The Hateful Eight- Eight-Barreled Brilliance

In Quentin Tarantino’s world, you can never ever trust anyone.

For in his cinematic world, populated by elements of genres as eclectic as crime drama, Blaxploitation caper, Kung Fu actioner and war thriller and endless stream of devilishly intriguing characters, you might find yourself trapped in a relentless onslaught of nervy fear and dread in closed spaces, in elaborate conversations, before everyone starts drawing and firing at each other. And then, in the middle of a bloodbath, you find that your friends are the ones aiming at you and you can only trust your foes.

All of this nerve-wracking paranoia comes in hefty chunks in his eighth feature film- a film which might seem like a fellow Western genre piece to his last gleaming red dynamite stick, ‘Django Unchained’- there is weighty talk of racial tensions in this film too. However, while that film was a showier piece, a blazing wallop of black revenge against the ‘white dogs’, ‘The Hateful Eight’ is a different beast- a film which plays down typical bombast and instead chooses a template of sheer, claustrophobic menace.

This spells itself new territory for a writer-director best known for orgasmic celebrations of violence, tension and verbose fireworks- but fans, let’s not forget his simmering, taut breakout film ‘Reservoir Dogs’- a ticking yarn which crammed together several scoundrels all doubting each other. ‘The Hateful Eight’ does something deeper and more visceral- cramming together disgruntled rogues and then letting the threads of insidious hatred unravel with unmatched mastery.

The time is sometime after the blood-splattered Civil War, the place is a far-flung, snow-bound Wyoming and we are instantly introduced to bounty hunters and the bodies they carry- both live and dead. Bearded bounty hunter John Ruth is carrying along damned prisoner Daisy Domergue to Red Rock to hang her and he tows along, reluctantly fellow mercenary Major Marquis Warren, a wild-eyed old-timer who carries a letter from none other than good old Abe Lincoln- as a way to get along with white Americans in a country that has not really changed even after a war.

Together, with a blizzard roaring, the three come across a bizarre cast of characters- a ‘son of the gun’ who needs to reach to a town to be its sheriff and four peculiar gentlemen in a weather-beaten haberdashery where they stop by and wait for the storm to end. Little by little, the doubt lingers in the air, the suspicions begin and as a fire crackles up nicely along with stew and coffee, Tarantino lets his slow-burn potboiler simmer, cook and unfold with relentless intensity.

This is a mostly solemn narrative, as intended by both the director as well as his crew. Master lensman Robert Richardson refutes the trademark stylistic flourishes and quick takes and instead shoots the increasingly sobering narrative nimbly and intuitively, choosing to linger over horses plowing through the snow, fur-gloved arms tinkering over piano keys and booted feet stomping on creaky wooden floors with thundering menace. All of it is scored, in an uncharacteristic masterstroke, by Ennio Morricone, offering us a haunting, elegiac score that throbs with deathly menace and dread. Tarantino himself chooses to cut his fascinatingly sneering characters some slack- allowing enough space between the film’s talky first half and the incendiary volcano of gore in the latter.

What does not change, however, is the typically terrific punch of the dialogue- always a Tarantino trope and this time the narrative packs in more potency than pulp- the words themselves more pointedly sharp rather than just pithy. Devoid of pop-cultural touchstones, the long-winded and often delectable conversations pack more seething anger, tension and visceral emotions between the lines than has been the case with Tarantino.

From a supposed hangman waxing eloquent the difference between frontier justice and civilized justice, to a man admitting that he ‘feels naked without a gun’, only to be replied back that the man asking for the same can protect him as well, from Warren explaining how Lincoln addresses him personally as ‘Dear Marquis’ and not as ‘Major’ to a point in which a room is divided into two American states so as to avoid potential confrontations, Tarantino’s command of the spoken word, both elaborate and snappy, still fascinates, even as it often scalds with both hilarity and horror. There is much of the latter between the verbal standoffs, in ways that shock and stun but there is also a lot of the former- even as it drips in between the hushed claustrophobic spaces all of a sudden and without warning. The humor is pitch-black, profane and uproarious- at a point, a woman, impressed with a vicious man’s French, demands desperately to be asked something to which she can reply ‘Oui’- but none of it overwhelms the inevitable terror of the proceedings.

This applies not only to the film’s blood-splattered brutality that detonates with split-second ruthlessness but to also the film’s glorious subtext about the harsh world in which the film’s denizens reside. Tarantino has mastered his violence this time around- it is gratuitous, shockingly misogynist but crucially painful, organic and vital- the film unafraid to revel in the terrifying hell unleashed on these uniformly devilish rascals. But it is his acidic portrayal of the world around them that makes ‘The Hateful Eight’ really so devastating.

This is an unforgiving world in which racial minorities still have to scavenge for some shred of acceptance for which they are willing to compromise their morals. The lines often burst with seething racism and sexism from men who live by a twisted conduct. Visually too, this is a harsh, ugly and unfurnished world- the one time when we see the sun shining on these snowy badlands is also when we see a victim degraded to morbid depths.

The writer-director also unveils the hidden, tender core beneath the rugged exteriors of these men. At one point, both Warren and Ruth admit that Lincoln’s supposed mention of his wife Mary Todd in the letter ‘gets to them’ emotionally. One of the men talks about spending Christmas with his mother while other- obviously impressed with another’s military exploits-starts acting as a de facto aide to the same.

The performances are universally spectacular.

Kurt Russell, as Ruth, is in terrific form, playing a Southern hillbilly who displays an often fatherly possessiveness about his shackled prisoner, Samuel L. Jackson is extraordinary as Warren, exhibiting, in a classic Tarantino flourish, a well-known distaste for ‘stupid animals’ and a taste for food as well and spouting lengthy soliloquies of death and violence with sneering menace. Michael Madsen and Tim Roth (two actors taken from ‘Reservoir Dogs’) are reliably excellent in their roles as shy introvert and smooth-talking executioner, Bruce Dern is even better as an idle, disinterested Confederate general and Jennifer Jason Leigh is a revelation as the screechy and grungy Daisy, full of vitriol, armed with a glimmer of insidious mischief and sizing up the men around her with her bloodied teeth in the film’s finest, most outrageously brilliant scene.

And yet, the film utterly and solely belongs to Walton Goggins as Chris Mannix, a sheriff totally out of his league in the film’s startling twists and turns. It is his character- a man giving to boasting of exploits with The Lost Cause- that lends Tarantino’s film its heart of whimsy and the film, a character closest to a hero. Right from his sing-song Southern delivery to the confident way in which he commands the film’s murky final half hour, Goggins creates recklessly only character in a crew of otherwise murderers and liars who we actually root for.

Tarantino employs some of his regular tricks here too- the chapter-divided narrative also jumps back and forth in time and space- but for most part ‘The Hateful Eight’ stays staunchly and stubbornly inside its cooking pot of hatred and violence before bubbling over with scalding gravy of blood and guts. Revenge is not on the menu here and the film’s sad climax is far from the celebration that the director usually hands us. While Tarantino has doffed his hat in style at Peckinpah and Leone, there is a starker similarity with John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’- with the only difference that in this brilliant film, the insidious, murderous creature lies beneath the skins of its characters. And it is unleashed with only disaster for all.

My Rating- 5 Stars.