The Sunset Limited is an HBO film adapted from a play by Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men). The play was published in 2006 and the Tommy Lee Jones produced the film in 2011. The film features two characters that are unnamed until the end of the play, Black, played by Samuel L. Jackson and White, played by Tommy Lee Jones. The interaction takes place in the Harlem apartment of Black after he saves White from committing suicide. He was going to throw himself on an oncoming train, The Sunset Limited.

While watching this movie, you can’t help but feel you are watching a play. The film opens with the two of them in the apartment, and ends the same way. Tommy Lee Jones’s character wants to leave, and you can feel that tension throughout the film, but as someone who was planning on committing suicide hours ago, he has little excuse to leave, especially when Black insists he stays. Partly with intrigue of Samuel L. Jackson’s character and partly because of a lack of an excuse, he reluctantly stays. The entire time, Black wants him to stay, believing firmly that God put this situation in front of him so he could save White.

The Sunset Limited is an intellectual film. The entertainment is based in the compelling conversation between a white, cynical professor who was ready to commit suicide and the black, religious, Southern, ex-convict that stopped him from doing so. The entire film is based on a conversation about faith that preoccupies Black and White. It is an intellectual tennis match that keeps the tension until the very end. Samuel L. Jackson proves to his audience once again, that he is fabulous. He is animated, fitting the prescribed archetype as demanded by the script, yet solely his own.

My only warning about this film is that you have to be in the mood. It is a brilliant film that vacillates between the faithful and faithless, leaving you thinking days after the film is over. Filmed in 16:9, with a striking clarity even though the tagline is, “Nothing is ever black or white”.