The Sunset Limited (2011)

Two men in a single room, one apartment, ninety minutes of argument. Tommy Lee Jones directs and plays White, a professor who has decided that existence is a rounding error and intends to correct it under a subway train called the Sunset Limited. Samuel L. Jackson is Black, the ex-convict who pulls him back from the platform and spends the rest of the running time trying to talk him out of the return trip. Cormac McCarthy wrote the play, and the screenplay keeps the walls close and the talk dense. There is no score to speak of, no scenery, no relief. Just two chairs and the sound of a civilization negotiating with itself.

The casting deserves a note, though a quiet one. A Black lead carries a fully realized dramatic role opposite a white co-star, and the film never pauses to congratulate itself for the arrangement. The characters are named Black and White, which is either the bluntest metaphor in McCarthy's catalog or an accident of the stage, and the ex-convict's history brushes against race relations without ever stopping to lecture about them. Race sits in the frame as furniture, not as thesis. The theological argument, faith against nihilism, is genuinely two-sided. Black argues for God and endurance, White argues for the void, and the film lets both men make their case without rigging the verdict. That evenhandedness is rarer than it should be. Talky, yes. Sermonizing, no.

The result is a chamber piece that trusts its actors and its audience in equal measure. It is grim, claustrophobic, and content to leave the argument unresolved, which is the correct choice for material like this. One leaves the room unsettled, which is presumably the point. A film that could have been a lecture instead behaves like a conversation, and that restraint is its own small mercy. Recommended for viewers who enjoy watching two excellent actors lose an argument to each other for an hour and a half.