*** (out of ****)
Starring Clive Owen, Charlotte Rampling, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Jamie Forman, Ken Stott, and Malcolm McDowell
Directed by Mike Hodges & written by Travor Preston
2003 (2004 US release)
103 min R
“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” may have all the trappings of a gangster picture, but it might really belong in the company of reality-questioning films like “Mulholland Drive” and “Fight Club.” The movie’s gimmick is not surreal or supernatural, however. There is no imaginary friend or dreams that are indistinguishable from reality. Instead, there is only the protagonist’s philosophy. The movie opens with his narration: “the dead are dead,” he says, and everything we remember about them is corrupted by time, until the real person is gone, and there is nothing to prove they were there at all. From this bleak statement we can draw the worst kind of nihilism: that nothing and no one matters, because everything that is not forgotten is warped.
“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” begins slowly, meticulously, even tediously. We understand why when the protagonist breaks his philosophy by searching for the truth, which by his own admission is unknowable. By the third act, we cannot quite remember the first act. Who was in that car with the hero’s brother? Which blonde henchman was that? Like the hero says, our own memories have corroded. Audiences expecting a “whodunit” will probably not be satisfied. The movie is the work of director Mike Hodges and star Clive Owen, who were behind “Croupier,” one of my favorite films of recent memory. Both movies use the seedy London underworld to show the allure of dangerous quasi-existential philosophies and protagonists who fail to live up to them. “Croupier’s” focus is the allure of absolute neutrality and objectivity, about being an employee in life’s casino instead of a gambler.
The plot of “When I’m Dead” is simplicity itself for followers of film noir and gangster flicks. Will Graham (Owen) is a former underworld bad-ass that has taken up the life of a lumberjack to hide from his past. He returns to London when he fears his younger brother Davy is in trouble. (Davy is played by the very thin Jonathan Rhys-Meyers of “Titus” and “Bend It Like Beckham,” who always looks like he’s strung out on heroin.) Old friends claim to be glad to see him, including Charlotte Rampling as a restaurant owner, and the new big man around the underworld (Ken Stott) is nervous and sends him threats. Hovering over all this is the man (Malcolm McDowell) in the dark SUV who was following Davy during a night of wheeling-and-dealing.
Hodges and screenwriter Trevor Preston use this framework subtly. The movie has a low body count. One crucial death could have been a quick and efficient murder, but it is allowed to linger for several minutes of screen time so that it is not the act that causes a death, but the memory of an act. Will Graham talks at length—a rarity for him—about a funeral, and all he can think about is the fictional person who will be invented by the dead man’s friends, while the real person washes away. Again and again, Will is confronted by old acquaintances who claim to know what his motives were when he left the underworld. His only response is skepticism—“is that why I left?”
Questions are raised about Davy’s character which Will claims that he can answer; this is a violation of his philosophy, and he knows it, and he shifts his genuine suspicion to a friend (Jamie Forman) who is helping him in his investigation. Because he does not believe in his own memories he is adrift in the world—adrift, indeed, the way we are in the picture’s first act, when we join the characters knowing nothing of their situation. We join the London scene the way Will does; he has memories of them we lack, but he chooses to ignore most of them. Like “Mulholland Dr.” and “Fight Club,” you may find yourself re-examining everything that took place earlier in the movie from a new perspective. The question isn’t what was real and what wasn’t, but were we seeing things objectively, or does Owen’s opening narration just mean we’re seeing his interpretations—his corroded, lying memories—of what took place? If that’s the case, then is there a story behind the story we’re seeing, like in “Croupier?” Is there a higher reality—a connection between McDowell and gang-leader Stott perhaps—to which we are not privy because we only seen Will’s version?
Will Graham is, of course, perfect for Welsh actor Clive Owen. Will is a man who has rejected the idea of memory, which leads him to rejecting his own past, and since every man is the sum of his experiences, Will in essence has no personality. It takes a special actor to convey thoughts, vulnerability, and an intense capability for violence when playing a character who is essentially a self-made, opinion-less void. You can also set your watch to Clive Owen in a suit and a wool trenchcoat.
Like “Croupier,” “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” is beautiful in a grimy, glossy, dirty way, in which dark cars crackle over wet streets and hard men in sharp suits step out of the shadows just long enough to threaten one another with incomprehensible British slang. Owen begins the movie looking out-of-place, sloppily dressed and sporting a nasty mop of hair, but by the end he is sharper than his competition and so handsome you almost can’t look at him. Davy’s flat is a mattress-on-the-floor rathole and cinematographer Michael Garfath (“Croupier” again) shoots everything in a gloomy blue raininess.
“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” is fascinating to think about and talk about, but it’s not as entertaining to watch as “Croupier.” The latter film is coolly hypnotic and we giggle guiltily at Owen’s cynicism and irony. Still, “When I’m Dead” rises fascinatingly above the gangster genre into the realms of psychology and philosophy. In all of us, there is the Croupier’s desire to wash our hands of the world and those around us, and there is Will Graham’s urge to distrust everything. The only difference is that most of us are only dabblers and dilletantes when it comes to walling off our souls.
Finished August 17th, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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