Post Description

John Locke could have been describing Tommy Lee Jones' new HBO adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's relentless 2006 play, The Sunset Limited. If you think that's a reductive reading, check the script. Jones' suicidal college professor is simply named White, while his savior, a man of faith played by Samuel L. Jackson (and a spiritual cousin to Jules Winnfield), is called Black. Essentially a 90-minute conversation in a Washington Heights tenement taking place in the immediate aftermath of White's suicide attempt at a subway station, The Sunset Limited plays like a talky condensation of McCarthy's great theme: How do we create meaningful lives in a chaotic world where God is silent and death is inescapable? But instead of a Western, Southern Gothic, or post-apocalyptic novel, he gave as a verbose, urban-set play, something Bergman would like (if Uncle Ingmar had had an interest in anyone but the haute bourgeoisie).
It's fascinating to see the conversation between Jones and Jackson ebb and flow like a game of verbal ping-pong, one holding the intellectual high ground one moment, the other the next-My Dinner With Andre as a game of philosophical brinksmanship. Jones' timorous atheist runs a whole emotional gauntlet from initial humiliation and despair to smug self-assuredness, and man of faith Jackson somewhat the reverse. If The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada didn't already convince you that the man can direct, Jones' take on Sunset Limited proves his directorial skill. Instead of opening up McCarthy's play, he embraces its claustrophobia, focusing on little sensual details like the flexing of a hand, swirling coffee in a mug, an orange peel on a counter-top, a trumpet's muted honk wafting through the walls. Jones' professor has forgotten that it's these little details that really make life worth living, and so, like ze tiger in ze zoo in Werner Herzog's Madeline, he thinks death is his only release. And to McCarthy's credit, he doesn't ever let the professor see the light. Maybe, like Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters, he just needs to see Duck Soup again to go on living.