Post by StevePulaski on May 1, 2017 15:42:31 GMT -5
The Sunset Limited (2011)
Directed by: Tommy Lee Jones
Directed by: Tommy Lee Jones
Samuel L. Jackson tries to instill some biblical thought in Tommy Lee Jones in The Sunset Limited.
Rating: ★★★
NOTE: This film was recommended to me by Sean Slimak for "Steve Pulaski Sees It," a month where I watch twenty-five films requested by friends, fans, and readers.
Films with a single setting almost always force screenwriters to rack their brains to illicit careful and interesting character drama that boils on-screen like an unattended pot on a stove. Often times, even the most innocuous premises prompt uneasiness or certain fear in their audiences due to the setting's claustrophobic nature. This is partly why Samuel L. Jackson's character's apartment is such a terrifying place in which to spend time for an upwards of one-hundred minutes as he makes a commendable attempt to instill some biblical thought in a man (Tommy Lee Jones) he just saved from committing suicide.
The two characters are evidently named in respects to their skin colors. White, the suicidal man, is a nihilist in classical sense. A philosophy professor who appears to have been a curmudgeon ever since birth, White emphasizes the indisputable truth that life ends in death - that much him and Black can agree on. Black, an ex-convict who has spent the last several years living off of very little with very little in a small apartment in a dangerous neighborhood, has studied the Bible during the time he spent incarcerated. He believes there is a God that puts us through numerous tests and tribulations in order to see who is most deserving of a spot in eternal paradise. A part of him would like to believe this being that he views himself as a reformed man, once on the path of violence.
The men engage in an imperative exchange for the entire runtime of the film, shifting from a worn dinner-table, couch, and every corner and crevasse of Black's shoddy apartment in hopes of using man's invention of words and language to come to a consensus - or at least partial agreement - on life, death, and the widely debated afterlife.
"Suffering and human destiny are the same thing; each is a description of the other," White tells Black in a way that sounds as if he's trying to shut down any and all debate by making his cynicism more than a bit apparent. "The light is all around you but you don't see nothin' but shadow," Black claims, "And you're the one causing it. It's you. You're the shadow; that's the point." The men engage in this dizzying philosophical debate about the larger questions that will have most ebbing and flowing as if they were engaged in a long-winded conversation in real-life. They'll be gradually going in and out at some points being more arrested and convinced than others.
Jackson and Jones show how and why they've gotten to their respective statuses as actors. They can both make the most work out of what little they can give one another in a setting sense and how much they can give one another in a written, performance-driven sense. Jackson's crackling voice contrasts with the low, monotone pipes of Jones in a way that doesn't matter as much to the convictions of either man as opposed to the largeness of their presence at different times throughout the film. Initially, I thought Black was a representation of God or Jesus himself - an idea not far off if you subscribe to the "Tyler Durden is imaginary" belief in Fight Club. However, as the film went on, I quit looking for answers and representations of deity as much as I simply listened to each man and admire their words, their power of placement and spatial awareness to one another, and the way how, at different times in the film, each of them became almost larger in size and scale.
The Sunset Limited is a nihilist's conversational wet-dream, comprised from the bottom up on great conversation with identifiable musicality on which a viewer can easily latch and powerful performances derived masquerading as deceptively simple ones. I believe the worst thing you can do when you approach this film, however, is expect answers to long-held questions or reassurance that the world and its many unanswered questions are layered in anything other than shades of gray. The Sunset Limited is at its most beautiful when it recognizes these inherent and mystifying complexities, which often come when Black and White are arguing, yet never managing to form the desired, neutral color.
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. Directed by: Tommy Lee Jones.