Panzram
06-26-2004, 12:40 PM
Director Mike Hodges created an icon of British crime drama with 1971’s GET CARTER. In some ways, I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD feels like a close relative of the earlier film, though some of the plot points would have been just about impossible to get past the censors three decades ago.
I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD jumps back and forth in time between the events leading up to the suicide of apparently cheerful Davey Graham (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a popular, cute low-level drug dealer. Davey’s older brother Will (Clive Owen) has been living in anonymous near-isolation for the past two years, but he comes back to London when he cannot reach his kid brother. Will has a reputation as a "hard man" – a terrifyingly tough criminal – and it is well warranted. Will wants to know the reason for Davey’s suicide and when he learns it, he is determined to get vengeance. The other villains in town, even the ones who had nothing to do with Davey’s death, are alarmed by Will’s return and want him gone.
Trevor Preston’s script and Hodges’ direction both have a quiet intensity – the film is a kind of character study of bleak, violent people who are mostly between bouts of insanity when we encounter them, though they are capable of prodigious brutality. Owen is so convincingly angry, watchful and coiled that the silences are never dull but rather filled with tension – we wonder where all of this will go. The answer is in a way surprising, as the film grapples with some core issues in ways that are much more psychologically insightful than usual, going far deeper in exploring criminal power struggles than most films dream of doing, while remaining true to the main characters’ limitations as severely cut-off human beings. Owen is first-rate as the grieving, livid brother, Rhys Meyers is amiably feckless as Davey and Malcolm McDowell exudes contempt and evil from every pore as the ultimate author of Davey’s despair. Jamie Foreman is excellent as Davey’s best friend and Will’s worshipful lieutenant.
SLEEP is sometimes a bit too terse for its own good – a few plot threads are so tenuous that we get more confused than we need to be figuring out how they fit in – and the finale is a bit more obscure than seems appropriate, given the linear seriousness that has preceded it. Still, the movie draws us in and makes us feel as if we are within its real troubled and troubling world while we are watching it. It has a real, if dour, internal vitality that makes it well worth seeing.
I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD jumps back and forth in time between the events leading up to the suicide of apparently cheerful Davey Graham (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a popular, cute low-level drug dealer. Davey’s older brother Will (Clive Owen) has been living in anonymous near-isolation for the past two years, but he comes back to London when he cannot reach his kid brother. Will has a reputation as a "hard man" – a terrifyingly tough criminal – and it is well warranted. Will wants to know the reason for Davey’s suicide and when he learns it, he is determined to get vengeance. The other villains in town, even the ones who had nothing to do with Davey’s death, are alarmed by Will’s return and want him gone.
Trevor Preston’s script and Hodges’ direction both have a quiet intensity – the film is a kind of character study of bleak, violent people who are mostly between bouts of insanity when we encounter them, though they are capable of prodigious brutality. Owen is so convincingly angry, watchful and coiled that the silences are never dull but rather filled with tension – we wonder where all of this will go. The answer is in a way surprising, as the film grapples with some core issues in ways that are much more psychologically insightful than usual, going far deeper in exploring criminal power struggles than most films dream of doing, while remaining true to the main characters’ limitations as severely cut-off human beings. Owen is first-rate as the grieving, livid brother, Rhys Meyers is amiably feckless as Davey and Malcolm McDowell exudes contempt and evil from every pore as the ultimate author of Davey’s despair. Jamie Foreman is excellent as Davey’s best friend and Will’s worshipful lieutenant.
SLEEP is sometimes a bit too terse for its own good – a few plot threads are so tenuous that we get more confused than we need to be figuring out how they fit in – and the finale is a bit more obscure than seems appropriate, given the linear seriousness that has preceded it. Still, the movie draws us in and makes us feel as if we are within its real troubled and troubling world while we are watching it. It has a real, if dour, internal vitality that makes it well worth seeing.