Tommy Lee Jones
The Sunset Limited

A table. A sofa. Two chairs. A Bible. Some coffee. An antiseptic room in the slums of New York. Here is the sparse location of "The Sunset Limited" second feature film with Tommy Lee Jones behind the camera. But the one who can be considered the real author of the film is the writer Cormac McCarthy. It is from his homonymous literary work (originally intended for the theater) that McCarthy himself draws the screenplay for this film, created for American television HBO.

A solitary specter and voluntarily averse to the limelight, McCarthy has always been talked about for his books, visceral to the core, capable of being overly disturbing. It was strange for McCarthy to choose to dedicate his time to the screenplay of a film: the confidence in the success of the project came to him when he learned that he would work with a few people, among whom were the two actors who share the scene. The good Tommy Lee Jones (also in the role of filmmaker) and Samuel L. Jackson.

The story is articulated on the sole figures of these two actors. They bring to life two nameless characters: the "white" man, who attempted suicide under the "Sunset Limited," a train, and the "black" man who saved him. The film is entirely played out on the black man's attempt to convince the white man to abandon the suicidal tendencies that haunt him. The black man, an avid Bible reader and believer (but with a very personal religious vision) and the white man, totally resistant to any religious "contamination." The former an ex-convict, the latter a professor.

"The Sunset Limited" is a one-and-a-half-hour discussion on the meaning of life, on the role feelings and states of mind like suffering, discomfort, fear, and loneliness exert on the human soul. It is a long confrontation between two culturally different men (but not so much after all...) on the most pressing issues of "modern" man. Specifically on two "fires": religion and the value of culture. One can exclude the other and vice versa. But the goal on which McCarthy and Jones' work development is based coincides with the black man's attempt to save his new friend. He tries to make him desist through his Catholic reasoning, his life principles, partially succeeding in hitting the mark. But before him is a wall, the product of society. A man who finds no happiness in anything, who does not accept biblical beliefs, and who can no longer find comfort even in his culture, which he once loved so much. Knowledge ceases to be a reason for happiness, and the intellect itself denies its existence. The result is that the white man surrenders to a "mal de vivre" that has the peculiar traits of modern society and his personal discouragement. The solitary crusade of one against the other, in a game of destruction that superficially assumes reasons and themes as deep as those dealt with in the film, but which in reality takes the form of a society that is slowly self-cannibalizing.

But the truth is that sooner or later everyone seeks their own "Sunset Limited."

"Show me a single religion that does not prepare for life after death. Show me one that prepares for nothingness. Now, that would be the one for me."