Tarantino Entertains with Darkly Funny Western "The Hateful Eight"

Samuel L. Jackson and Walton Goggins lead an amazing cast in

Quentin Tarantino's latest, The Hateful Eight.

And so the pattern repeats.

Three years ago, I wrote a review comparing Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino that discussed how each director had plowed through mid-career criticisms by taking a hard left into the idiosyncratic approaches that were supposedly holding them back, only to emerge once again as critical darlings.

A year later, Anderson continued to prove my point with Grand Budapest Hotel, and it seems Tarantino has followed suit with The Hateful Eight, a western that revolves around a collection of nasty sorts trapped together at a secluded stopover during a blizzard not long after the conclusion of the Civil War.

Intoxicating in the way that only great Tarantino can be, The Hateful Eight is the quickest three hours I’ve ever spent in a theater. And that's the case even though I saw the film in its glorious 70mm Roadshow Exhibition, which ran with an introductory musical overture and an intermission between acts, while also providing wider, more detailed images... because, you know, Tarantino.

Like many of the director’s films, The Hateful Eight is told in chapters, some of which are out of order, and built around a series of long, tense and often side-splitting conversations that eventually boil over into violence. For all the pomp and circumstance that came with the roadshow experience, the film is basically a talky chamber piece with the attitude and accoutrements of a mean-spirited western.

More specifically, The Hateful Eight is a western-flavored dark comedy mash up of And Then There Were None, Tarantino’s own Reservoir Dogs, and any number of plays by Sartre or Pinter with the racial tensions of post Civil-War Americans hanging over every moment. It's thought-provoking, titillating and, above all, entertaining as hell.

Other than a win for the eerily foreboding score from the legendary Ennio Morricone and a nomination for Jennifer Jason Leigh's hilariously gnarly performance, the Oscars stayed away from The Hateful Eight, which makes quite a bit of sense given the content. However, this is a master class in acting, writing, directing, editing and costuming, with Goggins and the underrated Jackson (who easily could've been included in my piece on #OscarSoWhite) providing standout work.

Having said all of that, I have some issues with the film, all of which are built around character motivation and plotting. To talk about them, I kind of need to spoil the movie a bit, so, spoiler warning. Enroute to Red Rock to deliver the fugitive Daisy Domergue (Leigh) for hanging, bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) encounters Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a black bounty hunter and former Union solider in possession of three dead bounties, and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), a former Lost-Causer militiamen who now claims to be the new sheriff of Red Rock. Ruth allows both men aboard his stage coach, and they set out for Minnie's Habadashery to seek refuge from the storm.

Upon arriving at the habadashery, they meet hangman Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), former Confederate general Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern), and Bob (Demián Bichir), a Mexican watching over the place while Minnie visits her mother. Tensions escalate on multiple fronts. Suspicious that any of this lot could be in cahoots with Domergue, Ruth forcefully disarms all but Warren since they have met before and have agreed to protect one another's bounties. Meanwhile, Warren feuds with both Smithers and Mannix over race and doubts the legitimacy of Bob's standing as the operator of the habadashery, an establishment he has frequented many times.

A third act flashback reveals Mobray, Gage and Bob are all members of the Jody Domergue gang and that they, along with Jody (Channing Tatum), arrived at the habadashery ahead of Ruth’s party so that they could kill him and free Jody’s sister. They kill Minnie and all other inhabitants of the habadashery except Smithers (they reason another occupant will add to their cover), hide several guns around the place, and then Jody hides beneath the floor boards just before the rest of the lead characters arrive.

During an argument between Warren and Smithers in which Warren arms Smithers and then baits him to draw on him so Warren can kill the older man, Gage secretly poisons the coffee, ultimately leading to the very gruesome poisoning of Ruth and his driver OB. Ruth almost kills Daisy before he dies while her brother remains in hiding and the his conspirators simply watch instead recovering their hidden weapons and taking advantage of the fact that Warren and Mannix are completely distracted. This is particularly problematic for Gage. He may have acted on his own in poisoning the coffee and thus surprised his compatriots, but then why is he also so unprepared to react to the aftermath?

Instead, they stand around like innocents allowing Warren to take control, arm Mannix and kill Bob. Only then does Jody fire upon Warren from below the floor boards, but once again he and his gang fail to act decisively (something made even more annoying by the later revelation that Mobray has already armed himself off screen) allowing Mannix and Warren to gather themselves and regroup. Although this development sets up a dynamic Mexican standoff and leads to a strong ending that unites Warren and Mannix against these outlaws, it also stretches credulity. What was the point of lying in wait and having a cover if you were just going to act like total fools at every opportunity? Sure they could’ve never anticipated that Warren and Mannix would show up with Ruth, and they absolutely never would’ve known about the dynamic between those men and Smithers, but those surprises still don’t explain their awful play here.

I think it would be foolish to suggest I have a better idea how to craft a script than Tarintino, but I’ll give it a go anyhow. I think the whole sequence would’ve played a lot better if Gage wasn’t one of the Domergue gang, but rather just another inhabitant of the haberdashery like Smithers and another wrinkle in their plan. Maybe he shows up in between when Jody goes down below the floor and Ruth’s arrival or maybe they just opt to keep him alive too, but what if he was just a cowboy visiting his mom just like he says, one that made the isolated decision to poison Ruth, not because he wanted to free Daisy, but because he was enraged that Ruth took his gun. That would certainly explain why the gang wasn't prepared to take advantage of Ruth's poisoning, while adding an extra level of chaos to the proceedings. Obviously, I’m just spit balling here, but I think something should’ve been done to diminish this narrative annoyance, which seems to be one of those "the plot required it" situations.

Regardless, even though this element of the film bothered me, it’s really just a problem that keeps me from viewing the film as perfect, because otherwise that’s what it is. Like the best of Tarantino, the film is shot beautifully and populated with great actors cutting loose with a well-observed and irreverent script filled to the brim with long, tense moments that seem tailor-made for the stage. And the ending, oh boy that ending -- it's some kind of perfect.

"Selma" Offers a Captivating Story and Worthwhile Commentary on Present Day Race Relations

Critics argue Selma grossly misplays the dynamic between MLK and LBJ.

While watching Ava DuVernay’s Selma, I was reminded of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (reviewed here). Both films focus on iconic moments in the American civil rights movement, while managing the tricky tasks of humanizing the larger-than-life icons involved. More intriguingly, both also illustrate the forceful guile and cunning strategy required to make such sweeping change.

Yes, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. stood on high ground ideologically and morally, but they also were willing to poke, prod and even play a little dirty to ensure success. These aren’t just stories of saints standing on the side of justice until society came around to their way of thinking – these are tales of men pulling strings to manipulate America into bettering itself.

There’s something I find so incredibly interesting about all of that, about the notion that King (commandingly played by David Oyelowo) and his compatriots in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) specifically targeted Selma because the sheriff there was a hotheaded racist who could easily be baited into doing something oppressive to nonviolent protesters. The film suggests the SCLC wasn’t concerned with long-range grass rooting – they left that to other groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. No, what they wanted were headlines that would put pressure on Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), a president who supported black voting rights, but who had a difference of opinion about the timing of further legislation. “We negotiate, we demonstrate, we resist,” King says in one key scene. “We raise white consciousness. And in particular, the consciousness of whichever white man happens to be sitting in the Oval Office.”

The film has come under fire in some corners for its inaccuracies, particularly related to its portrayal of Johnson as an antagonist to King. The idea that people could watch this movie and come away incensed at the treatment of a white person is pretty mind-boggling, but what makes the whole thing especially odd is that the film delivers a mostly nuanced take on the King-Johnson relationship.

Johnson isn't really the bad guy; he supports change, but doesn't agree with King's time frame. He certainly stands in stark contrast to the film's actual villains, even considering his attempts to slow King down by using wiretap information to expose the good doctor's extramarital dalliances to his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo). Not only does he surround himself with fair-minded advisers like Lee White (Giovanni Ribisi), but he also rebuffs a suggestion by J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker) to shut down King "permanently and unequivocally" and chastises George Wallace (Tim Roth) by saying "I'll be damned to let history put me in the same place as the likes of you."

Is this exactly how it happened? Probably not, but it makes thematic and dramatic sense, and it seems a lot more logical than the assertion that Johnson masterminded the whole march or that he was totally innocent of wiretapping King (I think it's an injustice to show Johnson taking aim at King's marriage, but the dude was president of the United States, for god's sake; he damn well knew about those wiretaps). The New York Times and Washington Post have done fairly good assessments of the entire controversy for those interested in reading more on the topic, but as far as opinions go, I tend to agree with this take in Slate.

The film posits that MLK's mission in Selma was to change the discourse among the inherently good but generally apathetic multitudes within white America, to impress upon them the immediacy of the situation. Johnson becomes the major stand-in there, and the film argues that the work put in by King and his brethren eventually allows Johnson (and a large contingent of whites) to see the light, to transition from sympathy to empathy, as evinced by his words, “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.”

This message is one that's still incredibly relevant today, given all the present day upheaval surrounding unjust treatment of blacks by law enforcement and the recent church slayings in South Carolina. Watch the scenes that depict the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing or the beating of Jimmie Lee Jackson (Keith Stanfield) and tell me they don't seem eerily familiar. It's easy to rationalize, explain or condemn certain situations on an individual basis while pretending there is no larger race problem in America, but on aggregate such justifications don't fly any better now than they did 50 years ago. Is black life better in America now than it was in 1965 when MLK led the march to Selma? Yes, certainly, it is, just like it was better in 1965 than it was in 1865 when Lincoln was trying to abolish slavery. But it isn't where it should be, and that's an American problem.

DuVernay gets that, and Selma encapsulates it, perhaps at the risk of smudging the role of Lyndon B. Johnson. But, I found myself cheering for the man when he put Wallace in his place and later when he spoke so passionately when presenting his bill. I believe that was the film's intent, so it's hard for me to say the film is casting Johnson in a negative light. It's much more accurate to say the film is turning him into a metaphorical beacon.

Is it incongruous that I'm defending artistic license here when I took a movie like Saving Mr. Banks to task for playing loose with history? Maybe. Maybe, I'm just blinded by my ideological persuasions in both cases. But, I have to call it the way I see it, and while I see a relevant thematic purpose in this instance, I only saw corporate propaganda in the former.

Selma is not a perfect history lesson, but if it encourages people to "interrogate history" as DuVernay suggests, and if it makes people a bit more empathetic in their considerations of race relations today, then it's a movie that offers a whole lot of value. When you toss on top of that the notion that it is a well-made and captivating story on the micro level, well that's really something.  A-