InvadeNOLA

By: Sean Rhoads

In one of his rare interviews, author Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, The Road) claimed that art which doesn’t address death isn’t, to him, art at all. By that standard, The Sunset Limited, HBO’s televised version of his 2006 play, is McCarthy’s purest work of art to date: White (Tommy Lee Jones), a suicidal professor, and Black (Samuel L. Jackson), a Christian ex-con, argue for eighty minutes about death. And there’s no action, no other characters, no fancy camera work to distract from the grim conversation. The characterization of Black is a tad trite and the conflict slightly unsatisfying, but I was glued to every minute.  

Black is a born-again Christian who, after a life of crime and violence, takes in junkies and tries to convert them. As the play begins, he has prevented White from committing suicide on a railroad track and hauled him back to his tenement apartment. White, depressed, bedraggled, and withdrawn, is neither thankful for Black’s help nor receptive to his preaching. Black dominates the first three-quarters of the play, brandishing Christian promises of redemption and an afterlife. White, like the truly depressed, lacks the energy to defend his atheistic nihilism, though he quietly highlights some of the frailty and incoherence in Black’s own beliefs. Then, the last ten minutes or so belong to White, as he unleashes a belch of existential hatred and resentment that evokes some of Captain Ahab’s best world-decrying speeches.

In McCarthy’s novels, the prose is the star, with long, purple evocations of barren landscapes and festering wounds, but The Sunset Limited is all dialogue. McCarthy the novelist is in the company of all-time greats, but as a playwright, he isn’t quite at the same level, though his intelligence shines through. The conversation effectively moves between long periods of naturalistic exchange and the occasional highly theatric soliloquy, but the play seems to be building towards a moment slightly more explosive than the conclusion here. Maybe, in the end, the lack of action catches up to the play. I’m fine with a relative lack of conclusion, but everything feels unfinished.

The actors certainly aren’t at fault. Black is written as a little bit of a stereotype, speaking in a wise, rural African-American dialect that occasionally rings of Uncle Remus, but Jackson takes advantage of a rare non-pulp role and makes Black believable and compelling. He is especially effective where he reflects on a life-changing prison fight, showing a layer of egoism beneath his conversion experience. Jones, who also directs, is usually cast as a tough, blue-collar guy, and plays well against type as the learned White.  He is putty-like and defeated for most of the play, but, by the end, he is monstrous and terrifying. White’ s part is underwritten, his past and history all but unrevealed, an abstract figure, an embodiment of despair.

The confrontation, however, isn’t as dynamic as it ought to be. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t work as the bout between theism and atheism it strives to be. It’s a portrait of two men who can’t accept death’s role in the world. Black leads a compromised, self-deceptive life because he believes he will be rewarded after he dies. White, on the other hand, despises the world because of death. Death makes it impossible for him to be happy, knowing, as he puts it, that the “the axe hangs” over every pleasure. Neither, McCarthy suggests, is a particularly healthy attitude.