Movie Review: The Hateful Eight

Every kind of ugliness finds its way to Minnie's Haberdashery, the setting of Quentin Tarantino's nihilistic - and nastily funny - chamber piece The Hateful Eight.

That ugliness - misogyny, racism, homophobia and an unrelenting bloodthirst (common to nearly all Tarantino characters) – can be found within the wood cabin's residents, all eight of them waiting impatiently for an icy blizzard to blow over in America's west.

(Don’t be fooled by the title, though. There may only be a couple of quartets on the poster but the death toll - spoiler alert, barely - sits well in the double digits. For QT, eight is not enough.)

Set shortly after the Civil War, soldiers from both sides are adjusting, poorly, to life in an apparently unified America.

Samuel L. Jackson's Major Marquis Warren, famed for his white-killing prowess during the war, is these days making a living as a bounty hunter. At the film's opening, however, he's facing certain death, sitting in the cold atop three corpses with no horses to carry them to the town of Red Rock, where his payday awaits.

In the kind of uncanny coincidence usually imagined by the Coen brothers, Warren is happened upon by another bounty hunter, John 'The Hangman' Ruth (a mightily-moustachioed Kurt Russell).

The two have a professional, cordial history, despite the racial chasm between them. Nonetheless, if Major Warren is going to ride in The Hangman's carriage, he has to pledge that he not try to steal the claim for his own prisoner, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), whose crimes are apparently so vicious they're never actually outlined in the film. When a Quentin Tarantino script can't bear to utter someone's charges, you know they must be pretty bad.

The coincidences don't end there. Soon, the carriage is picking up a rambling stranger - lost in the snow - revealed to be Red Rock's new sheriff, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). The privacy-craving Hangman is caught in a quandary, given that Mannix is the one who'll end up paying him for Daisy's delivery. Leave the sheriff to die, and Ruth might as well abandon his prized $10,000 prisoner in the wilderness too.

The uneasy foursome rides on, eventually taking shelter in the aforementioned Minnie's Haberdashery, where the coincidences continue to bombard them with greater velocity than any blizzard. Among those similarly seeking shelter at Minnie’s: a Confederate general (Bruce Dern) whose wartime past unfortunately intersects with Major Warren, not to mention the actual hangman (Tim Roth) responsible for someday tightening Daisy's noose.

Slightly more inexplicable is the presence of a simmering cowboy (Michael Madsen) and Bob the Mexican (Demián Bichir), the latter apparently running the place in Minnie's absence. Understandably, tensions are high amongst the racially- and sexually-divided occupants, each of them already trigger-happy in even the friendliest of scenarios. They tentatively pledge to keep out of each other's hair for a few days; a couple weeks, tops.

Yeah, by nightfall, the truce is a distant memory.

The Hateful Eight's debut (not counting the leaking of the screenplay online) was a staged reading by Tarantino and a slew of his favourite actors in 2014. He's since expressed a desire to mount a production in the live theatre space. Despite the much-vaunted 70mm cinematography by Robert Richardson we can currently enjoy on celluloid, you can see why he wants to go live once more. This is easily QT's talkiest feature, without exception. (I'd also suggest it's his most gory, though we'd need to count up exploded-heads per movie before making the official call.)

Not that anything feels lost in this cinematic telling. The extra-wide lens of Richardson's camera is not just capturing the snowy American vista, but allowing Tarantino to position performers with theatrical precision. The camera is primarily remarkable in how it captures the subtle power shifts from character to character indoors; then, in depicting the glorious landscape outside their window. In a script with this much dramatic irony, the cinematography tells the story with beautiful comic timing.

Tarantino is a wordsmith and savvy screenwriter; this we know. The Hateful Eight, which spends much of its three hour running time in stasis, proves he knows how to move the camera thrillingly too.

It helps having this cast (plus the legendary Ennio Morricone scoring his first western in decades – and yes, he remains the master). Jackson, in Tarantino's projects, is as good as actors get; as the picture's ostensible lead - and, almost by default, it's least despicable character - he does career best work (certainly equaling his iconic parts in Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained).

Every other actor named - and a couple others I haven't, to maintain the pleasant surprise of their appearance - clearly relishes the words given to them, no matter how ugly and, yes, hateful.

You may find yourself challenged by the epithets spat from their mouths. In previous works by Tarantino, such language was punctuation. Here, the characters are shooting their dialogue to kill, specifically seeking to ignite a violent reaction. My audience laughed uproariously - because Tarantino can land a joke with ease - hopefully registering the discomfort in the humour. Tarantino’s making a point: 2016 is a long way from the 1870s, but as America continues to wrestle with its diverse citizenship, ugliness reigns supreme. See also: the current presidential race.

By the end of The Hateful Eight, some progress, and peace has been found. Yet, only after buckets of viscera have been sprayed across the screen. Such is the endless march of America away from ugliness, through ugliness. With his 1-2-3 punch of Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, Tarantino is revealing himself to be pop cinema's foremost political provocateur.

His flicks used to be largely film-geek kibble (and there wasn't a thing wrong with them). Now, QT seems to really have something to say. Find another director doing so with such skill and audience-pleasing ease. You could trek across the wild and wooly plains of the United States with Leo Dicaprian-tenacity and still come up short.

4/5

Rated R 18+ for high impact violence. The Hateful Eight’s 70mm theatrical roadshow is now showing in select cinemas. A slightly shorter version of the picture, projected digitally, will be released widely in Australia on January 19.