MOVIE REVIEW: Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’ by Mansfield Frazier

It’s been said that truly great art acts as a mirror, allowing us to see more accurately — via reflection — who we really are, not whom we pretend to be. And Quentin Tarantino’s latest flick (his eighth, and truly a work of art) does just that: It reflects and throws back in our faces just how truly damaging — in the end, totally destructive — hatefulness really is.

Sometimes authors write an entire book to make one salient point, and it could very well be that Tarantino made an epic three-hour film to make one point, which one of his characters gives voice to: “White people feel safe when blacks are afraid.”

Set in the period after the Civil War, The Hateful Eight is about revenge, retribution, and the lingering hatreds and fears spawned by that great and defining conflict. While the Revolutionary War determined what we are as a nation (a constitutionally established republic), the Civil War determined whom we are as a nation (a country forever doomed to struggle with its ugly past until we once and for all face up and come to grips with the beast slavery created).

The plot — if it can be called that — is simple: A bounty hunter, John “The Hangman” Ruth, played by Kurt Russell, has rented a stagecoach to take his fugitive prisoner, Daisy Domergue, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, to Red Rock Colorado to be hung. They encounter another bounty hunter, Major Marques Warren, played by Samuel L. Jackson, who has two dead desperados that he’s delivering to collect on. The only problem for the major is that his horse has succumbed and he’s stranded on the snowy road with a blizzard bearing down.

He negotiates with “The Hangman” (who sounds amazingly like John Wayne) to be allowed into the stagecoach, and Daisy immediately squawks, “You’re going to let that nigger ride in here?” Thus using the “N” word for the first time in what must be a record for the number of times it’s used in a film. I lost count after the first couple a dozen or so.

For her temerity, the Hangman, whom she stays attached to by a chain for most of the movie (until she cuts his arm off in an attempt to escape; luckily he was dead, as is virtually every one else by the end of the flick), violently backhands her and gives her a bloody nose to go along with her already black eye.

Some will initially view Tarantino’s treatment of Daisy as misogynistic, but stick around to the end of the film and you’ll see that she deserves every whack she receives, and then some. The director’s message is simple: You want to roll like a man, then be prepared to be treated like one.

After picking up another stranded wayfarer the stagecoach ends up at a ramshackle stagecoach stop where the killing soon will commence. In fact, earlier in the day, we are to learn a heap of killing had already taken place.

Inside we find Bruce Dern, playing former Confederate General Sanford Smithers, warming his old bones by the fire and expressing his hatred of niggers. But not to worry — Major Warren (who was a slave before he became a Union soldier) knows this kind of hater, and with a tale so diabolical that only a mind like Tarantino’s can conjure up, he goads the general into reaching for a gun so that he can blow his ass into that great Confederacy in the sky: One down, a bunch more to go.

The major characters in The Hateful Eight are stuck re-fighting the recently ended Civil War, just as some people are still stuck fighting it politically today, over 150 years later, and often with consequences just as deadly.

Beautifully filmed, artfully directed and magnificently acted, the movie, with all of its splattered blood and guts, somehow makes all of the killing acceptable, and at many moments even humorous. After the first hour or so the viewer becomes desensitized to all the violence, just like in real life.

The message is this: Life is cheap, and just as things are today, men with police powers and armed with big guns make the rules up as they go along. The parallels are striking — and frightening.

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.

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