If this had turned out to be the film that Friedkin
intended, it would have been fantastic.
Unfortunately, Sorcerer has many problems, and the coup de grâce is that it never
approaches the quality of Clouzot’s cover of the same material, The Wages of
Fear.
In Clouzot’s tight film, the opening section sets up a world
whose values inform the subsequent road adventures. These values – pessimism, opportunism,
amorality -- heighten the suspense as well as give us an investment in the
characters. Friedkin might have been
trying to do the same in the opening section of Sorcerer, but the film rambles
into a two-stage opening that neither creates a sustained mood nor establishes
characters that we care much about. In
the first stage, we meet the characters on their individual home turfs as
assassins, robbers, terrorists and con artists; after this extended section on
four continents, we then see these characters for a while in a small, Latin
village. This extended introductory section
of the movie has so much sprawl that we have no time to connect with any of the
quartet; worse still, the information in this section is only modestly
important later in the film. While we
eventually have the Palestinian bomber, Kassim, blowing a fallen tree out of
the road, the Frenchman Victor’s fraud is irrelevant to the rest of the film, we
learn so little of Latin Nilo in the intro that he’s even hard to recognize
when he arrives in the village, and the calm efficiency we see of the American Jackie
in the introduction has little take up in the rest of the film. It feels as if Friedkin is aiming to recreate
the pervasive existentialism of Clouzot’s opening, but Sorcerer instead gives
us a long, diffuse introduction to some bad guys who inhabit a world that isn’t
necessarily corrupt.
When the trucks finally get rolling, so does Sorcerer. While there are several fine action and
thrill scenes in the film, the best by far is the scene of the trucks crossing
the rope bridge in a storm. As the
trucks lurch and lean, it’s only the most jaded of viewers who won’t gasp and
wonder how Friedkin created the effects.
But such action sequences aside, the other elements of the film are sour
here. We are most attached to Victor
through the introductory section, but his role is diminished in the travel
section; conversely, the man we see the least in the introduction, Nilo,
becomes one of the most important characters on the trip. As Nilo becomes the coward we recall in Clouzot’s
Jo, we are far less disgusted here because we don’t know much about him and we
don’t see the hypocritical contrast between the gangster poseur and scared weakling
Nilo soon becomes. And one of the strangest
transformations is when a shot of the grimly determined Jackie cuts to a shot
of Jackie having a hallucinatory nervous breakdown. And that in a desert that has suddenly
replaced the rain forest. Such contrastive
cuts can have an effective role, but in a film that doesn’t use this technique
for the first two hours of narrative, it feels more like bad film-making than
innovative styling.
Friedkin’s ambitions are evident here -- grand existentialist
statement, explicit anti-Americanism, intertextuality with his earlier Exorcist
success (witness the title, flashes to pre-Colombian masks, and the menacing
grill of one of the trucks). But
Friedkin’s failure to focus and his lack of control prevents Sorcerer from
delivering on any of them, and there’s not even enough excess to provide the
kind of pleasure we might get from a similar effort by a director like Herzog. Sorcerer delivers us some grand action scenes
in the middle of muddle that neither achieves the profundity it aspires to nor satisfies
our desire for a tight aesthetic experience.
