Avis des critiques

I'm not here to defend this movie, nor to explain why it was my favorite film of last year, but to advise you to watch it again and try to see beyond the obvious elements that were the subject of the hottest takes of 2015. This western mystery is a play in disguise as a big operatic snowy masterpiece, where every performance is among the best roles that the cast have had in their careers.

Clocking in at 167 minutes (even longer in its roadshow version, with its overture, intermission, and additional footage), the runtime of The Hateful Eight is something of a commercial exception. But within this duration, Tarantino crafts a progressive and deceptively intricate tale, one in which not a minute is wasted.

The Hateful Eight is a reflective film in which the Hawksian Tarantino reevaluates the unfair comments he made about John Ford when Django came out. Maybe in rewatching some Ford movies featuring John Wayne in preparation for casting Kurt Russell in a role based on Wayne (and on the constructed authority Wayne brought to his characters—an authority that is questioned and then eliminated in The Hateful Eight), Tarantino realized he has more in common with Ford than he thought.

Though set during the Reconstruction, it's a readymade Cliff's Notes of shitty late-Obama America: Whites hating Blacks; Blacks hating Whites; both hating on Latinos and all feeling pretty ok about abusing women as well. In this world, guns are everywhere, authority is fleeting, the profit motive reigns supreme, memories of the Confederacy loom large and an absent Lincoln, unable to defend his legacy, is just left twisting in the breeze.

Tarantino turns 53 in March; his films have always been about people as well as genre conventions. He should simply embrace middle age, ditch the criminals and tough guys and gallons of blood, and write a relationship drama. The Hateful Eight is halfway-there, but the film is drawn-out and stately when its gory B-movie content needed the energy of a Reservoir Dogs. He's still good enough to get away with it, but for how much longer?

If Aretha Franklin's performance of Carole King's "(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman" at the Kennedy Center Honors in December can be seen as the most inspiringly optimistic vision of race relations in America in 2015/2016, The Hateful Eight can be seen as a purposefully rebarbative nightmare vision of same. This ought not surprise. As an individual, Tarantino may well have a social conscience, but there's no way that he's ever been what you could call a socially *responsible* filmmaker.

Is this the film that will bring celluloid back from the fringes of modern filmmaking? Probably not, but it does strengthen the cause, much like Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan have recently. THE HATEFUL EIGHT successfully brings back a sense of spectacle in going to the movies. The roadshow version is an impressive achievement that should not be missed.

The Hateful Eight is violent, wacky, entertaining, and somewhat meaner that I thought it would be, but Tarantino's appropriation of history in order to bring forth his critique and wild fantasy is less convincing here -- much less than Inglourious Basterds, which I think is another of his best films. That he is always heavy-handed, a maestro of wilful exaggeration, is a cinch; only that in The Hateful Eight, the natural steam that runs his madcap engine seems spread out too thin.

The biggest problem for me is that the film really held no surprises, nor did the stakes feel important or personal in any way. I kept thinking about another film, Day of the Outlaw (1959), and how much deeper it went in surveying a similar story because its characters behaved like real people and it seemed rooted in its surroundings... The film is a flimsy fantasy that I found almost completely humorless, though I may be an exception in this regard, and lacking a proper ending.

It's hard not to draw a link between the aggravated pettiness—if not outright Trump-esque trolling—of Tarantino's recent comments on race, and the vitriolic provocation that characterizes The Hateful Eight. It's simultaneously his longest, grandest production to date as well as his most dubious.

[Tarantino] deserves credit for devising a narrative—his first since 1997's Jackie Brown—that isn't explicitly revenge-driven from the outset. But one longs for interstitial moments like when a smitten Robert Forster sheepishly buys a Delfonics album after hearing it played in Jackie Brown's apartment. Thirsts can be quenched in many other ways.

Like most of Kubrick, Tarantino's films usually require re-viewing; their first impressions can be disappointing... But it may be time to admit frustrated irritation with Tarantino's evolving voice, even if it means questioning a beloved and hyper-literate hipster auteur, in an American desert of original perspectives, whose work consists of 95 per cent dialogue and no CGIs whatsoever. Forgive us for being conflicted.