The Hateful Eight

© 2015 The Weinstein Company. All Rights Reserved.

Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino on the set of THE HATEFUL EIGHT Photo: Andrew Cooper, SMPSP / © 2015 The Weinstein Company. All Rights Reserved.

© 2015 The Weinstein Company. All Rights Reserved.
Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino on the set of THE HATEFUL EIGHT
Photo: Andrew Cooper, SMPSP / © 2015 The Weinstein Company. All Rights Reserved.

In 2011, three of the world’s major suppliers of motion picture cameras—ARRI, Aaton, and Panavision—each announced they were ceasing production of film-based cameras and switching to digital.  The following year, Kodak announced it was selling off its film division.  As of 2014, all but 2,500 of the approximately 40,000 theater screens in the US have been converted to the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) format.   The advantages of digital distribution are primarily shared by theatrical exhibition and motion picture production.  That is, since the advent of DCP, motion picture studios have almost entirely eliminated the duplication and shipping costs associated with 35mm exhibition and theater owners have automated much of the exhibition process thereby eliminating the need for skilled projectionists.  Aside from the technical inferiority of the format, the absolute best of which appears washed out compared to even a middling film print, none of these savings have been passed on to the consumer.

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, punctuated beautifully by Ennio Morricone’s original score, THE HATEFUL EIGHT, has been presented for a limited, one-week engagement at 100 theaters nationwide in Ultra Panavision 70, a 70mm panoramic format 15% wider than the conventional 35mm standard Panavision format, with a stunningly greater degree of detail. Ultra Panavision was most notably employed for BEN-HUR and last used on the 1966 Basil Drearden epic KHARTOUM, which both utilized it to capture mostly outdoor panoramas.  Currently, the film is showing in digital cinema nationwide.

Our story begins several years after the end of the Civil War.  Union soldier-turned-bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) flags down a stagecoach transporting John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell) and his bounty, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who is to be hanged in the city of Red Rock, Wyoming.  Delayed by a whiteout blizzard (what we Midwesterners call “October”), the trio picks up a fourth, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) and takes refuge at Minnie’s Haberdashery—a watering hole where all is not as it seems.

At Minnie’s they happen upon Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), the hangman of Red Rock, Bob the Mexican (Demian Bichir), and two suspiciously quiet men, Joe Gage (Michael Madsen) and Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern).  What follows is part stage play, part whodunit, and part revenge porn—Anthony Shaffer’s SLEUTH comes to mind.

Since RESERVOIR DOGS, Quentin Tarantino has always put forth character studies with no innocents, no survivors without consequence, and at least one elaborate deception.  One can’t help but sense a stagnation in Tarantino’s storytelling, especially when his previous two pictures, DJANGO UNCHAINED and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, already effectively trod the disenfranchised retribution fantasy as well as the themes and lyricism of the Spaghetti western.  Odd that, in his tenth outing, he hasn’t once turned his eye toward the topical with gay protagonists, though he is content to overuse male-on-male rape as his closest go to.

I’ve never made a violent film. A violent film is one that bares a woman’s tits just to show them, instead of having it come from a place of some meaningfulness. There’s a way to present the conflicts we have in our sexuality that has meaningfulness and there’s a way to exploit sexuality without any meaning to it. There’s a way to present suffering and violence that has a meaning to it and a way to go lopping off heads that is mindless.

-Harvey Keitel, THE ART OF DARKNESS (1997 biography)

The strength of Tarantino’s oeuvre is in his usage of dialogue and violence to create depth and subtext.  In a movie landscape peppered with inane, plot-advancing exposition, Tarantino’s dialogues spin elaborate stories that bring us closer to the nature of his characters, or conversely further apart like a series of rabbit holes with no hint as to where they lead.  That too is a relief.  Twist-driven stories are tiresome, having become exercises in which the attentive viewer can unpack all the easter eggs that lead to a conclusion that has an equal chance of being right or wrong, depending on where the director chooses to take a left turn.  THE HATEFUL EIGHT invokes none of this:  The suspense and tension are built smartly on the interplay of the characters attempting to outwit one-another, rather than the omniscience of the audience’s reliance on twists past to dictate the outcome in a universe of finite possibilities like the horribly linear storylines of 90’s era video games.  Part of me wants to admit that Roger Ebert was right, and that THE USUAL SUSPECTS was a scourge on filmmaking rather than a boon, fixing our expectations forever on the reliability of the unreliable narrator trope.   Here, all the players are unreliable narrators.

In every film Tarantino’s made, no one is unnecessarily victimized.  Each person gets their comeuppance in a way that only the unobservant would interpret as hyper masculine violence porn.  While this holds true for EIGHT, it feels as though he’s overplayed his hand enough that several important beats don’t hit us as hard as should be.  Initially, yes.  When Daisy gets clocked in the jaw by Ruth the first three or four times, you feel it.  But once gallons of blood have soaked the floorboards of the Haberdashery, a harrowing near-escape doesn’t land with the usual punch.  Normally, in a Tarantino flick when someone loses an appendage, it’s a visceral moment.

In terms of the actual characterizations, however, QT is in top form: In particular, Walton Goggins’ performance as Mannix, a scenery-chewing bigot who claims to be the new sheriff of Red Rock.  While most of the characters, including a few surprise appearances I won’t spoil, are fine performances (hats off to Channing Tatum for somehow leveraging his generic, all-American charms into the realm of the creepy), it’s Goggins that builds the most interesting arc—a misguided, racist buffoon whose principles outweigh his prejudices.  Jennifer Jason Leigh as Daisy hits her cues to establish the stereotypically quiet psychopath (Domergue… Dahmer…) though this may yet be another misdirection.  The rest of the cast plays very much to type, including Tim Roth’s  mustache-twirling Brit, Bruce Dern’s cantankerous asshole, Demian Bachir’s cartoonish Mexican, Michael Madsen’s Michael Madsen and Russell’s Jack Burton-meets-Wyatt Earp of whom I can’t decide whether to find delightful or groan-inducing.

The standout, of course, is the visual storytelling.  There’s a moment where DP Robert Richardson breaks the so-called 180 degree rule in which the conventional setup for a dialogue utilizes matched over-the-shoulder shots so when the perspective is flipped, the actors are still on the same sides of the screen.  Here, Richardson uses the enormous negative space afforded by the Ultra Panavision format to let our eyes digest the feckless chickens in the barn juxtaposed against the next shot of the blistering, frigid snowstorm.   As though Richardson’s winking at us and his fellow cinematographers, the two actors criss-cross so they exit into the snowstorm on the same sides of our periphery as when we entered the shot—breaking and sustaining the convention at the same time.

Though epics such as BEN-HUR leveraged the format’s size to capture sprawling outdoor sets, the 2.76:1 aspect ratio closely matches our field of vision and, wall-to-wall, entombs us in the Haberdashery with the eight players.  Academy or Panavision (what many mistakenly call “scope”) formats wouldn’t capture simultaneously this spaciousness and confinement.  Astonishingly, Tarantino pulls it off with a picture 1.7 times wider than in Lumet’s 12 Angry Men,  achieving the same tension.

The presentation of the 70mm roadshow delights and infuriates me.  Given the technical and financial hurdles involved, we’re unlikely to see Hollywood, the Mecca of risk averse capitalism, venture out into this lone wilderness again.  Why not?  Why is 3D gimmickry a better path to ticket sales than large, crisp images with colors that pop, musical overtures to set the mood as patrons enter, and intermissions to relieve us of the $500 of concessions we purchased going in (and give the theater an opportunity to profit from seconds)?

And there’s no possibility of a big breakthrough in movies—a new release of energy, like the French New Wave, which moved from country to country and resulted in an international cross-fertilization—when movies are financed only if they fall into stale categories of past successes…

And when I saw The Black Stallion on a Saturday afternoon, there was proof that even children who have grown up with television and may never have been exposed to a good movie can respond to the real thing when they see it. It was a hushed, attentive audience, with no running up and down the aisles and no traffic to the popcorn counter, and even when the closing credits came on, the children sat quietly looking at the images behind the names. There may be a separate God for the movies, at that.

-Pauline Kael, “Why Are Movies So Bad -or- The Numbers?”, The New Yorker; June 23, 1980

Granted, there will always only be a handful of pictures that benefit from this kind of presentation.   To wit, prior to THE HATEFUL EIGHT, only ten pictures were ever filmed in this particular format.  Movies today, though, seem less like an event than a chore, like something you feel obligated to squeeze in on your way to buy overpriced jeans.