Heart of Darkness

Nicolas Roeg – 1993 – USA

The unfilmable Joseph Conrad novel finally got a direct and faithful cinematic treatment by the eccentric Nicolas Roeg in 1993.  It had most famously been adapted (very loosely) as Apocalypse Now (1979) and there was a pretty interesting Playhouse 90 version in 1958 with Roddy McDowall and Boris Karloff.  It was also intended to be Orson Welles’ ambitious first film before technical difficulties diverted him to Citizen Kane (1941) instead.  Roeg’s adaptation is not very popular because it’s murky and mysterious, just like the novel.  Roeg is one of a handful of directors – with Robert Altman, Ken Russell and a couple others – who, despite the passage of time, kept on making films in the style they liked, as if it was the 1970s forever.  Therefore, the style of Roeg’s Heart of Darkness seems like an odd throwback to earlier films like Walkabout (1971) and Don’t Look Now (1973), but it really is consistent with Roeg’s many other surreal and psychological movies.  Tim Roth stars as Marlow, the steamer captain sent up the Congo on behalf of a British ivory trading company.  John Malkovich is Kurtz, the company agent who appears to have “gone native” and acts as a deity to the natives who reside on or around his outpost.  One of the hallmarks of Roeg’s style is the fractured time reality in which brief flash-forwards from future events intrude on the present, meaning we often don’t know what various inserted shots mean until later in the film.  Expectedly, this frustrates some viewers who see the technique as chaotic.  The film might not satisfy in high school literature classes, but I view it less in the context of Conrad than Roeg.  It continues his long preoccupation with the pull of the savage and the irrational.