On a precarious night in 19thcentury Wyoming, eight strangers find themselves hemmed into an outpost by a blistering storm. Outside: the landscape of the Wild West is buried beneath pillowy drifts of snow, and here in this lone throb of civilisation, our wanderers settle down for coffee and talk turns to the usual themes in any Tarantino film: deeds of violence sharpened on the edge of a territorial masculinity, honour, humiliation, and of course, vendettas and vengeance.
Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson share in common an audience which is mightily split on the question of their value and will cultivate the most extreme appraisals of their work long before they debut at the movies, everything from the redemptive to the disgustedly condemnatory. And yet, when you amble down to your local cinema and see the barrage of near-indistinguishable romantic comedies beamed from the gallery of back-lit posters, it’s easy to see that Tarantino’s films remain a cinematic event, a unique moment of imagination and daring wedged in-between all that Hollywood candyfloss.
Where else would you find a hero like the Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a black bounty-hunter with a cargo of frostbitten corpses he is hoping to drag to Red Rock for a handsome fee? Wearing a blood-red tie and wide-brimmed black hat which makes him look like a sorcerer from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s hallucinogenic films, Jackson plays the Major with the deep, righteous anger he has become famed for. He is no timid descendant of slaves, but a growling, white-eyed pistol-whipper, a personality which allows him to stand undeterred against the atmosphere of a poisonous racism that predominates the post-civil war scene of “Hateful Eight”. Many commentators have remarked on Tarantino’s, let’s say, “fondness” for the use of the n-word, and here together with that inauspicious term for a female dog, these hateful epithets serve as the glue which gums the dialogue together. On the one hand, it’s a grating affect to hear so much loathing in an age which wants to forget the brutal origins of the modern world, but on the other, it creates a most persuasive environment in which to properly register the Major’s alienation in these early American years: conscripted to play the savage in another’s man history, he is always second-guessed, insulted, spat-upon.
In the midst of the white hell of the snowstorm, the Major hitches a ride with another bounty hunter, John Ruth (Kurt Russell), whose ursine presence is heightened by a bearskin coat draped over his broad shoulders and a thick two-winged moustache beneath his snout. He is carrying his own precious freight across through the snow-lashed countryside: Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a wild female outlaw, who he hopes to have hanged alive in Red Rock. When the winter elements become too ferocious to bear, the wanderers, along with their driver and a Sheriff they picked up en route (Walton Goggins), seek refuge at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a creaky, old pit-stop for the lonesome traveller. Here, a gaggle of mysterious people have already made themselves comfortable and among their number, you can count appearances by Michael Madsen and Tim Roth.
“Hateful Eight” is constantly altering shape – from the vastness of the white wilderness, to the claustrophobic chamber-room of the Haberdashery, from those signature, mazy conversation pieces, to an almost classic Agatha Christie-style mystery, and all wrapped up, as anticipated, with a denouement of gristle-bursting violence, where pink, tender inner organs spatter into an organic wallpaper.
Yes, this film is sprawling and overlong, and at times boredom certainly takes its rightful place alongside intrigue and excitement. But the scoring by Ennio Morricone, with its distant wail of a forlorn trumpet, has an almost horror or fantasy to feel to it, giving an otherworldliness to this strange slice of alternative history, and the sensations are aided by the wind which whistles and roars outside, a feral presence constantly threatening to surge in. Tarantino’s “Hateful Eight” is a weird, shape-shifting film, once again in debt to a rampant maleness and guided by the director’s whim to shatter all precious platitudes. It leaves a dark, troubled adventure in its wake.