TV REVIEWS : TNT, Roeg Attempt Conrad’s ‘Darkness’

The ho-hum, the ho-hum.

More than nine decades after its literary launch, someone has finally brought Joseph Conrad’s household-name novella “Heart of Darkness” directly to the screen--albeit the small screen, on TNT cable--going where Orson Welles and so many others tried but failed to steam before.

But while, in theory, mercurial Nicolas Roeg sounds like an inspired choice of director--with a history of methods as unconventional as the central demigod Kurtz’s own--what he uncovers upriver is a spleen of murkiness at best.

Conrad’s source story about a brilliant ivory trader who’s gone mad deep in the Congo consists mainly of descriptive passages, and is a bit of a clever cheat; it assumes our willingness to take the author’s word for it that the mystery man awaiting the journeyman Marlow deep in the jungle is a genius. Dialogue is minimal, and ballyhooed Kurtz himself gets only a few unremarkable sentences near the end before dying unremarkably. It’s a great screen “treatment” in some ways, but, as climaxes go, Conrad wasn’t doing foolhardy future adapters any favors.

Here, in a peerless piece of miscasting, Kurtz is played by John Malkovich, who filmed this immediately after “In the Line of Fire” and seems to be playing a stoned version of the same languidly luciferin character. (Malkovich even casually snaps an orangutan’s neck just like he did with that woman in the Eastwood picture.) True, it’s no easy assignment playing dying and demagogue-ish at the same time, but the actor proceeds so ineffectually--uttering his famous last lines, “The horror, the horror,” as a kind of resigned yawn before the infinite--that it’s hard to picture him even in his prime having roused any gullible natives into god worship.

It’s inevitable that scripter Benedict Fitzgerald would have to invent a lot of dialogue for Kurtz and Marlow; this ends up being mostly Malkovich imparting over-obvious pearls like “It is dangerous to tear away the layers from our faults and look down into the abyss of our true beings.”

Fitzgerald has also messed with the novella in making protagonist Marlow a fairly surly, anti-authoritarian chap right from the beginning, which doesn’t leave the usually excellent actor Tim Roth any changes to go through.

Roeg’s hand-held camera work brings some needed nervousness to the proceedings; technically, the location work in Belize often looks terrific. But fans of the source are likely to be annoyed by the changes from the book--some of them apparently for purely P.C. purposes--and conversely, those who haven’t read it may be confused by some details that have reverently, needlessly been incorporated.

You have to admire the sheer courage of the attempt. But Conrad buffs may walk away with a new appreciation for Francis Coppola’s very loose--yet somehow more spiritually faithful--adaptation, “Apocalypse Now”; even Brando doing jungle improv had more “horror” than this.

* “Heart of Darkness” airs on TNT Sunday at 5, 7 and 9 p.m.