Robert Duvall did a great injustice to Pat Conroy. Duvall, of course, won great critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his portrayal of the title character in the film adaptation of The Great Santini. Duvall was too fine an actor playing at the top of his game during the peak phase of his career to be satisfied with playing the character as created by Conroy. As a result, while it would be stretching things past the point of credulity to suggest that Col. Bull Meecham is likable in the film, he is certainly a more rounded, developed and significantly less pathological portrait of mental derangement than the character that dominates Conroy’s prose. While it is true that most actors love to play bad guys, it is equally true most stars don’t like to play characters the audience hates. When the film is over, one may hate the things that Meecham does, but Duvall is such a naturally engaging presence that it is practically impossible to hate the man.
This is not the case with the book. In fact, it is quite likely that Conroy created a character of such profound narcissism that he refers to himself as "the Great Santini" that the only person in the world—both his fictional world and our real world one—who can honestly say they like him is Col. Meecham. And even that may be up for question. All this comparison between the novel and the film may seem to indicate a negative appraisal of the book for its failure to lend dimensionality to its most dynamic character. Actually, that could not be less true. The initial suggestion that Duvall did not serve Conroy well is a commentary on the genius of Conroy’s accomplishment.
Consider what he has done with The Great Santini. Conroy created a character whose behavior and actions are consistent with the kind of pure malevolence inhabited by more conventionally situated villains. Bull Meecham is intolerant, judgmental, mentally and physically abusive, narrow-minded, pompous, self-involved, misogynistic and, quite possibly, sociopathic. He exhibits everything one would want or desire in the nemesis or antagonist of a much tougher type of story far removed from the trappings of domestic drama and the limitations of a soldier’s story. Take the Col. out of peacetime, put ten years on him, ship him to Vietnam and what you’ve got there is, well, actually, what you’ve got there is the Col. that Robert Duvall played in Apocalypse Now. The point is that Meecham is perfectly constructed for the role of a villain, but it is really going too far to call him that.
Meecham treats his family bad enough to qualify for a call to human resources in today’s world. But he’s a military man and a good one. An honest one. He is deserving of respect and he is deserving of being called an honorable soldier. But he is one of the lousiest excuses for a human being to ever be a lead character in a novel without killing someone in cold blood. And that is why an actor of the caliber of Robert Duvall could never have been satisfied with merely playing him as a guy way too easy to hate. Where is the greatness in that?
