had to plumb these dark depths do that he could once again see the light.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino’s 2019 follow-up, is at least partially about the Manson family and it’s as warm, cuddly and irresistible as Paddington compared to The Hateful Eight. Tarantino’s affectionate tribute to the late 1960s is a shameless crowd-pleaser whereas The Hateful Eight seems more interested in challenging than pleasing crowds.
The Hateful Eight lived up to its title and its reputation. Then again I watched a version of the film that was even longer, even darker and even more nihilistic than the one that played in theaters and most people saw.
One of the many perverse aspects of The Hateful Eight is that it is a motion picture specifically designed to feel like both a television show from the 1960s and a play.
Tarantino’s films are riotously kinetic and cinematic but The Hateful Eight is claustrophobic, snow-bound and stage-bound by design, the film equivalent of a bottle episode of a television show that strands its characters in one location and then turns up the heat.
The two-time Academy Award winner’s eighth film begins in a stagecoach where bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell, with facial hair so hideous it accomplishes the impossible feat of making the legendarily handsome actor ugly) is transporting vicious murderer Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh in an Oscar-nominated turn devoid of vanity or self-consciousness) to Red Rock, Wyoming and a date with a hangman’s noose.
Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a Civil War veteran who has amassed a body count on par with some small wars and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), the product of a prominent Confederate family and the next sheriff of Red Rock, receive shelter from a brutal blizzard in the stagecoach.
Daisy’s first words include a racial slur that Tarantino has used extensively in Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained and Jackie Brown. You know the one! Over the course of the film, characters never stop referring to Jackson’s fiery renegade by the N word.
This is another area where The Hateful Eight more than lives up and down to its reputation. The film is notorious for its extensive use of the N word yet I still found it jarring. That’s largely intentional. Tarantino does not want to let us get comfortable with that ugliest of words. He wants it to sting anew with each repetition. It does.
Tarantino is thrusting our nation’s ugly racial history in the audience’s face for over three hours. The Hateful Eight depicts anti-black racism and self-interest as the glue that holds our toxic and hopeless world together.
The non-stop use of racial slurs is one of the things that makes The Hateful Eight hard to watch and even harder to enjoy. There are moments of humor and humanity scattered throughout but otherwise The Hateful Eight is unrelenting in its nastiness.
It’s as if Tarantino is answering accusations that his films are excessively violent, nihilistic, sexist, racist and sexist by making the most violent, nihilistic, sexist and racially exploitative movie possible, a movie with no heroes, just pragmatists who are slightly less evil than their colleagues. .
The Major, Mannix, Ruth and Domergue end up at a lodge known as Minnie’s Haberdashery, where they are joined by such disreputable and dishonest rogues as Señor Bob (Demián Bichir), a mysterious Mexican who has ostensibly been left in charge of the lodge in its owner’s absence, cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), black-hearted retired military man General Sanford "Sandy" Smithers (Bruce Dern) and Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), Red Rock’s resident executioner.
The Hateful Eight strands these scoundrels in Minnie’s Haberdashery, cranks up the tension and explores multiple mysteries. Who is working behind the scenes to free Domergue before she pays for her crimes? And who poisoned the coffee that leads to multiple deaths?
Over the course of the proceedings true identities are revealed, the wicked and innocent alike die agonizing deaths, women are viciously abused and the N word is uttered so frequently that it’s as if Tarantino was paid her racial slur.
Because this is a Quentin Tarantino movie it’s masterfully written, brilliantly acted by a cast full of distinguished members of Tarantino’s repertory, particularly Jackson, who turns his blood-thirsty man of action into a volcanic force of nature and elegantly shot (by Robert Richardson) and scored (by Ennio Morricone, who picked up his only Academy Award for his work here).
As always, the individual parts are remarkable but the uncompromisingly grim end result is the least satisfying and enjoyable film Tarantino has made since his segment in Four Rooms.
Violence is deeply woven into the fabric of The Hateful Eight. It takes on myriad forms. It’s physical but also emotional and verbal. Tarantino seems as intent on punishing audiences and testing their tolerance for ugliness as he is in entertaining them.
Late in The Hateful Eight there is a flashback featuring stuntwoman-turned-beloved Tarantino repertory player Zoe Bell as Six-Horse Judy and Dana Gourrier as Minnie Mink, the owner and proprietor of the lodge where most of the film’s action take place.
They’re friendly and affable and welcoming to the strangers in their midst. Their behavior stands out to such an extent that they might as well be space aliens. It’s too good to last, of course, and the smiling women full of goodwill pay a terrible price for existing in this savage, heartless world but this brief sequence points the way towards a more nuanced film with an emotional palette beyond hatred, anger and rage.
Tarantino is one of our greatest populist entertainers but it feels like he made The Hateful Eight primarily for himself and the most indulgent members of his cult. If The Hateful Eight was designed to separate Tarantino’s real fans from the fake, the hardcore from the casual, then I failed his test.
When I finish watching one of Tarantino’s movies I’m usually overcome with an intense desire to see it again. I love the worlds Tarantino has created so much that I want to live in them as much as possible.
That was not how I felt at the end of The Hateful Eight however. Once was enough for me. It’s a movie I respect more than I enjoyed. The Hateful Eight is strong, bitter, piping hot black coffee but I’m afraid I am more of a Vanilla Skim Ice Chai Latte kind of guy myself.
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