A new classic born in ‘Hateful Eight’ – Savagery and virtuosity mingle in ‘The Revenant’

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‘The Hateful Eight’ is not for the faint at heart. What Quentin Tarantino movie is? But while cinema’s favorite cinephile is up to some of his old tricks in his eighth feature, this over three hour long drawing room thriller also feels like a step forward for the wayward enfant terrible  a step toward maturity.

That’s not to say he’s mellowed. You need only spend a minute with 87-year-old Ennio Morricone’s throbbing, malicious score to know that to be true. Instead, Tarantino shows relaxed power with “The Hateful Eight.” It’s easy authority that’s less manic than the cinematic language we’ve grown to expect from him. And it still packs a punch to the gut, or, in the spirit of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s murderous prisoner, some repeated blows to the head.

This tale of eight unsavory creatures stranded in a one-room haberdashery in the middle of a nasty Wyoming blizzard is in no hurry to get where it’s going, and the audience is better off for it.

It’s a whodunit when no one has done anything yet  more like a who’s gonna do it, and what exactly are they gonna do. Everyone is bad, everyone has a secret, and everyone is the hero of their own story.

There’s Samuel L. Jackson as the hyper literate bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren who carries a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln in his coat pocket; Kurt Russell as the violently affable John Ruth who’s transporting a prisoner to town to be hanged for a $10,000 bounty; Leigh as said prisoner; Daisy Domergue, whose bloody Cheshire grin says more than any monologue ever could. Walton Goggins plays Chris Mannix, the soon-to-be sheriff who may be a master manipulator or just plain dumb; Demian Bechir is Bob, who runs the Haberdashery; Michael Madsen as Joe Gage, the menacingly quiet one in the corner; Tim Roth as Oswaldo Mobray, a British hangman who seems like a Christoph Waltz stand-in before he finds his groove; and Bruce Dern as an ornery Confederate general, wondering what’s become of his life now that the war is done.

Ensemble

It seems like a lot, but it’s really not. That’s the brilliance of Tarantino. Each of his characters is so distinctive, so rich, that they pop off the screen as soon as you meet them. It is refreshing when so many ensemble movies seem to confuse character development with something more akin to “here’s a famous person who you’ll remember.” Vivid costuming work from Courtney Hoffman only adds to their uniqueness.

Tarantino also keeps you on the edge of your seat wondering who to trust, or, at the very least, side with. It changes every 15 minutes as the mystery unravels, and then explodes.

The conversations are as nimble as ever, whether they’re talking coffee, war, or the benefits of transporting prisoners dead or alive.

A big deal has been made about the presentation of “The Hateful Eight.” Tarantino and his cinematographer Robert Richardson shot the film in Ultra Panavision 70, a basically dead format that was used on only a few films, such as “Mutiny on the Bounty.” There’s even an overture and an intermission at the roadshow presentations.

It’s hard to see how that’s not mostly posturing as most of the film is set in one room, but it does add a theatrical wonder to it all even if the “glorious 70mm” depends a great deal on the individual projectionist. In the screening I attended, the film was so blurry that they switched to digital at intermission. For what it’s worth, the digital looked great.

Besides, we need Tarantino to go all out in whatever ways he deems necessary even if we don’t always understand it. If he didn’t he wouldn’t be Tarantino and we’d be missing out.

“The Hateful Eight,” a Weinstein Company release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for “strong bloody violence, a scene of violent sexual content, language and some graphic nudity.” Wide release run time: 167 minutes. 70mm Roadshow Run Time: 187 minutes with a 12 minute intermission. Three and a half stars out of four.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s frontier survival saga “The Revenant,” filmed in the Canadian Rockies, seeks to join the ranks of Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”: movies that take some of their primal madness from their raw, remote natural landscapes. The making of those movies are mythic tales in their own right, and “The Revenant” arrives with its own tall tales of on-set tussles and actor derring-do.

After confining himself largely to the interior of a Broadway theater  and the psyche of Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thomson  in the best picture-winning “Birdman,” Inarritu and his maverick cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, have opted for the open air of the West, circa 1823, in a loose adaptation of Michael Punke’s 2002 novel about the frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio).

The result is some of the most ravishing filmmaking of the year, or any year, as Inarritu and Lubezki stretch their fluid long takes down river rapids and into the kind of clashes  a mauling grizzly, an ambushing tribe not rendered before with this kind of awe-inspiring, naturally lit virtuosity. But awe is the only thing “The Revenant” is well stocked in, if you don’t count snow and beards.

“The Revenant” isn’t just showy about its audacity, it’s relentlessly chest-thumping. DiCaprio isn’t the film’s true star; it’s Inarritu’s camera. He never lets us forget it, not just in staggering one-takes but by allowing characters to look into the lens, sometimes even fogging it with their breath. “The Revenant” earns your admiration, only to lose it by continually insisting upon it.

Somewhere in the realm of the Dakotas and Montana is the Rocky Mountain Fur Co, guided by Glass in their pursuit through hostile and uncompromising territory for beaver pelts. In our first view of the trappers, they’re camped in river-side pines when an eerie suspense settles over them. Arrows from all around sail into them before Ree tribesmen, searching for a stolen daughter, stream into the camp.

With mayhem and savagery all around, Inarritu’s balletic camera sweeps through the slaughter and eventually drifts down the river with small band of survivors. Among them are Glass, his Pawnee son (Forrest Goodluck), the company’s leader, Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson), a callow youngster (Will Poulter) and John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy).

The scene is the first taste of what “The Revenant” has in store: the throbbing intensity of survival, played out across harsh, wintery terrain, in a series of flights and pursuits between men, native and not, seeking a variety of vengeances. There are occasional whispery flashbacks and surreal dream sequences that attempt to give the film more spiritual underpinnings that are little match for the movie’s relentlessly visceral reality.

In another extended single shot, Glass is mauled by a bear, leaving him so badly injured that death seems certain. After attempting to lug him through the mountains, Henry offers more money for volunteers to stay behind and give him a proper burial “when the time comes.”

Fitzgerald, interested in the extra cash, steps forward. Shifty and selfish, Fitzgerald is the obvious villain-in-waiting; Hardy patiently waits for his opportunity to reveal a deeper savagery in mankind and babble something over a campfire about God being a squirrel he once caught and ate. Let loose in the wild, Hardy doesn’t disappoint.

Neither does DiCaprio in an often wordless, exceptionally committed performance of Glass’ great determination. As he was in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” (which also included long sections of the actor crawling, albeit in a quaalude-induced stupor), DiCaprio is most interested in extremes of performance.

But no one is more in rhapsody over the manliness of the mission than Inarritu. His bleak and beautiful movie is overwrought, but it’s also soaked through with the brutality of the frontier and the tragedy of its indigenous people. Native Americans traverse “The Revenant,” carrying the deepest horrors of the land. It’s something to contemplate, when not ooo-ing at the spectacular set pieces.

“The Revenant,” a 20th Century Fox release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for “strong frontier combat and violence including gory images, a sexual assault, language and brief nudity.” Running time: 156 minutes. Three stars out of four. (AP)

By Lindsey Bahr and Jake Coyle

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