I feel like the highlight of any film director’s career, aspiring or otherwise, is when you try something new and different and completely out of left field and it totally works. That’s how I imagine George Lucas felt when he took his love of old film serials and transformed it into Star Wars, or how David Lynch took a stress dream about his life and parenthood in Philadelphia and ended up with Eraserhead. Or John Carpenter taking Halloween back to its haunted roots with an unkillable, silent murderer It’s just so satisfying that in an industry, and to a greater extent a society which obsesses over marketability and profitability that sometimes a little bit of creativity manages to sneak in and change things up a bit. As far as directors go though, I don’t know many who have managed the balancing act of creative freedom, critical acclaim and commercial appeal quite like Mr. Quentin Tarantino. Not Lucas, who ended up trying and failing to live up to his own enormous legacy. Not Lynch, whose unique vision has often found itself at odds with the box office. Not Carpenter, whose constant struggles with The Man ended in a bitter separation. Tarantino grabbed the tiger by the tail and now he’s got a tiger-skin rug in his den.
For those wondering why I haven’t covered a Tarantino film before now after I just blew smoke, there are two main reasons. One, I had already seen what was the ‘major’ Tarantino films (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction) prior, and none of his other films really seemed to fit the Marathon motif. Yes, occasionally I try to focus this list on horror movies. Secondly, technically I had already watched a Tarantino movie for the Marathon years back, which ultimately never coalesced into a review. That movie was From Dusk Till Dawn, the vampire action-horror movie that saw Mr. Brown split directing duties right down the middle with Robert Rodriguez, the guy who made a bunch of B-movies and also Spy Kids. The film is, as you’d expect, of two minds, a legitimately tense thriller that devolves into a sleazy wannabe Army of Darkness schlockfest with vampire strippers and guns popping out of dude’s dicks. Could it have worked? Yeah. Does it work? Not in my opinion, no. The sudden shift in tone, although likely intentional by the directors, is jarring and only highlights the fact that these are two stories that really would have been better off explored in their own films. Also the attempt at making the audience sympathize for the death of an unapologetic rapist and murder, even if it does give George Clooney a chance to actually act, just rings hollow. Perhaps someone could drum up the enthusiasm to write up a couple thousand words for From Dusk Till Dawn, but that someone wasn’t your ol’ pal Thunderbird.
Which brings us to The Hateful Eight, the eighth and possibly final film by Tarantino (can’t remember if he’s still retiring). This was also his second foray in the western genre following the immensely popular Django Unchained, and if this was going to be his last film, he certainly pulled out all the stops. An all-star cast, including Kurt Russell, Channing Tatum and Samuel Jackson, a score by composing legend Ennio Morricone, sweeping vistas taken straight from a nature documentary, Tarantino has practically lifted a spaghetti western from the 1970s wholesale and modified it for the modern age. Which is about the same thing he did with Jackie Brown and Kill Bill, so you know he’s got a great track record for this kind of thing.
Of course things aren’t quite what you might expect from a typical Sergio Leone type film. There are sweepings vistas yes, but almost the entire movie takes place in a single room, which imbues it with a claustrophobic atmosphere. Instead of the sweltering heat we usually associate with the wild (wild) west, we’re in a the middle of a blizzard. Rather than an adventure film, a lone gunman wandering into a blighted town and enacting justice, it’s something quite different. More of a whodunit murder mystery crossed with a character study of eight different people forced to interact with each other. However it does take place in the American West (Wyoming specifically) circa the late 19th century (a few years after the Civil War, specifically), which at the end of the day is all you really need to be a western movie, in a technical sense.
The Hateful Eight may have subverted those common features of westerns, but I think it’s mainly so that Tarantino can highlight the major theme of the genre, and specifically the late-era westerns of Leone and others: nihilism and violence. There are no heroes in The Hateful Eight, no gallant John Waynes or Lone Rangers here to save the damsel and shoot a couple dozen Apaches along the way. There are only people all too eager to throw any semblance of morality to the wind in order to achieve their own interests. John Ruth is perfectly willing to murder everyone in the store/house (Minnie’s Haberdashery)in order to protect his bounty, Mannix is a craven opportunist despite his ‘Southern pride’ and his supposed position of sheriff, and so on. Even Sam Jackson’s character, Major Marcus, who you’d assume would be the go-to character to root for, has a history of torture and murder, and in fact might have the highest body count by the end of the film. ‘Good or bad’, ‘hero or villain’? In the world of The Hateful Eight, and by extension spaghetti westerns as a whole, it’s more ‘the one holding the gun is right, the one not holding a gun is wrong’. Why else would folks like Clint Eastwood get to just walk into some town, murder those they decided deserved to die, and then just leave without any repercussions? In the actual American West things were much more controlled and subject to the rule of law, but in the American West of cinema, the only rule is might makes right.
The Hateful Eight is also a violent film as I mentioned, and in that way it is textbook western. These are movies about people with guns shooting at each other after all, even if you tried to fairy tale it up with folks just falling over with no blood it’s a genre built on death. However, The Hateful Eight isn’t just a violent movie, just as it wasn’t just dealing with the harsh realities of frontier life. It’s hyper-violent in that tried-and true Tarantino fashion, with folks vomiting blood, heads exploding, and other such horrific acts upon the human body. Honestly it reaches a point where it ends up becoming comical, and you end up wondering if Robert Rodriguez somehow got into the editing booth, but it makes sense. These are absurdly awful people after all, it makes sense that the violence they inflict on each other are similarly excessive. Go big or go home has been the motto of Quentin Tarantino’s entire film career upto this point, that it would be the basis for his final film is pretty much a given.
The music is amazing, as is expected from Ennio Morricone returning to the work that made him a legend. Tarantino’s writing and characterization is on par with the rest of his work, again as expected, although there are moments where I think he might have passed ‘witty’ and dipped into ‘pretentiousness’ around the time folks start dying. Overall I had a very fun time with The Hateful Eight, and I have no problem tossing my recommendation into the pile. It’s funny, it’s violent, it’s crazy, and when Halloween rolls around that’s what you want in a movie. If this is truly the last film Quentin Tarantino ever makes, I’d say he left on a high note.
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