HEART OF DARKNESS
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
Factoids about Joseph Conrad and his HEART OF DARKNESS, the famous tale first published in a collection entitled "Youth" in 1902: Born in Russian-occupied Poland in 1857, Conrad acquired a wide-eyed fascination with the sea from his father; orphaned b 12 (both parents died of hardship), he left Poland at 16 and headed to Marseille, from where, for four years, he sailed on French vessels, dabbled with "legitimiste" causes of certain French and Spanish pretenders, flopped at financial enterprises, and en had a love affair that brought to him the brink of suicide. Needing to escape France for these and other reasons, he hopped aboard an English freighter -- The Mavis -- without much knowledge of the English language but in short time he conquered it, came a master mariner, and a naturalized British subject by 1886. Until 1894, when he retired from his travels and married an Englishwoman (and went on to become the father of two boys), Conrad sailed the entire Mediterranean, and onto Australia, the In an Ocean, Singapore, Borneo, the China seas, South America, the South Pacific, South Africa, and, places to be featured prominently in his writings, to the Malay Archipelago and up the Congo River, where he was stricken (and never fully recovered) from ver and dysentery. Conrad didn't start writing until he was 37; his writing was done in English -- his fourth language, after Russian, Polish and French. Though he had received extraordinary praise from other writers like H. G. Wells and Henry James for is early works -- "Almayer's Folly" (1895), "An Outcast of the Islands" (1896), "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'" (1897), "Tales of Unrest" (1898) and "Lord Jim" (1900) -- he never made much money from his writings. (Two novels -- "The Inheritors" and "R ance" -- were collaborations with editor-critic Ford Madox Ford, who would later break down to famed muckraker George Seldes over publishers re-issuing editions of both books without his name appearing as co-writer.)
Conrad had a physically torturous time getting his prose on paper: when his masterwork "Nostromo" was published in 1904, he said that it was "an achievement upon which my friends may congratulate me as upon recovery from a dangerous illness." The analog is neither false nor exaggerated: while in the process of writing, and often at a work's completion, he'd suffer severe flare-ups of rheumatic gout. Some critics suspect his illnesses were psychosomaticly induced: as writer, Conrad, like James, was atte ting to dive into the unexplored darkness of psychology, fictionalizing the craze of Freud but through their own experiences. Unlike James, and unlike Melville, to whom he's sometimes been compared, Conrad's visions of the human condition -- the complex ies, pessimism of his characters' consciences and souls, the estrangement brought on by isolation, guilts, fears and sometimes courage -- are literature derived from the challenge of a foreign language. While it's true that the mazey chronology of his s ries can be off-putting, sometimes irritatingly because, as in HEART OF DARKNESS, supporting characters are unnamed, and often the florid prose is thicker than our palettes are used to, almost a hundred years later we're still in awe of how his command English narrative blooms of mystery and psycho and moral perceptions. HEART OF DARKNESS has the beauty of language comparable to Joyce's "The Dead" and Dylan Thomas's "Under Milk Wood" -- that is, a language of beauty for voices.
For many more years than movie makers have wanted to bring Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" and Paul Bowles' "The Sheltering Sky" to the screen they've wanted to film HEART OF DARKNESS. The late John Huston managed to make both UNDER THE VOLCANO and THE DEAD; in the case of the former, he was only able to bring a safe literal translation to Lowry's sloshed, toxic voluminosity, and in the latter he seemed to impress a whole lot of Kaelettes with what looked like an invitation to an Eveni of "Amateur Hour" Finals, until the very ending, when Donal McCann, off screen to boot, brings Joyce to glorious life. (Only 83 minutes in length, it seems three times that long.) Bernardo Bertolucci seemed to be having a Mass for the Dysenterics said ring his version of THE SHELTERING SKY, when perhaps what might have been celebrated was one for sexual obfuscation. And, as most everyone knows, Francis Ford Coppola used Conrad's Kurtz in HEART to moralize against the American intervention in Vietnam APOCALYSE NOW. Despite the expensive, impressive panoramas, Coppola couldn't make the kind of connection between what Conrad was cautioning about and the Vietnam War. As I see it, Conrad's Kurtz, the ivory hunter turned jungle Messiah, is -- and it nee 't be the author's intentions -- paralleling the Cortes expedition into Mexico: awaiting Kurtz was a tribe of black Montezumas, who, like the Aztec emperor, believed as destiny that a God was to come. The Vietnamese were never looking for a "White God t rule over the dark hordes."
Directors who wanted to make HEART OF DARKNESS had two obstacles: getting the financing and producing a filmable script. No major movie company saw audience interest in a gloomy, diseased-mind horror story, and they readily backed up their fears by pointing out the dismal box office of other Conrad-based movies: AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS, thought to be the best of his stories on screen; the bummer LORD JIM, starring Peter O'Toole; and Ridley Scott's THE DUELLISTS, based on Conrad's mini-novella "T Duel," its only virtue being how it looks. The larger problem is in getting a coherent, playable adaptation, because, despite the persistent acclaim for the story, and all the scholarly interpretation, Conrad creates in Kurtz an astonishingly weak, vag megalomaniac -- a mouse. Academicians have been remiss in not pointing out that according to Marlow's first person narrative, he saw that Kurtz's "soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and by heavens! I tell you, it d gone mad...I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear." Eleven paragraphs later, Marlow says Kurtz "was an impenetrable darkness. I looked down at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of precipice where the sun never shines." Oh, really? How can we the readers "peer" at what Marlow is describing when what he's describing isn't there? As shrewdness, a literary and psychological construct, Conrad turns the tables on his own promise of an vil vision by not delivering; this journey into a blackened soul is all in the imagination. This the major frustration of the multitude of directors and screenwriters who have attempted to conjure up movie imagery worthy of Kurtz's psychosis, of Conrad' nebulousness. The late Orson Welles had the most intriguing concept: he wanted to voice over an unseen Marlow and play Kurtz.
The risk-takers over at TNT-Turner Pictures believed they could get a version of HEART OF DARKNESS made, and, perhaps on the strength of his abilities at occult and visual decay in DON'T LOOK NOW, and his CASTAWAY, which is something like an English Couple Robinson, accepted Nicolas Roeg as director. For what was accomplished, we have to call Roeg's version respectable, and though I would resist it as full praise, faithful. One immediate success: Captain Charlie Marlow, pl ed by Tim Roth, and for the reason we wouldn't have thought possible: in spite what seems everyone's obsession with the madman, in the written tale as well as the movie, Marlow does not get overshadowed by the demented Kurtz. With a voice at the beginni 's narration that suggests Daniel Day-Lewis's Fryer in THE BOUNTY, and confirming that this is indeed a play for articulation, Roth is what keeps us watching; his thin frame, large nose and sun-bleached hair combine to give his performance a strength th oughtn't be there, because Roeg's direction is, elsewhere, soft as room-temperature butter. More to the point: we as viewers sometimes don't know exactly what Marlow's doing up that river, in that everyone else suspects -- probably knows -- that Kurtz s gone bonkers. (More than one, overly-attired White Man confirms "there have been rumors, rumors...") But Roth's curiosity holds us to him: maybe as actor he needed to see what was in store for him as much as wanted to see how Roeg would visual Kurtz's emonic craziness. In fact, the movie was filmed in exact sequence, to help build the dread, the fear, the encroaching evil. (Only there isn't any persuasive dread, fear, evil.) Watching Roth's Marlow, especially when he smears blood on his face, I thoug of Werner Herzog's anguish in the documentary on the making of his FITZCARRALDO entitled BURDEN OF DREAMS, which would be a fine subtitle to the years-long quest to make HEART. And the maxi-thin FITZCARRALDO seeps into our thoughts even before this, wh we see Marlow and the village blacks retrieve the sunken boat that will be used to seek out Kurtz.
Conrad knew, of course, that our curiosities would be aroused by what is a tease of a look into (at the time unchartered) depths of psychology, and don't we all know that literary classes spend most of their time discussing Kurtz. And since APOCALYPSE W, which unfortunately TNT used as a come-on in their ads, Marlon Brando has become so identified with the character that not only do students "see" Kurtz "Brandofied," actors who might play the character probably do as well. Hence, we get John Malkovic wrapped in what looks like a raw silk curtain, reduced to a half-tub version of an idol. Though Brando's voice, which seems to be getting weaker and more whiny as the years pass, has its semi-deranged effects, what's mesmerizing is his piggish grotesqu ess; it's scary, all right, but not Conrad-scary. (Marlow describes Kurtz as "not much heavier than a child.") Malkovich's voice doesn't have any resonance, either, and without that, he doesn't have anything else to fall back on, he can't get Kurtz to e n visually penetrate. All said and done, the only depth Conrad could supply about how power corrupts, how it infects with psychological horror, is through his stylishly arched prose -- and it's Marlow's verbal account that supplies whatever depth there because Kurtz speaks less than two hundred words. So it's no surprise -- may even be Conrad's Revenge -- that this is where Roeg and screen adapter Benedict Fitzgerald get trapped: excepting four lines, nothing they've given Malkovich to say is in the vella; they've written for him such phonied up mediocrity that we might believe they've borrowed whole sentences from introductions published in various editions of the story, pedantry about "light, darkness, the abyss." In trying to pin Kurtz down, we t this: "There is no more detestable creature in nature than the one who runs away from his demons" -- not once but twice. There might have been the chance that this Conrad-like fakery could have been forceful had Malkovich "discoursed" with a voice tha Marlow recalls "rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart." Malkovich's doesn't; and he's limp, soggy -- as if the humidity is more the disease that kills him inst d of the illness which inevitably does. The way he baby-shuffles around his thatched, ornate hut, you'd swear he wasn't so much dying as recuperating from his Camilled Port in THE SHELTERING SKY. But the larger mistake is putting an American actor into e part: this is a role for searing craziness, for the kind of actor who can rattle our moral cages, something we don't train our own actors to do. (Unlike the Brits, ours either go flat, weary, or do a lot of screaming.) Malkovich can get by with his ma uerades in an Eastwood picture like IN THE LINE OF FIRE and he somehow worked commanding magic against his own unattractiveness in DANGEROUS LIAISONS, and brought a pleasing surliness to his photographer in THE KILLING FIELDS. Physically at least, he sh ld have been able to mirror "the ivory face, the expression of sombre pride, ruthless power, (the) craven terror" of Kurtz. Instead, he's become a master at measured prostitution, as seen in that gagger PLACES OF THE HEART; he grants his favors arbitrar y. He's not Conradian here, he's Capotesque.
After Roth, there's a second, albeit easier success -- the use of Belize as a substitute for the Congo. You don't have to be anything more than an armchair traveller to know that Belize isn't Africa, and some will point out that tropical settings pract ally film themselves, as we've seen in APOCALYSE NOW, THE AFRICAN QUEEN and THE MOSQUITO COAST, but Roeg and photographer Anthony Richmond come very close to Marlow's view: "Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the rld, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. A great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the water-way ran on, deserte into the gloom of over-shadowed distances." About the only things they don't get -- the avoidance of which is right -- are the "silvery sand-banks hippos and alligators." The substitution is most effective when, drenched in a twilight fog, the boat is ing closed in on by the warrior-clad tribe, some of whom wear headdresses that could be out of THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and PREDATOR. Roeg succeeds in getting the beautiful Iman to look like "a wild and gorgeous apparition" whose "face had a t gic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve." The only fun: The actor who plays "Alphonse Degrief," a name that's perhaps a planted joke about the difficulties encountered while mak g the movie, wears what appears to be a Napoleon-like nightshirt.
Purists have insisted that HEART OF DARKNESS is intrinsically unfilmable, that there's no way to visually record Conrad's inner sanctum of dementia. They've said the same about UNDER THE VOLCANO and THE SHELTERING SKY, and, in looking over the results, they may be right. Arguably movies are, for the most part, intrinsic common denominators -- by their very nature they dumb down original source material. This process can be exacerbated by movie makers wanting to secure the largest possible aud nce, and even if they don't, their backers do. And it's often compounded by the movie makers inaccurately weighing an audience's interest in the source. These are some of the reasons why UNDER THE VOLCANO doesn't work as movie as it might as opera; the dience is pre-judged not to be as interested in Lowry's hallucinatory verbiage as it would be about a literal story that doesn't make one damned bit of sense. As opera,the torrent of psycheboozydelic words could be showcased by a Greek chorus and we wou have been able to accept the central character's dumb-dumb wife as operatic convention. And yes, HEART OF DARKNESS has strong possibilities as opera: it may be the only medium to give credence to Kurtz's megalomania, allowing for a show-stopping aria a political and psycho caveat. Where but in opera can you turn a mouse into a giant?
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