The Merciless West

 

For Pike Bishop, the hardened leader of a gang of outlaws in Sam Peckinpah's 1969 epic The Wild Bunch, even criminals must adhere to some set of ethics. When a double-cross is suggested, William Holden snarls, "When you side with a man, you stay with him. And if you can't do that, you're like some animal - you're finished! We're finished! All of us!" Without some semblance of honor, all hell will break loose.

Hell breaking loose is precisely what happens in Quentin Tarantino's masterful The Hateful Eight. Easily his best picture since Kill Bill, Hateful distinguishes itself from his previous two revenge fantasies in that the good and the bad are not nearly so viscerally defined.  Nazis and slavedrivers are just about the two most reviled archetypes in the American imagination.  But in Hateful, the "good" guys are only identified as such because their atrocities are only slightly less odious than those of the really bad guys. The result is a supremely taut Western mystery that's hilariously clever in only the way Tarantino films can be.

The eight in the title refers to the eight characters stuck in a mountain inn riding out a blizzard in postbellum Wyoming.  Kurt Russell plays John "Hangman" Ruth, a bounty hunter determined to bring uncouth Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to nearby Red Rock to hang.  John Ruth is filled with paranoia that he's walking into some kind of trap to free his prisoner, but it slowly becomes clear that a conspiracy is clearly in play.  Samuel L. Jackson plays a fellow bounty hunter and former Civil War hero with an extreme "proficiency at killing Johnny Reb." Tim Roth, Demián Bichir, Walton Goggins, Michael Madsen, and Bruce Dern round up the superb cast.

Filmed in ultra Panavision 70mm, Hateful produces some of the best cinematography of Tarantino's oeuvre. Shots of a stagecoach ambling through the high Rockies while White Stripes' "Apple Blossom" plays is a particular delight. The wide 70mm format gives the actors room to really stretch their legs with their facial expressions, nuanced glances, and subtle mannerisms. A suspenseful Western wouldn't be worth its salt without a cavalcade of suspicious glares and piercing gazes. Coupled with a tense score from Ennio Morricone, Hateful firmly places itself within the Western film tradition. 

The three hour running time passes quickly as the usual chatty Tarantino script drives the narrative rather than digresses as we find out about the characters' backstories, which are equal parts disturbing, hilarious, and bizarre. Although others may lazily call this a Tarantino fantasy, that assertion would be mistaken. The old West was a harsh and unsparing place. Peckinpah understood this, and so does Tarantino. During a massacre scene, a dying beautiful young woman reaches up to grab the hem of the coat of the man who just shot her in a seeming plea for terminal comfort. The man gives her a warm look and then shoots her in the face to finish the job, her hand stuck gripping the bottom of his coat. This was the old West. Raw, merciless, and inexplicably brutal. The film makes reference to this when Samuel L. Jackson's character is outed for an indiscretion he incredulously asks the aggrieved John Ruth in only the way Samuel L. can, "What, did I hurt your feelings, John Ruth?" As if anyone can spare the luxury of feelings in such a morally bankrupt world.

But Tarantino's most consummate stroke is his exploration of American race relations.  On one side you have Samuel L. Jackson's Major Marquis Warren who supposedly has a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln and John Ruth.  On the other is Confederate General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), a former Lost Causer. The animosity between the two sides is explosive and deadly, but they soon find themselves facing a common lethal foe, and inadvertently find each other somewhere neither thought possible: on the same side. The parallels to today's racial strife cannot be ignored. Don't worry, Tarantino hasn't gone political, he's just gone societal. White America and Black America has a chance to come together if their common goal is truth and justice.

Tarantino touches upon something in Hateful that sets it apart from some of his earlier work. The concluding scene, which follows a truly howl-worthy climax, is the most profound of his venerated career, devoid of any hints of irony or cheekiness, but full of hopefulness and regret.

Tarantino Unrestrained

I confess I had to see Django Unchained, Tarantino's latest historical revenge fantasy, twice before I was able to fully grasped my reaction to it.  Django pulls the viewer in multiple and diametrically opposed directions.  At once it is an epic, a love story, a revenge fantasy, and an historical reimagining, while maintaining wickedly funny -- and gruesome -- overtones.  It is disturbing and heavy while also being witty and light. Only Tarantino.

For those who are even semi-regular readers of this space are aware of my strong affinity towards Quentin Tarantino, whom I have aptly dubbed the Patron Saint of Cinema.  There is no other filmmaker in the world who makes the kinds of films that Tarantino does.  The combination of vision, audacity, technical prowess, film history proficiency, and general auteurship, is something that Tarantino alone possesses.

From sadistic villains to anachronistically hip protagonists, Django is a classic Tarantino film, replete with all the hallmarks we've come to expect from a QT production.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays Calvin Candie, a loathsome plantation owner whose idea of leisure is participating in cockfighting, except with human slaves fighting to the death instead of roosters.  Even more abject is Samuel L. Jackson's Stephen, a complexly hideous Uncle Tom. Stephen's nauseating subservience to his master is the driving force in thwarting Django's heroic bid to abscond with his enslaved wife, whom Candie owns, and arguably makes him the most problematic character in cinema's history. 

Django is an important film in ways Tarantino's previous films were not.  Never before has Tarantino -- or any other filmmaker I'm aware of -- so brazenly and unabashedly confronted America's shameful slave past in such an unsolemn and untactful way.  In the Antebellum South, slaves were considered subhuman, and Tarantino misses not one opportunity to depict that debasement on screen.  Could you ever imagine seeing a film that spews the n-word with such frequency and unrepentance that after a half an hour the phenomenon is barely noticeable?

Recently, DiCaprio admitted that during filming he began to have serious reservations regarding the content matter and even confronted Tarantino asking, "Are we going to far with this?  Are we crossing a line we should not cross?"  Apparently, Tarantino was joined by Jackson in adamantly defending their unrelenting approach.  If there is going to be a movie made about slavery, and Tarantino is behind it, then it has to go this far.  It has to be done right.  To borrow a phrase Cornel West used to defend Huckleberry Finn from modern editing:  "The funk must remain." 

Christoph Waltz's cognoscenti Dr. King Schultz and Jamie Foxx's muted Django may be the protoganists, but slavery is the main character in this film, as every second of screen time, every characterization, every word of dialogue, is weighed down by its albatross.  And still the film is wildly fun and entertaining.

One of the things Tarantino does best, and for which we love him for, is he takes a general setting, say, a heist, an underworld double-cross, World War II, antebellum South, whatever, and then he creates an environment in which the most horrific occurrences -- specific to that particular moment in time -- are allowed to come to fruition.  Of course he plays with the facts, but it's solely to maximize the effect. Tarantino doesn't bother with pedagoguery, instead, what he is concerned with is eliciting the greatest possible audience reaction, preferably visceral, and followed quickly by a loudly audible, "Ohhh!!"

The scenes of slavery at its worst are an absolute nightmare.  And yet what might be even more frightening is that no matter how exaggerated Tarantino makes them, we know through the lens of history that nothing that is shown can ever go far enough.  Slavery, by default, is an unspeakable human catastrophe.  

Now, of course QT's last film dealt with another unimaginably terrible event, World War II and the Holocaust. But what makes Django even more affecting than Inglourious Basterds is that the latter wholly avoids the ultimate mechanism of the Holocaust, the death camp.  Surely there are terrifying scenes as Landa, the Jew Hunter, stalks his prey, but Tarantino elides the crematoria.  In the Antebellum South, there is nothing to elide.  Slavery is chains, whips, rape, commodification, and just about every other possible dehumanizing act one can and can't imagine.  Skip over even just one of those and it is no longer slavery, not in the way we know it truly to be.  In short, don't expect to exit this film psychologically unscathed.

Mental scarring aside, the film looks marvelous and the cinematography is exquisite. And of course, there are the usual sight/sound gags, none better than when the freed slave Django and his bounty hunter and abolitionist partner, King Schultz, ride off into the wilderness to Jim Croce crooning "I Got A Name."  Ironically, as much as I enjoyed that scene, it is precisely here that my adulation of Tarantino recedes.

Tarantino has reached such cinematic heights, is imbued with such supreme confidence, and has had his sense of cheekiness emboldened to such an extent, that he has over-indulged the part of his creative mind that fetishizes the minutia, at the expense of the bigger picture.  The devil is indeed in the details and I fear Tarantino is well on his way down the river Styx.  He exerts a tremendous amount of effort in developing over-elaborately fascinating backstories, inside jokes, set-pieces, and constructing a cinematic kaleidoscope, that he inevitably runs out of room (literally and figuratively) when the climax comes due.  If the film is like a jigsaw puzzle, then he's got all these magnificent pieces but they can't all possibly fit onto one board.  

Like Basterds, Tarantino again finds himself in an untenable position once he hits the 150 minute mark and must rely on a bit of deux ex machina to right the ship.  Probably, Tarantino's past virtuosity is his own undoing as there are only so many ways to revolutionize (Tarantino-ize?) a final shoot-out scene, and he's already done them all. The finale, the main confrontation, suddenly becomes an afterthought, an incongruently consequential tangent, rather than a properly organic culmination, to everything else that has already happened.  Although, I must admit, I did find the Antonioniesque fulmination of Candyland a nice touch, a symbolic blowing up of the institution of slavery and everything it stood for.

As I've declared many times before, I love Tarantino's films, and I love his uncompromising vision, how he gleefully manipulates our expectations, and even challenges our sense of history and values.  And this film was by no means a disappointment.  As I mentioned, it is quite an important film, in fact.  But if I had a few moments with the man, I'd entreat him to return to the days when he firstly crafted a magnificently deranged, fully-fleshed out story, and then went to town on the details of how to get there, instead of the other way around. 

La Mariée était en noir

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."
--T.S. Eliot, 1920

Perhaps the loudest - and most recurring - criticism of the work of Quentin Tarantino indicts the master auteur with cinematic plagiarism.  He simply usurps set-ups from classic films, known and unknown, polishes them wish modern luster, and voilà, is proclaimed a genius, so they say.  To his loudest critics, Tarantino isn't so much a master originator as he is a master thief.  

From a purely technical perspective, this view is highly flawed.  Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and Inglourious Basterds surely borrow elements from both film and literature, but the shocking novelty of their central conceits is undeniable.  It must be this reality that boils the skin of all the haters; it seems to me these philistines must be of the same crowd that denies Shakespeare to be the sole author of his plays and sonnets, and who are convinced our President was born in Indonesia, or worse, Kenya.  

Not a single of Shakespeare's plays exhibited original plotting.  The comedies, the tragedies, the histories, can trace their antecedents to Aristophanes, Sophocles, Plutarch, Petrarch, Boccaccio, just to name a few.  What Shakespeare did - what all great artists do - is take an established good idea and present it in a refreshing and revealing way.  Through this method, Shakespeare elevated himself to the greatest contributor of world literature in history!

The French New Wave is widely considered to be one of the greatest eras in filmmaking.  Beginning in 1959 with Les Quatre Cents Coups, by the end of the 60s, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Pierre Léaud became household names.  The French New Wavers were obsessed with American film noirs of the 30s and 40s - and they translated that aesthetic into a wholly new French form.  Looking back, arguably the first true New Wave film came in 1956 with Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur.  Melville was so in love with American culture that he changed his surname to reflect his favourite author.  Here is the trailer to Bob:



The homage to American ganster/heist films is crystal.  Nowhere is the adulation of American cinema more obvious in the French New Wave than Truffaut's often overlooked 1968 revenge film, La Mariée était en noir.  Truffaut adored Hitchcock.  So he essentially set out to make a French version of a Hitchcock thriller.  Truffaut employs Hitchcock's favourite cinematic device, the macguffin, by misleading the audience into investing itself into who/what caused Julie Kohler's (Jeanne Moreau) husband's murder, he raises the suspense ten-fold as we watch the inconsolable bride take revenge in increasingly manipulatively inventive ways.  To top it all off, Truffaut brought on Hitchcock's composer, Bernard Herrmann, to compose the score:

Inglourious Basterds Redux - The Grace Paley Connection

I return briefly to Inglourious Basterds to illustrate further the genius that permeates even the smallest details of Tarantino's work.

There's an insignificant scene showcasing Tarantino's literary prowess:

Brigdet Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger):  There have been two recent developments regarding Operation Kino. One, the venue has been changed from the Ritz to a much smaller venue.

Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt):   Enormous changes at the last minute? That's not very "Germatic."

It's a malapropism line played for laughs, but buried within is a reference to Jewish-American short story writer Grace Paley (who recently died) and her famous book, Enormous Changes At The Last Minute, hence the added meaning of not being very "Germatic." Ha-ha!

Brilliant stuff, Quentin.   

Review of Inglourious Basterds

Fans of Quentin Tarantino have come to expect one thing from his films:  the unexpected.  The ear-slashing, the Gimp, a raged Robert De Niro, all of Kill Bill, have become staples of the Tarantino ouevre, and of current cinema as we know it, and as future generations will remember it.  

Inglourious Basterds delivers the unexpected in droves.  The film's marketing suggested a Kill Bill-esque 'Jewish-Americans mercilessly slaughtering Nazis' bloodbath, instead, Tarantino gave us a deeply cerebral picture smattered with bursts of relatively mild violence.

With his wordy script and the eye-opening performance of "Jew-Hunter" Christoph Waltz, Tarantino shrewdly captured the true terror of the Nazis.  It wasn't the cattle-car deportation to death camps -- horrible as they were -- but rather the corruptibility of otherwise good people, of the ever-present fear of being found out, whether you were hiding Jews, sympathetic to Jews, a partisan, a spy, or a Jew.  The Jew-Hunter's subtle innuendos, probing questions, suspicious gestures, and discomforting good humour would drive even the stoutest resistance fighter to his breaking point wondering, "How much does he know?" and "How do I escape this man?"


Inglourious Basterds is a fantasy.  In a reality where the majority of the literature, fiction and nonfiction, portrays the Jewish people, helpless and crippled, enduring unimaginable horror from the hyper-aggressive Juggernaut of the Third Reich, Tarantino imagines an alternative where the victims not only have a voice, but a baseball bat as it were, as a vehicle of vengence.


It has become marvelously clear that Tarantino's capacity for innovative storytelling has eclipsed the standard 2-3 hour feature film format (ahem, Kill Bill). Basterds clocked in at 153 minutes, and yet the film felt like it breezed by, with multiple plotlines and asides that begged for proper exposition.  Tarantino has entered the realm of eminent Polish auteur, Krzysztof Kieślowski, who required multiple films (10 to be exact for the appropriately titled Dekalog) to fully express his vision.

With Tarantino you never know what to expect, except this:  he'll keep on keeping on with films that make our palms sweat, our heads shake, and our mouths go, "Oh!"

Patron Saint of Cinema - St. Quentin Tarantino

The evening was moving along swimmingly: South American wine, richly prepared surf-and-turf cuisine, surfeit of bon mots. Just settling into our respective digestifs, the dinner party suddenly careened off a cliff hovering above the River Hades.

Someone had unwittingly committed the grievous garrulous sin that will certainly ruin any social gathering wherein participants aren't intimately acquainted: initiating a discussion on the merits of Quentin Tarantino. It matters little if that first remark is favourable, the mere mention of his Latinate name will spark a wildfire in a docile conversational stream.

I had to straddle the index finger and thumb of my right hand upon my forehead and cheekbone as I anticipated the tremendous headache I would momentarily suffer in my eye. When the requisite irrationally reasoned criticism was inadvisedly and recklessly announced, my eyes were already closed in full-throttled paroxysm.

"Can we talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?" I groused, "Or maybe the pros and cons of abortion if you prefer?" This was not my attempt at inappropriate humour. This was my plea to maintain some semblance of sanity. I'd rather delve into the fiery quicksand of those aforementioned issues than writhe in the indignity of having to defend the merits of this generation's greatest cineaste, the current patron saint of cinema.

Coming Attraction: The Found Generation will elucidate why St. Quentin Tarantino is a monstre sacré. Also, a review of Inglourious Basterds, which looks to be the ultimate Jewish revenge fantasy film.