Movie Review: "The Hateful Eight"

The Hateful Eight (2015)

R

3.5 Stars out of 5

Writer/Director                 Quentin Tarantino
Cinematography                Robert Richardson
Music                                   Ennio Morricone

Samuel L Jackson              Union Maj. Marquis Warren
Kurt Russell                        John “The Hangman” Ruth
Jennifer Jason Leigh          Daisy Domergue
Walton Goggins                 Sheriff (to be) Chris Mannix
Damián Bichir                     Bob
Tim Roth                              Oswaldo Mobray
Michael Madsen                Joe Gage
Bruce Dern                         Confederate General Sandy Smithers
James Parks                        O.B.
Channing Tatum                Jody Domergue

“That’s the problem with old men. You can kick them downstairs, but you can’t shoot them” John Ruth

How does one begin to summarize and review a Quentin Tarantino movie? Does he have a brilliant sense of dialog - everyone, even those that hate his movies would agree that he has one. With his cinematographer, Robert Richardson, does he have an equally brilliant eye to create his various mise en scènes - again, there is great agreement on this point as well. Does he explore themes of general interest, the rights of the oppressed and revenge for those crimes, and does he make great use of ironic wit coupled with multi-layered story-lines to explore his themes – yes, again. The problem comes of course when the other visual tools that Tarantino uses are discussed: guns, murder, insensate violence, and gallons of movie blood. These cinematic tools in the hands of his characters, all displaying no vestige of human morality create a dark and repellent view of the human condition. One really has to ask, what are Tarantino’s motives in writing such movies? I think the answer lies in his latest movie: “The Hateful Eight”.

The movie, Tarantino’s eighth (if we count 2003/04’s “Kill Bill” as a single movie and as proudly announced in the opening credits) is filmed in 70 mm Panavision. Tarantino and Richardson make great use of all 70 mm as they film a series of landscape shots of a snowy Wyoming wilderness, all of it devoid of any kind of life. The camera then focuses on a frozen, snow-bedecked wooden crucifix standing alone in a vast snowy plain. The camera plays very slowly over the figure while a throbbing Ennio Morricone (famous for his “spaghetti western” scores for Sergio Leone from the 60’s and 70’s) plays in the musical background. Slowly in the visual background a dark object resolves itself into the image of a stagecoach drawn by a team of six horses. They too are covered in snow while they snort their frozen exhalations. These early pristine, white, and lifeless scenes are worth remembering later in the movie, as they provide a vivid counterpoint to the later red-drenched interior scenes that are also to a great extent, lifeless.

In the coach is a bounty hunter with a wild handlebar mustache, John “The Hangman” Ruth expertly played by a veteran of many another blood-soaked movie, Kurt Russell. Chained to Ruth is an incredibly tough and sarcastic prisoner, Daisy Domergue (played in a Best Supporting Oscar nominated role by Jennifer Jason Leigh). Tarantino rapidly demonstrates his alternate world view of human morality by having Ruth repeatedly and viciously strike Daisy in the face. Leigh will act out the entire movie with a black eye that slowly heals, but with a face that is frequently bloodied via Ruth’s beatings. This new kind of norm in terms of normal human interaction is a constant throughout this movie. Daisy is not a woman; she is not even a human deserving of basic human respect. She is a talking thing deserving only of a beating. The suggestion that she deserves the beatings is made, but never truly substantiated. In this world, no such substantiation is necessary. Ruth carries a warrant for her arrest; thus he has all he needs to beat her into a bloody mess. Prisoners have no rights, they are not people. No one in this world disagrees to any extent whatsoever.

Ruth and Daisy will be soon joined by former Union Maj. Marquis Warren (Samuel L Jackson) and the new sheriff of the town the coach is driving towards: ex-confederate soldier Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). They will each go through an interrogation by Ruth before he allows them on-board the coach. These quixotic interrogations and their intentional repetitiveness will be a pattern that will show up time and again throughout the movie in various guises. These guises are almost certainly Tarantino’s main objective of this movie: create scene after scene where two people argue their diametric views, each basing their arguments based on their personal vision of right and wrong. This point-of-view perspective in morality is easily seen as a defense of "moral relativism". This is not a topic I object to in general unless it is pushed to extremes; when it is pushed to violent extremes as Tarantino routinely does, then even the existence of morality must be called into question. There is no longer any right/wrong duality in Tarantino’s cinematic world. Such a world is characterized only by “Might makes Right”. The strong will decide what is right and what is wrong; the weak will have no say; they are merely extras waiting to be put down by the mighty.

When Warren and Mannix are finally inside the coach they will engage in a debate in the manner I describe above. Initially (and despite the fact that Mannix is shown to be a former Rebel) Ruth will describe in glowing details the heroics of Warren as a Union officer during the war, including even allusions to the fact that Warren has a signed letter from President Abraham Lincoln. Mannix undeterred will then proceed to redefine for Ruth the nature of Warren’s actual “heroics”. He will show that one man’s hero is another man’s terrorist, and not just that, but that in fact Warren’s heroics are deeply stained by at least one act of indifferent atrocity against Union soldiers. Warren will counter that as a black man, he makes few distinctions between white Rebels and white Yankees….and it goes on and on and on. This conversation between various opponents will also go on and on throughout the movie. Tarantino will be making the obvious point of right and wrong being defined like art by the beholder. The less obvious point Tarantino makes is that the end result of each man creating his own definitions of words such heroism and morality, will be that words have no real meaning and that there is no right or wrong. He will underline this point with his oft used gallons of blood; after all, how could doing so, be wrong in such a world?

The coach will arrive in time at a way-station, one peopled by an aged confederate General, Sanford Smith (Bruce Dern at his soft-spoken and understated best), an Englishman claiming to be the town executioner, Oswald Mobray (a very toned down but still malevolent, Tim Roth), a mysterious wayfarer on the way to see his mother for Christmas, Joe Gage (Michael Madsen, like Roth another actor famous for oozing threats), a Mexican caretaker (Mexican actor Damián Bichir) and a character to be described later in the movie (but not here), Jody (Channing Tatum). At this point in the movie, Tarantino reaches back to an idea he used in his first movie, “Reservoir Dogs” (1995). There he borrowed a theme from the 50’s: the unseen enemy in our midst. In “Reservoir Dogs”, each of the criminal characters took an assumed name, and as that script moved forward, it was revealed that one of the characters was an undercover policeman, but which one?. How perfect an upside down world this was: the “bad guy” to the other gang members is actually the “good guy” in the our world; the world Tarantino refers to indirectly, but never enters for very long. He does the same things in “The Hateful Eight” – one or more of the characters described at the beginning of this paragraph bears a false name and is at cross-purposes to Ruth and his desire to take Daisy in for her foreordained hanging. The paranoia and bloodletting will soon begin.

As the search for Ruth’s potential transgressor proceeds, there will be arguments over frontier justice vs. civilized justice, the rights of POWs (black POWs), who should be hung (“mean bastards”), dead or alive prisoners being brought in dead vs. waiting for their court ordered hanging, and on and on. There are moments in the first half of this three hour movie where one might think they’ve slipped into a warped version of “12 Angry Men” (1957) or “My Dinner with Andre” (1981) – movies dedicated to arguing and talking, though to rather less violence than “The Hateful Eight”. There will be semi-comical episodes involving a door that won’t stay close with the concomitant instructions on how to keep it close being yelled by all in the Way-Station. There will be numberless voicings by all members of the cast of the “N-word”. Whether this use was to shock or to numb is hard to say, but like the over the top use of violence that drenches the last parts of the film, numb seems most like the correct participle. But for greatest shock value and to underline the difference between the mighty and the weak, Tarantino uses flashback to tell two tales of the semi-innocent and the truly innocent in conflict with the truly semi-evil and truly evil – it won’t matter though how innocent or evil either was, they will all meet the same fates.

In Tarantino’s definition of the world, innocence or wickedness simply do not matter. Each man or woman is as much on his own as if we were all savages living in an amoral, prehistoric world. There are people with guns, there are people with value solely determined by their bounties, and only by the bounty on their heads, and there are the people without guns just waiting to be killed. They can be cheerful and thoughtful and happy, but none of that matters In Tarantino-land. Tarantino sees no morality in this world, he sees only some people playing at morality and some that make no attempt whatsoever to even play at it. Thus, his movies overflow with mayhem, with violence, and with pointless death. In “The Hateful Eight” Tarantino even undoes whatever moral value he gave Django in punishing the nearly inhuman white slave owners with the same death they had recently dealt daily to their black slaves (“Django Unchained”, 2012). Even the “morality” of revenge, of just punishment for horrendous crimes (see also 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds” for a similar theme) is absent from “The Hateful Eight”. What is left of value in the story presented with this movie – like the absence of morality, there is no value left in this story. It is nihilism taken to its fullest extent.

It is hard to say this movie is for no one. There is great technical merit in the camera-work, in the exotic and occasionally beautiful music that accompanies the scenes on the screen; I especially love the way Bob plays “Silent Night”. There is fine, memorable acting by Leigh, Dern, Jackson, Goggins and Russell. The script contains some surprises and carefully constructed dialog that exposes the weakness of many arguments told seemingly from a high moral ground, but are really often merely self-serving. But in this movie, more so that in all previous Tarantino movies, the use of violence and bloodshed shown in an attempt to typify moral ambiguities reached a point where it only seems gratuitous. Is this a movie designed to demonstrate moral hypocrisy (see the quote from Ruth at this review’s beginning) or only to wallow in it? This movie is for Tarantino aficionados only; a group that most definitely includes me. I can watch this movie and find things of interest and value. I can watch this movie and walk away thinking Tarantino overshot his mark this time, but not hate the movie, only feel disappointed. For anyone else, not an ardent fan of Tarantino and his chosen style and themes, is this a movie for them; no I don't think so. No, this movie is for his fans alone with the possible exception of film schools showing where genius sometimes fails.

Book Review: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness of the West (1985)

Five Stars out of Five

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy’s fifth book, a Western or neo-Western, “Blood Meridian” has been named one of the best American works of fiction over the previous twenty-five years in a 2006 NY Times poll of writers and critics. This book has been compared to “Moby Dick” in terms of scope and language, and has been extensively analyzed by a broad range of critics and academics for its philosophical depths and ambiguities. It is definitely one of the best books I have ever read. And yet for the casual reader, it is very easy to imagine the initial reaction will be revulsion. The book is replete with violence, so much so that by the book’s purposely confused ending, the violence has long shed its shock value and assumes little more effect than a landscape that comes with a particular character. This theme of violence in the character of Man is clearly a central precept of the book: does Man act out violence in a benign manner (i.e. out of an instinct for survival) or in some kind of malignant manner, that is to say out of some twisted nature in his character.

The story spans the era of 1830’s Tennessee to the borderlands between Mexico and the US in the 1840’s – 50’s. By far, the preponderance of the book is focused on the historical scalp-hunting Glanton gang in 1849-1850. The book follows the violent life of “The Kid” from his birth in Tennessee under a meteor shower to his death fifty or so years later under yet another meteor shower. As a fourteen-year old, he meets “The Judge”, an icon of evil not easily surpassed by any other such fictional character. The Kid having not met his fate as a youth at the hands of the Judge eventually finds himself in Nagadoches Texas where he joins up with an inept band of US Army irregulars. This group is bound for Mexico where they intend to take property and land from the Mexicans. However, their plans are demolished by a passing band of Comanches. Most of the Americans are killed, but the Kid ends up after some desert-induced privation in a Mexican prison. While there, he joins a more competent but even more morally bankrupt group. This new group is a band of scalp hunters led by John Glanton. The Glanton gang will eventually include the Judge. This gang will institute a reign of terror on the local Mexican populace, soldiery and Native American bands until they themselves are destroyed with few survivors. Amongst the survivors are the Kid, the ex-priest Tobin, and the Judge. The book concludes with the Kid much older and now referred to as the Man. The Man meets the Judge in an outhouse at the very end of the book. The Judge survives, but the Kid’s outcome is only suggested, never resolved.

The text used in the book is extraordinarily spare. McCarthy does not use quotation marks to note conversational passages or even apostrophes for contractions. Indeed, McCarthy in furtherance of this spareness uses extensive Spanish language passages which are left untranslated. The English language sections are infused with a sense of both the bible and the 19^th century. Like the violence referred to above, this spare language and untranslated Spanish help to create a stage on which the themes and characters live and die on. And such characters, the four that are most significant is the earless Toadvine (a near constant associate of The Kid), the ex-priest Tobin (actually never a priest, ironically only a failed noviate), the violent but still somewhat merciful Kid, and the bald, fatalistic, scientific, pederast and thoroughly satanic Judge. To be honest, a complete critical review of this book could be spent focusing on the hairless, fiddle-playing, dancing Judge.

To comment that these four characters play metaphorical roles in the book is quite an understatement. The two about whom the book revolves are the Judge and the Kid. The Kid proves himself time and again capable of violent exertions that would frighten almost anyone. And yet in contrast with the war-loving Judge he is instead an example of the benignly violent character; whether or not he feels any empathy for his victims is left unclear. The Judge states quite clearly that war is act of the highest moral value. In a final conversation with the Kid, he refers to it as a dance and asserts that only a Man set above the animals is capable of it. The Kid and the ex-priest make various halfhearted arguments to the contrary at various points in the book, but it is clear from each confrontation, and as well from the book’s ending that violence is the conscious decision of Man; it is part of his nature.

Another theme that runs through this book as well as several other McCarthy books is that of borders. It shows up in the title of course as well as the geography in “Blood Meridian” between the United States and Mexico. McCarthy also uses it on several occasions in a more nuanced fashion to make his point. Consider his use of the two Jacksons in the Glanton gang; one black, one white, and both violently opposed to one another. The reference is to Cain and Abel by the death of one Jackson at the hands of the other. But the primary purpose of these various dichotomies is to highlight the difference between Man and beast, between Good and Evil – like the spare language, there are no greys in any of these differences.

Violence and Borderlands are however the secondary themes; they work to support the central theme of this book, and that is a variation on a philosophical argument known as Theodicy. This was a concept introduced by Leibniz in the early 18^th century. There are several versions of it, but the gist is that Theodicy asserts that the presence of evil in the world and why God permits it is an argument for the probability of God; the probability, rather than the possibility. That this book goes to some effort to demonstrate the existence of Evil is without question. McCarthy leaves it to the reader to draws his own conclusions about God’s probability, but he certainly pushes one in the Theodictic direction. Another important aspect is to consider the irony of the Judge’s nature. He spends much of the book analyzing and recording his observations of Nature in his endless quest to own and control the World. As such, he is not only an icon for the devil and evil, but also for the “amoral” pursuit of Science to own and control Nature – which would obviously include God himself, from some perspectives. Quite an indictment of Science and something of an allusion to the Garden of Eden wherein Satan indices Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge.

As mentioned above, the ending is purposely vague (there is great debate on why this is so amongst the academics). To set the scene, consider how many times the reader is told that the Judge is a pederast who abuses and then kills his young victims, and how he missed a chance with the Kid at the beginning of the story. When we reach the book’s conclusion, the Kid, now the Man seems completely aimless and with hardly an argument to counter the Judge’s immoral (to the Kid/Man, certainly not to the Judge) views towards violence and war. The Man makes one last feeble attempt at verbal jousting with the Judge, and then moments later,  The Man enters an outhouse wherein he find the Judge, nude. The suggestion is of murder and humiliation for the Man; his apotheosis at the hands of the Judge. The end result of this meeting is in a manner completely unlike the rest of the vividly portrayed acts of violence in this book; no description, only suggestion.  The only note of explanation is made by one of two cowboys upon later opening the door to the outhouse: “Good God Almighty”. Ignoring the religious reference made by the cowboy, multiple questions are left unanswered: did the Man enter knowingly to death and sexual humiliation, did he make one more fight or only passively submit to his fate, and is his fate emblematic of our own?

My opinion is that McCarthy is indeed saying that Man’s nature is that of the beast, and that we are not in control of our fate, nor even aware of it; and like the beasts, we are doomed to die without any real understanding of the Universe. We make our feeble attempts to explain nature, to control it and ourselves, but like the animals and children we are merely victims waiting for our sentence of death to be carried out by some indifferent Power. This point is made clearer in the Epilogue wherein a line of holes are lit in the desert that passersby wander across. The holes themselves are described as “validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before”.  Einstein and his theory of General Relativity would not be pleased with this phrase (he proved a lack of causality in Time), but it certainly underscores McCarthy’s pessimistic view of Man and his “understanding”.

“Blood Meridian” is a brilliantly written and conceived work of art. It is most clearly not for every reader. But if you are of a philosophical bent, and can tolerate the violent themes throughout this book, you too will be amazed at its artistry. I could not be further from McCarthy’s view as regards Man and the Universe, but I can still be awed by what he has done with “Blood Meridian” – perhaps, you will be, too.