Good But Problematic

Rating: 8/10 (27 December 2015)

Quentin Tarantino's last two features were revisionist histories of the antebellum South and World War II and "The Hateful Eight" is nothing if not a revisionist approach to the film western as studio Hollywood has presented it and the way it has been consumed by the movie-going public. Tarantino pulls out all the stops here, at least in its initial engagement, lovingly presenting it in eye-popping anamorphic 70 mm that highlights his careful staging and Robert Richardson's equally detailed cinematography, with the first quarter of the film taking place in a Wyoming blizzard and the remainder in an overstuffed cabin. (The production design is by Yohei Taneda and the set decoration is by Rosemary Brandenburg.) The large-scale presentation finds Tarantino creating a post-Civil War scenario in which the players are Tarantino's forte: dirty, cold-blooded sadists (the film is hyper-violent to say the least) that an old school presentation this large would never have considered. And the first half features some of Tarantino's most expressive writing: having gotten his revenge on Nazis and slave owners, he can turn his attention to detailing strong characters and while racism remains an important theme in Tarantino's work, the film is ultimately about his love of storytelling; and his cast commits to him with absolutely no false notes. But it's here where he slips up, with a second half that seems filled with arbitrary characters and flashbacks to create story continuity (and where the topic of racism provides a slip in that continuity); and while the story's not exactly a mystery, the way the narrative is delineated seems somewhat unsatisfactory, with viewers unable to fill in the gaps by themselves--by leaving Tarantino to explain it all to us, he renders much of "The Hateful Eight" somewhat pointless.