A TV movie adaption of Joseph Conrad's iconic novella stars Tim Roth and John Malkovich as the infamous Kurtz.
Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" is probably one of my favorite books of all time. The author was able to capture perfectly the evil of King Leopold's conquest in the Congo as personified in the mysterious Kurtz without being preachy or judgmental. It's timelessness is almost horrifying, as that heart of darkness in mankind has risen up again and again, through the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, modern war crimes, and countless other unnoticed incidents in society. This adaption tries so very hard to imitate what the text accomplished, but it just became rather sad and confusing.
I thought the location was beautiful. It was exactly what I pictured when I read the book. You could almost see the heat rising off the jungles and the rivers, and there was no actor who wasn't gleaming with sweat and dirt.
There wasn't another especially bad with the acting, either. Tim Roth was a little blank, but given the text, Marlowe does seem rather unresponsive to the events around him. Malkovich was decent too, given what little screen time he actually had. I didn't dig the American accent, but that hardly ruined the entire character.
I think the problem with this adaption was its overuse of symbols and subtlety. There were a lot of seemingly "unnecessary" scenes that one might only understand if the book itself had been analyzed in depth. It was very long, too, over two hours, and not much actually happened. I think "Heart of Darkness" is just one of those books that extremely difficult to transition to the screen. It's Conrad's words that really contain the power of the message, and so trading them in for a script and images waters down that power. "Apocalypse Now" had a better idea, I think: Take the message and change the setting to something fresh and still painful. I believe it served Conrad's message more effectively.
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