‘Nostromo’: Ambitious but Muddled Miniseries of Novel

The dying words of Kurtz, the pivotal character of Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness,” summarize a thoroughly bungled, unwieldy, interminable six-hour TV rendition of his cosmic longer work, “Nostromo”:

“The horror! The horror!”

The darkness turns out to be “Nostromo.” An ambitious colossus filmed in Cartegena, Colombia, over six months, it opens the winter season of “Masterpiece Theatre” on PBS. Partners in this production are England’s BBC and Boston’s WGBH-TV in association with RAI of Italy and TVE of Spain, a collaboration about as seamless, it appears from the result, as the United Nations.

Although published in 1904, “Nostromo” is remarkably durable as a commentary on economic imperialism and the emptiness and corruption of politics and politicians on all levels; Conrad’s message about exploitation of the weak by the powerful still resonates across the generations. Faces may change but much harder to alter is the basic fabric of societies whose lower classes historically march to the tune of high finance and the privileged elite.

Conrad’s metaphor is Constaguana, a fictional South American republic where even the virtuous are ultimately corrupted by greed, and whose major economic asset is a silver mine owned by a British family that’s being reopened after a decade of closure following a bloody worker rebellion. That opening episode of violent defiance, a sharp jolt that shatters a deceptively languid, sweltering calm at the mine, just may be the production’s best sequence, raising hopes that evaporate in the coming hours.

Thereafter, the narrative fibrillates, gasping, gurgling and never quite catching its breath, while following the misfortunes of Constanguaneros largely through newly arrived mine owner Charles Gould (Colin Firth) and a magnetic Italian emigre (Claudio Amendola), who heads the local dockworkers and whose nickname, Nostromo, means “our man.” Gould, the silver miner, is not a bad sort, but his trickle-down benevolence is conditional, just as Nostromo’s almost mythic heroism turns out to be not everlasting. Meanwhile, Gould’s wife, Emilia (Serena Scott Thomas), is a suffering idealist, and a lump of a local physician named Monygham (Albert Finney) is hopelessly debauched and drunken.

The “Nostromo” crowd is much larger than this, however. And, director Alastair Reid is unable to give cohesion to the story’s thicket of players, nor sort out the causes they and their numerous factions represent, nor improve Conrad’s unsatisfying ending. It’s doubtful that anyone who has not read “Nostromo” will know from John Hale’s porous, disjointed screenplay what is happening at any given point. There is a civil war, but no clear vision of who is fighting whom or where or for what. There are random generals and a fortress, a new president said to be coming through the mountains but never getting through. Characters appear, then inexplicably vanish for long sections of the story. It’s a melting pot that just keeps melting, an odyssey so swollen and slow that the last of its three segments is in danger of being lapped by the previous century.

Only Thomas is at all persuasive; Amendola, especially, is such a hunk of stone that Nostromo’s reputation for charisma appears to have no basis.

The scenery is exotic and the music arresting. You’d trade both, though, for clarity.

* “Mobil Masterpiece Theatre: Nostromo” airs Sunday-Tuesday at 9 p.m. on KCET.