Victory

An Intelligent Adaptation
Victory (the novel) is hardly one of Conrad's masterpieces, and is his most melodramatic piece of fiction. These melodramatic elements lend themselves very well, however, when it comes to translating Conrad to film (which hasn't been done very well to this stage, apart from Coppola's loose adaptation of Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now). Director Mark Peploe, a sometime collaborator with Bernardo Bertolluci, has fashioned a script that comes close to the spirit of Conrad's novel. The changes that have been made have to do with the book's ending, yet they don't hinder the artistic flow of the film in any manner.

The story is a classic good vs. evil allegory, with Heyst (Willem Dafoe) representing a fallen Adam trying to make his way back to paradise. Just for reinforcement of the concept, Heyst's father stares down in glaring disapproval from a painting Heyst has had delivered from his old digs in San Francisco. He's now living in a paradisical setting (the Javanese...

"We are the world, Mr Heyst, come to pay you a visit."
I love Joseph Conrad but the films never seem to work. "The Duellists" was too thin, "The Secret Agent" terrible. "Lord Jim"s the best of a bad bunch so far.

This doesn't up the score much, but it's an honest try. The locations are good and it has the feel of the time and place. Casting is arse over face, with pudgy Sam Neill as the novel's skeletal Mr Jones (hammy, mannered, ineffective) and Willem Dafoe as the novel's pudgy Heyst (very good indeed). Irene Jacob's a blank sheet, but at least she's better here than in "U.S. Marshalls." Best of the bunch is Rufus Sewell, who has Jones' 'private secretary' to perfection, and he's an actor I've no time for in anything else.

Biggest drawback is the narration. Bill Patterson may be great, but he barely keeps his trap shut for more than two minutes. He's always telling us back story, what Heyst thinks, what Schomberg thinks. It's as if Mark Peploe can't let go of the novel or as if the producers didn't think the...

Tell Tale Heart
Axel Heyst (here played by Dafoe), like many of Conrad's outcasts, is a wounded creature who has beaten a retreat from the mainstream of life. But even in the far-flung colonies, the imperial heart of darkness still beats.

Written in 1913, Victory went to press just as WWI erupted and so Conrad considered changing the title of the book so as not to mislead readers into thinking this was a war novel. But he opted to keep the title anyway. The title "victory" refers to the protagonist's victory not so much over historical circumstance (which can never be transcended) but despite the crushing effects of historical circumstances. Arguably, its not much of a victory at all. Its not a happy book by any stretch of the imagination, its a deeply philosophical book about man's alienation from himself. The dense impenetrable tropic setting, as always in Conrad, serves as a symbol of man's dark impenetrable heart. In this book that heart is especially dark and the densely philosophical...

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