A propos Ridley Scott´s The Counsellor (2013), seminally reviewed in these pages back in February 2016, I proclaimed Cormac McCarthy to be the greatest living American writer. So much so that for his sake I broke my rule of never reading theatre to immerse myself in The Sunset Limited, which very uncharacteristically I read in one go. I was wondering the other day if there wasn´t any film adaptation of the play and I found it, the above, so I will now break one MacMahonian rule, namely review a film not made for the big screen.
The Sunset Limited was the second TV feature film directed by Tommy Lee Jones, whose acting talent and renown vastly supersede the directorial, but this is not to belittle the latter, as the effort under review does generally justice to the play, more on which below.
The Sunset Limited tells the story of two unnamed black (Samuel L Jackson) and white men (Tommy Lee Jones), the former calling the latter “Professor” in consideration of his apparent erudition, who sit in conversation in the black man´s apartment. The host, an ex-convict and born-again Christian or thereabouts, who lives in a derelict part of Big City USA, where he tries to assist the most hopeless of the hopeless in order to obey his call and presumably try to atone for past sins, has just saved the “Professor”´s life by preventing him from committing suicide by jumping on an incoming train, hence the title. The conversation, appropriately, is about the meaning of life, and the drama stems from the contrast between an uneducated, underprivileged man´s unshakeable faith born from personal experience and suffering and the despondent suicidal nihilism of an affluent, well-educated, well-read, urban “liberal”.
The MacMahonian, which, film aside, believes in keeping it real, feels the author´s (in this case, Cormac McCarthy, there goes another MacMahonian rule) sympathy is strongly with Mr Black. Both characters are sketched somewhat rudimentarily, maybe Mr White more so, a reflection of McCarthy´s apparent belief that faithlessness will lead you to suicide no matter how smart, cultured or well-off you are, but the great pleasure of the play is in the dialogue and the idiosyncratic slang Mr Black uses to refute relatively effortlessly Mr Whites theorems. That (spoiler alert) in the end he fails in no way detracts from this, shall we say, spiritual victory.
Tommy Lee Jones directorial style is self-effacing, which is probably wise, as his rare attempts at rhetorical flair (at one point of the conversation Mr Black is sitting on a sofa and Mr White lying on a couch, Freudian therapy session, wink wink…) would have been best left untried.