Quentin Tarantino must quit taking the bullet after Hateful Eight
Last night I watched Quentin Tarantino's Hateful Eight with 40 other excessively appreciative people at a local PVR.
The men and women were so indulgent of their favourite director, the slightest ironic gesture by a character made them cry ooooh. As for instance, when Jennifer Leigh blew her nose in medium close-up.
I thought the audience had come in armed with the effusive outpourings of critics like T Guardian's, Peter Bradshaw, who had recently expended rivers of ink to underline the virtues of the Hateful Eight.
What bothered me through the movie was not any visible sign of the waning of Tarantino's virtuosity. That was in full flow. The point really was that his virtuosity has begun to be repetitive, which is another way of saying he is miming himself. This is an occupational hazard for any artist.
That doesn't take away anything from Tarantino's contribution. Indeed he has fashioned - and found a horde of emulators across the world without his originality - a whole technique of film making which nearly collapses the visual grammar of a movie into the format of the written word. Or the other way round. That incudes the novel-like formatting (Chapter 1, etc) to long lines which the late superstar of Tamil cinema, Shivaji Ganeshan, would have relished.
Tarantino predicates the movement of the movie to an excruciating extent on the verbalisation of each character. More than what he/she does, or at least equally; it is rhetoric that explains a character, rather than his action. Each main character of Tarantino has an almost endless need to explain himself. Explanation as expiation.
Like few before him, Tarantino has a masterly grip over the sense of time - Tarkovsky describes cinema as "sculpting in time" - and he is probably at his most facile when it comes to loading each moment with a menace that compels him as a director to render it in a reasonable while momentous. And this consequentiality of the moment is normally bone-shattering violence and body-caroming death, which all his movies bear testimonies to.
The Hateful Eight is all that. In fact more. More blood. More death. More guns. As a part-time script writer myself, Tarantino's idea of death/gun intrigues me. These two notions in Tarantino are not mutually exclusve.
The first half of Hateful Eight is almost harmless in the sense that it is just long lines and some great-angled shots. It is the set up. And perhaps it's far too long to establish. But we know it is Tarantino. We know something will happen. It's just a matter of time. And most certainly it does, the mystery and intrigue of which are explained afterwards in a rather literary flashback. It's a bit like cheating the audience, but never mind. The story demands it, so be it.
The plot by now is well known. Kurt Russell's John Rooth is taking gangster Jennifer Leigh's Daisy Dormegue to Red Rock over the whited-out country of Wyoming in winter to collect bounty.
The six others that he encounters on his way prevent him from doing so, because of their own back stories. The other baddies are Samuel Jackson, the black unionist soldier and a bounty hunter himself; Walter Goggin, the self styled Sheriff of Red Rock; Tim Roth ( who acts exactly like a clone of Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds) a hangman; Michael Madsen, Channing Tatum, Demian Bichir (all members of a certain gang); and Bruce Dern, the nigger-hating general. The action takes place a few years after the civil war, in Minnie's Haberdashery, on way to Red Rock, where a blizzard forces them all to take refuge.
When the movie ends, everyone in it, probably for the first time in the history of cinema, is dead or dying. Everyone. That's what Tarantino's gun demands. A story without survivors. A story in fact that can't survive because of the gun. As ever Tarantino is Biblical. The bad will die. The good are hard to come by. All through the movie, (I had just seen The Revenant and the much hyped but the unsatisfactory Star Wars:The Force Awakens, back to back.), I had thought there is no American cinema without the gun. But Tarantino is probably its culmination as we know it. Because as a movie maker, he himself can't survive that destructive weapon, which recently made Barack Obama cry in public.
No director or screenplay writer (Tarantino is also the screenplay writer of the Hateful Eight) is as dependent on the gun for his art. The gun defines it. Is that a limitation? I think so. Death is one of the most easily resorted to options in the resolution of action and dismissing of a character in fiction and cinema. Authors and directors do it all the time. But Tarantino is just helpless without it. He might still make a movie without a camera, but without a gun? Not likely.
The long lines and the literal inversion of the literary clichés (Son of a Gun, for example, explained as a subtitle of one of the chapters of the movie, is actually a son of a gun) and the loading of the moments, is all there. But everything, and I mean everything, in the movie is conditional on the gun, frame for frame.
Characters carry guns. As do horses. Guns are kept as baits, as when Bruce Dern's old General Sanford is goaded into picking it up and pull the trigger so Jackson can shoot him dead rightfully. Guns are kept under the table. Below the floorboards. Guns at waist. And over the shoulders. The gun is the main character, really. Everyone is finally shot, except Domergue - who is both shot and hanged.
If biblical terms must be used to explain the Hateful Eight, this is the most apocalyptic of Tarantino movies. And Hell is a haberdashery in an icy desolate place, where the only innocents are the horses.
Tarantino's infantile dependency on guns as a movie making tool has one suicidal consequence as well: he shoots the director in him dead. Because the trajectories of the characters are drawn by the gun even before they make their appearance, they are forced to do predictable things.
The movie still manages to engage your attention only because of the unpreditctable timing of their actions. And Tarantino takes the given, facile truths - frontier justice for example - so seriously, small gestures gain gravitas and become monumental.
As a filmmaker, Tarantino's genius is in turning cliches into culpable homicide, and they bleed poetry. But if Tarantino continues to see a gun before he sees a character, I'll be pointing one at him soon - unless he takes the law into his own hands.