The Hateful Eight and Joy (2015)

Okay, let me start off by saying how much I fucking hate Tarantino's whole "The 8th Film by Quentin Tarantino" thing. I know he's been doing it for awhile, and I'm sure he'd say he's trying to call back to the grandiosity of classic cinema in some way. But I'm sorry, it's just really annoying. We get it Quentin. You're you.

With that out of the way, I'll go ahead and say that The Hateful Eight is probably my favorite Tarantino film since Reservoir Dogs. This isn't necessarily saying all that much because I haven't really loved a Tarantino film since Dogs (or maybe Jackie Brown). I appreciate most of them and only actively dislike one (Django Unchained), but after the new-car smell of Pulp Fiction wore off back around 1996 or so I've just never really been able to plug back into his aesthetic the way most people seem to. 

I've always said that Tarantino is like the most genius 13-year-old boy in the world. He can craft a brilliant scene (the opener of Inglorious Basterds, the "oh, I'm sorry, did I break your concentration?" scene in Pulp). His movies are, by and large, full of such scenes — even in Django, which I found pretty repulsive, I watched the "white cake" scene with my jaw on the floor. But, in the end, he just can't help but get in his own way. The constant movie references, the baroque violence, the scene-stomping monologues... over the course of two hours or so I just find it all pretty wearying. Not offensive or distasteful. Just... kind of boring. I know I'm not the first to say this, but I ultimately find his hyper-referential approach more alienating than entertaining. Whatever substance might be there gets buried under all the "isn't this cool?" posturing, and I just check out eventually.

There's something about The Hateful Eight that feels a little different, though. It's still a Tarantino film, with all that that implies, but it's sharper and more purposeful than anything he's done in years. And, for once, it really seems like he has something he wants to say here. 

This is a mean fucking movie — maybe the meanest he's ever made — but in its way it's an oddly moral one. Tarantino has been oft-derided for his liberal use of the N-word, and I'll admit that most of the time I've felt that he uses it for shock value and little else. But in The Hateful Eight he really digs into the word — its meaning, its power to hurt and to be wielded as a weapon, and how it can be turned against the person wielding it. While I think The Hateful Eight is one of his best and most cohesive films, it actually has fewer of those amazing scenes we've grown accustomed to. But there's one right before the intermission (I saw the 70mm roadshow version) that's a true show stopper. Tarantino rips the scab off the country's long racial wound and lets all the festering ugliness just flow right out. In the era of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, that feels necessary. 

Tarantino also explores some interesting and similarly dark territory in regard to gender. Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is one of the vilest, most disgusting characters in recent years (she reminded me a more dangerous/psychopathic Gollum). We spend much of the movie rooting for her to die — and to die painfully. Yet, Tarantino constantly pulls the rug out from under us and fucks with our sense of empathy. She'll do something truly awful, but when one of the much larger male characters responds with a vicious punch, pistol-whip, or elbow to the face — well, it's hard not to wince and feel a little disgusted with ourselves.

For all its nastiness, however, The Hateful Eight is also supremely entertaining. I think it's no accident that I responded to this in a way I haven't since Dogs; by locking the characters in one place and forcing them to bounce off each other like pinballs (or grenades), both movies strip away so much of what I tend to find so maddening in the rest of his work. The film is clearly influenced by John Carpenter's The Thing (he even uses some of Ennio Morricone's unreleased music from the 1982 horror classic), but it also owes a huge debt to Hitchcock's Lifeboat and Romero's Night of the Living Dead. The use of the wide-format 70mm in the confined space of the snowed-in cabin that serves as the movie's primary location heightens rather than takes away from the claustrophobia. The aspect ratio tends to crowd the characters together in an interesting way, rarely letting any one person own the frame him/herself. The film starts relatively quiet by Tarantino standards, but he uses that claustrophobia brilliantly and lets the tension build until it explodes in a truly impressive carnival of violence that feels more earned than gratuitous.

I still don't love The Hateful Eight, or at least not as much as I love Dogs. But it's Tarantino's first movie in a long time that reminded me what he's capable of when he gets serious.  

****

I've always been a bit on the fence about David O. Russell as well. His movies tend to be an odd mix of mania and ponderousness that undercuts whatever comedy he might be going for. Occasionally it clicks (Flirting with Disaster, American Hustle) but too often his films can kind of sink under their own weight (I Heart Huckabees). 

I saw Joy the same day that I saw The Hateful Eight, and two more different movies I couldn't imagine. On paper, Joy shouldn't work at all — the story of the woman who invented the Miracle Mop does not seem to cry out for cinematic treatment. 

But, while The Hateful Eight is maybe the better and more ambitious movie, Joy is a hell of a lot of fun. It's loose and breezy in a way that reminded me of Flirting, and O. Russell rides that line between just-enough-quirk and way-too-much like an expert rodeo cowboy riding the bucking bronco. There are moments where I felt like Joy was about to tip over into preposterousness, but O. Russell unerringly pulls back at just the right moment.

Sort of based on the story of Joy Mangano (Jennifer Lawrence), the aforementioned Miracle Mop inventor, the film is actually a pretty insightful (if at times too on-the-nose) study on the ways our society conspires to thwart the ambitions of women. Joy is a single mom saddled with two kids, an ex-husband and a father who won't move out of her basement, and an epically dysfunctional extended family that seems determined at every turn to stomp whatever sense of industriousness and entrepreneurial self-worth right out of her. She risks everything to bring her damn mop to market, but it all nearly comes undone because of a family member's stunning act of presumptuous incompetence. 

But this isn't a weeper or a tragedy. This movie is fucking funny. Lawrence showcases the same comedic chops that she did in last year's Hustle, and she's balanced perfectly against a supporting cast that includes an in-rare-form Robert de Niro and a giddily vampiric Isabella Rossellini. 

When he's at his best, O. Russell is a master at zeroing in on those little moments of interaction that can be at once fraught with tension and absolutely hilarious. I don't think he's been as sharp in his observations of the sometimes cannibalistic nature of the American family since Flirting with Disaster.