I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

What makes a movie great, as opposed to merely good, or interesting? Nobody really knows. Seminars and how-to books try to break the process down—reduce it to a set of principles, a plan of action. But it remains a mystery. A great movie, especially a small, great movie, is like an amazing dream. You know what happens when you're having an amazing dream and something interrupts you and you try to pick up where you left off, or start over: disappointment. Try to make an amazing dream happen again and it'll be different, and probably not as interesting. Try to make your brain come up with a different, equally amazing dream and your luck won't be much better.

Croupier, the 1998 thriller about a novelist turned croupier pulled into a criminal plot, was an amazing dream of a movie. It teamed an out-of-favor, intermittently brilliant director, Mike Hodges (Get Carter), and a hard-ass English matinee idol, Clive Owen, to splendid effect, just when fans of the hardboiled crime drama wanted reassurance that there was more to the form than Quentin Tarantino's film references, ornate monologues and jokey violence. Hodges' roomy medium and wide shots, hatred of sentimentality and sophisticated deployment of voice-over narration (Paul Mayersberg's script was written in très-postmodern third person) made a picture that could have felt intellectualized and academic feel ruthless instead. Owen held it together. An up-and-coming star whose glacial machismo seemed to predate feminist thought, Owen regarded other characters (women especially) with a poker-faced fascination that hid his character's true feelings—or made you wonder if he had any. He smoked more than he talked and didn't care if anybody liked him. You liked him.

The super-hardboiled I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, a London underworld thriller, re-teams Owen and Hodges to profoundly disappointing effect. Everything about it is eerily, almost comically wrongheaded; I've been confused by the too-charitable reviews it's gotten because I think it's a bad movie. It deliberately rejects many of the basic pleasures of Croupier (a filmmaker's privilege, of course) while replacing them with elements that are dumber, more cliched, less interesting and poorly articulated to boot. (Warning: Major plot spoilers ahead.)

The film asks Owen—who looks better in a suit than any Englishman since Archibald Leach and specializes in fearless, self-aware thugs—to sport wooly facial hair and lumberjack clothes while playing Will Graham, an ex-criminal who endured a mental breakdown and now works in a Scottish lumber camp. The casting is as wrongheaded as John Wayne playing Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. Trevor Preston's poky, prosaic script feels misshapen. Expository material that could have been tossed off in a matter of minutes—clearing space for the moral conflicts and power plays that drive all great thrillers—instead gets drawn out for no good reason. Owen spends at least half the film's running time moping in the woods, insisting he's not a criminal anymore. His I-vant-to-be-alone posturing takes a hit when his kid brother Davey (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a petty drug dealer and ladies man, is kidnapped off the street by goons and raped by their boss, an older gangster (Malcolm McDowell, natch). Davey is so shattered by the assault that he kills himself.

The bulk of I'll Sleep When I'm Dead follows Will and Davey's tough, emotional best friend Mickser (superbly played by Jamie Foreman) as they learn of Davey's fate and then seek revenge. The learning-what-happened-to-Davey part seems to take six days. This section of the movie is a one-of-a-kind paradox, at once tedious and mesmerizing, because it abandons drama and substitutes medical and psychological lectures instead. We know what happened to Davey because we saw it onscreen, yet the movie still asks us to watch Will pay under-the-table for a second autopsy, then listen as the coroner tells Will that Davey had homosexual intercourse before his death. Asked if Davey was gay, Will immediately and unhesitatingly responds no. The expert—whose self-satisfied delivery and straight-out-of-a-textbook dialogue unfortunately suggest the narrator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show—proceeds to explain that Davey's body showed evidence of having endured forced anal sex.

Think, for a moment, about the order of these two questions. The expert asked Will whether Davey was gay, and only then proceeded to describe punishingly violent, demeaning sex. Intentional or not, the implication is that all gay sex is so punishingly violent and demeaning. We then learn that it's not uncommon for victims of sexual assault—men, especially—to become so deeply depressed that they kill themselves. The forthcoming lecture about how rape is an act of cruel domination, a grotesque attempt to assuage feelings of inadequacy, is accurate, and will not surprise rape survivors or their loved ones. But the context of this information corrupts and falsifies it. By accident or on purpose, the film vindicates the intense homophobia present in so many crime thrillers, English ones especially. The subtext is, "Gay sex leads to insanity and death," and in dignifying it, I'll Sleep When6 I'm Dead ceases to be a substandard revenge thriller and instead becomes an exceptionally weird, alarmist cautionary tale: the Reefer Madness of buggery.

Swirling around this curious narrative centerpiece is a constellation of subplots and supporting characters, all so poorly articulated that you feel as though you're not watching a finished movie, but reading a writer's outline for a script he hasn't written yet. As Will's ex-lover, Charlotte Rampling is given little to do but look vaguely concerned. As a rival of Will's old gang, Ken Stott is entrusted mainly with delivering kiss-ass dialogue about what an incredibly clever, dangerous, magnetic fellow Will is. (I've never understood why movies think it's necessary to hype a star we already paid money to see.) McDowell, too, is wasted. His character barely knows Davey and doesn't seem all that familiar with Will, either. So the predictable revenge finale is a showdown between men who are strangers to each other—and to us. I suppose one could make a case for this ending as "existential" or something. But from here it seems inept—as inept as Will's voice-over, which is as perfunctory and intermittent as the Croupier narration was dense, allusive and meaningful.

What a letdown. American fiction filmmaking has grown so stale in so many ways that thinking moviegoers increasingly rely on documentaries and dramas from other countries to give them regular helpings of surprise, wit and true feelings. The most depressing thing about I'll Sleep When I'm Dead isn't its sordid subject matter or its listless storytelling. It's the underlying sense that the filmmakers and actors were, in some fundamental sense, going through the motions—doing what they thought fans wanted rather than embarking on a new adventure; describing a dream instead of dreaming. o