The Deadly Companions: THE HATEFUL EIGHT

Quentin Tarantino’s films are unfailingly concerned with using impeccable craft – sharp widescreen blocking, showy camera moves, nesting doll narrative structure – to show off his video store savant chops. Each new effort is an excuse to raid the cabinets of his genre knowledge: gangster pictures, heist movies, blaxploitation films, kung fu cinema, spaghetti Westerns, World War II epics, car chase actioners, and Grindhouse exploitation flicks. He loves the idea of movies almost as much as actually having made a movie. His latest is The Hateful Eight, a blending of a Sergio Corbucci snow Western and an Agatha Christie locked-room mystery. It’s also easily identifiable as a Tarantino picture, not just in its predictable mixture of inspirations, but in concerning itself with secrets and revenge, violence and profanity, chatty killers and Rubik’s Cube plotting tied up in a bow made from faux-vintage 70’s tics. By now you should know exactly what to expect out of his films.

A Tarantino film always features long talkative sequences of deferred suspense slowly building to shocking outbursts of violence. It forms the backbone of his best pictures. (Inglorious Basterds, for example, is a cascading collection of perfectly structured chatty setpieces.) With The Hateful Eight he makes an entire picture out of one enclosed talkathon. Set in the years following the Civil War, at a remote roadhouse in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, a bounty hunter (Kurt Russell) and his captive (Jennifer Jason Leigh) are trapped in a blizzard. Stuck waiting out the storm with an eclectic group of strangers – a rival bounty hunter (Samuel L. Jackson), a stagecoach driver (James Parks), a hangman (Tim Roth), a cowboy (Michael Madsen), an elderly Confederate veteran (Bruce Dern), a Mexican proprietor (Demian Bichir), and an unpersuasive rookie sheriff (Walton Goggins) – he’s convinced one of them is secretly scheming to spring his prisoner. Each is an opposite of some sort to another, a tangle of conflicts and grievances ready to boil over.

The ensemble is Tarantino’s most derivative, from Jackson as essentially an older, chattier Django Unchained to Roth in a role that sounds written for Christoph Waltz. They, and the rest, are types and remain so, conduits for Tarantino’s words and pawns in his plot. At least the cast is made up of dependable character actors who are relishing the opportunity to speak elongated, dense, complicated paragraphs of chewy dialogue. The performances are crackling, but it’s Tarantino’s shaggiest, emptiest script, his thinnest idea stretched across three hours. Maybe that part won’t feel quite so acute years from now, removed from the elaborate White Elephantine presentation and promotion, conspicuously hyping connection to canonical old school epics like Ben-Hur through its 70mm format and reviving (sort of) the roadshow concept, from overture and intermission to the commemorative booklet. It’s less and more than all that, some of his sharpest direction married to his most hollow story.

Set almost entirely in a small indoor space with a raging blizzard outside, there’s a great sense of claustrophobic paranoia (echoes of The Things, emphasized with an ominous Morricone score) as the tough men size each other up, and the captured woman quietly looks for a way out of her chains. She knows who’s there to help her, but she doesn’t let on, both to keep his cover and to keep the audience’s guessing game going. It’s fun watching the other characters try to figure it out for themselves, a neat little mystery primed to explode. Cinematographer Robert Richardson (in his fifth collaboration with Tarantino) executes tight and elegant formal control, staging varied and interesting angles within the confined space, juxtaposing it with blindingly white vistas of howling winds and galloping horses. It breathes with lengthy takes and long looks, not exactly slow cinema, but of a relaxed pace that recalls, say, Blake Edwards’s unusual 1971 film Wild Rovers in its easygoing Western danger. Nothing like a Tarantino picture to make one want to scrape the back of the brain for obscure genre comparison points.

My attention did not drift once during the extended runtime. He’s too good a craftsman and has too good a cast trapped in a gripping hook for that to happen. But I did find myself questioning why I had to be watching it. All Tarantino films deal with “edgy” material, that is to say uncomfortable subject matter (the holocaust, slavery, and so on) used for genre ends and political points, loaded up with bloodshed and profanity in overtly movie-ish ways. But Hateful Eight is barely engaging in any serious ideas beyond “people can be awful,” and isn’t using any of the inherent subtextual tensions to meaningfully add to the suspense or the drama. It’s merely cheap offense muddying an otherwise engaging and entertaining experience.

Despite a black bounty hunter and Confederate veterans cooped up together, it has only fleeting serious thoughts about race, and despite the one woman in the bunch being a villain (we’re told she’s bad, but never why until late in the game) gender rarely overtly enters the question. It’s a movie that’s just out to tell its simple, nihilistic little story (everyone has their hateful moments) in a complicated, drawn-out way, exploiting hot-button ideas with no intention of using them for more than uncomfortable shocks. At least the plotting is reasonably compelling, and the mystery engaging enough. It’s sometimes fun, and other times nasty, but the two were mostly mutually exclusive here in my eyes. But being so long and so well constructed it had plenty of time after nearly every instant that lost me to win me back.

The film has a wicked mean streak, with slurs spat out for comic effect, a woman repeatedly battered for punctuation and punchlines, and an extended rape anecdote staged for queasy laughs. (That it probably didn’t really happen, and is instead a story told to make another character mad, doesn’t blunt the cackling glee with which the devastating act is visualized for our benefit.) The movie is willing to toss aside any possible avenues of empathy in order to go for a brutal moment. It’s an unserious lark with serious violations and sadism on its mind, feinting at heavy ideas to fill the bitter hollow pit in its core. The movie wraps up with Tarantino’s usual gnarly violence, cartoonish and self-satisfied gobs of gore spraying out from the cast members one by one. It’s a long-delayed payoff – half exciting, half disturbing – for so much talky, sick tension.

A release of a sort, predictable but vivid and full of his typical surprise kills, the climax also deflates suspense and danger, especially as many fatal shots are played for cruel jokes (even when it happens to characters we’re basically rooting for). It matches the amped up ugliness of the subtext, and the relentlessness with which most of the gooiest gore effects are inflicted upon women and people of color in the cast (most of them in a depressing mass murder flashback). The Hateful Eight is disturbingly easy, and often entertaining, to watch, but hard to indulge, playing with painful cruelty for light distraction. Unlike his last few films, where violence is modulated and contained within a moral and pointed context, here it is unmoored, grotesque, deadening. The movie is compelling but difficult, a pointed display of American bloodlust and prejudice that ends up grooving on such nastiness.

Julia's World: EAT PRAY LOVE

Under the direction of Ryan Murphy, most recently notable for creating the TV show Glee, the popular Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat Pray Love has become a star turn for Julia Roberts who holds the screen with movie star style as she poses in exotic locations. This is a pretty travelogue with gorgeous scenery and well-dressed costars. What other leading lady in recent memory gets to be romanced by James Franco and Javier Bardem in the same picture? What other leading lady gets to indulge in lovingly prepared meals, walk through lush jungles and beautiful ruins, and look consistently endearing? This is a movie of wish fulfillment, allowing an audience to trek to Italy, India, and Indonesia with a beautiful travelling companion who lets us meet beautiful people.

It’s also a movie dripping in syrupy schmaltz, a gooey, sloppy mess that results in a movie that practically slides off the screen. This isn’t a chick flick; its a woman’s picture, but one portentous in the deep meaning it thinks it’s passing down to us. Roberts plays Elizabeth Gilbert, a writer who leaves her husband (Billy Crudup), has a fling with a struggling actor (Franco), and is all around unsettled. She tells her close friend (Viola Davis) that she feels disconnected from life, unsure of whom she really is. What she decides she needs is some time to get in touch with her appetites, her spirituality, and herself. Thus the eating, praying and loving that happens on her yearlong trek across three exotic locales.

Through her travels, Julia Roberts remains remarkably well put-together. She devours tempting plates of pasta that are sumptuously photographed. After many of those meals she mentions her need for wider pants, but when we get the shot of her struggling to button her jeans, she still looked skinny to me. She also stays remarkably clean, even when she tumbles off of a bike into a muddy ditch.

Figure and cleanliness aside, Roberts brings some small nuance to a role that, as scripted, has very little nuance inherent. She stands before breathtaking vistas, bikes through dripping, green rainforests, and meditates at an ashram in the heart of bustling India. She’s a great surrogate traveler for the audience, experiencing great beauty at every turn.

At each location, she meets people who help her along on her journey of self-discovery. The most intriguing is the sixtyish man from Texas whom she meets in India and is played by the always welcome, always excellent, Richard Jenkins. He has a moving background and a warm screen presence. Later, in Indonesia, Javier Bardem enters the picture and nearly steals the whole thing away with his effortless charm.

Yet, for all its amazing sights and charming cast, the film is frustrating in its lack of introspection. This is a story about a woman’s self-discovery, a woman coming to terms with whom she is, mentally and spiritually, finding a perfect balance and a sense of completeness. And yet, this is a film that gives us almost no sense of her interior thoughts. Sure, we get a few passages of on-the-nose narration, but we are otherwise left stranded with only occasional quivering lips, moody flashbacks, pensive eyes, and, maybe, a single tear rolling down Robert’s cheek. It’s a film that goes out of its way to convince an audience that this woman has learned Big Lessons on her journey, lessons that will change her life, change her outlook, for the better. And yet, as the credits rolled, I remained unconvinced.

Still, I found Eat Pray Love to be an agreeable experience. I liked the scenery and I liked the actors that I had to share it with. As the movie started, I found myself resisting it. I found it too maudlin, too episodic, and too full of polished imagery covering up its hollowness, it’s hodgepodge spirituality, it’s reductive view of foreign culture and it’s navel-gazing dullness. But the film outlasted my will to resist. While my early complaints still stand, by the film’s end I found myself lulled into a sense of small pleasure. It’s a shiny, big-budget, continent-spanning film with fine actors and a nice look, pleasant and undemanding. Robert Richardson’s sun-soaked cinematography is consistently lovely and the cast is enjoyable company. The film is far worse than it thinks it is, but much better than I was expecting, hardly necessary, but certainly watchable.