Tense, wildly bloody and fiercely provocative on almost every level, Quentin Tarantino has kicked off my 2016 cinematic joyride in precisely the fashion I relish and expect from him.
But there's the rub - what we get is almost exactly what we were expecting. This needn't be a bad thing of course; there are few directors with as vivid a catalogue or so distinct a film signature in today's ever more homogeneous Hollywood. To lend Tarantino a couple of hours (the heavy side of three with the intermission, as it happens) in the hopes of getting that Tarantino dialogue from these Tarantino players in the throes of that Tarantino cinematography is a great wager and one we feel bound to win.
This time around the acting in particular was stellar. Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russell dominate the screen magnificently while Jennifer Jason Leigh slowly burbles up into an increasingly twisted, ghastly mess in the most interesting performance of the film. It's fantastic. The racial aspect in this post-Civil War story also bears out several interesting character moments that layer the story in ambiguity (and come very close to commenting on what's happening in America today, as Tarantino himself has discussed).
So why do I feel a tad short-changed? Is it that the unique style is now overfamiliar and that The Hateful Eight is too much of an eighth film to blow my mind in the way its predecessors managed? Yeah, maybe. It's by no means a new issue - critics have been chewing over whether Tarantino's been recycling his act since Inglourious Basterds - just one that I've finally caught up to in my aging cynicism. After just lauding his consistency, it's probably unfair to have my cake and eat it. 'Reservoir Dogs meets Django Unchained' makes a delicious melting pot to plunge my face into. And I felt greedy for wanting something more.
Then I realised exactly what I was hungering for, and why it is that The Hateful Eight, specifically, exposes Tarantino's weaknesses as a filmmaker. I wanted depth, a real bone-deep connection to what was unfolding. There's generally been more style than substance in the latter films, and that's been fine. Kill Bill and Django lent themselves well to their sensory blaze across the surface of their worlds. That fire is sucked back in on itself in The Hateful Eight, confined to essentially two locations where it crackles ominously under the floorboards, leaping up only when the pressure becomes unbearable.
The film owes much to John Carpenter's horror masterpiece, The Thing, in which a blizzard traps a group in a claustrophobic space forcing them to contend with a malevolent force that could be lurking behind any or all of the squinting eyes present. The Hateful Eight is even overlaid with three unused tracks originally intended for The Thing by composer Ennio Morricone. Both films open to a haunting blaze of white that hurts to look upon and perfectly suggests the uncompromising threat boding for our characters. When the horror's finally quenched, the beaten, still-damned survivors sink into a grim solidarity. And blood freezes on the snow.
The point of departure is that The Thing doesn't hinge on spectacle (though it certainly delivers it), whereas The Hateful Eight is driven by it. I believed in the characters of The Thing; their reality and grit are established clearly. The viewer gets a measure of the souls at risk in a way that Tarantino's clever black wit simply isn't designed to achieve. Tension is still built expertly through the prowess of technique but ultimately the stakes for these characters feel diminished, and this is a serious issue when the narrative through-line is drawn entirely by the complex many-bodied interactions of characters trapped by their oppressive setting. Slaughter becomes a lottery, the next splatter or one-liner or eloquent-but-still-largely-superficial speech is my only point of engagement. And this time that's really not enough to match the demands of the premise.
The end result is a cinematic experience that scintillates as only Tarantino can, but when the blood dries and the credits roll that yawning lack of substance hollows out the soul of the film and left me wondering if it can really stand up without it.
D
