Will Graham still looms large in the memories of those he left behind when he chose to, or had to, disappear. In "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," he plays a familiar type, the retired killer forced to return to his old skills. Hodges made a comeback in 1998 with " Croupier," a sleeper hit starring Owen, who was not then widely known but was launched toward stardom by that film you can currently see him in the title role of " King Arthur," where he creates a harder, darker Arthur than the movies usually give us. Hodges is a hard-boiled director who began with " Get Carter" (1971), with Michael Caine in one of his best performances, also as a gangster seeking vengeance for a dead brother. In Clive Owen, Hodges has an actor who suggests the buried mystery and menace the role requires. Whatever Will Graham did in the old days, whoever he was, there are a lot of people in south London who remember and fear him, even though he's been off the scene for years. He apparently kills himself, and when Will learns of this he returns to London. Davey is dragged off the street and raped. In a third story, a car cruises through London with a hard man in the back seat, surrounded by hired muscle.
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Somewhere in a remote area, a man named Will ( Clive Owen) lives alone in a van, is a manual laborer, finds a man who has been beaten and helps him. In South London, an ingratiating charmer named Davey ( Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) delivers drugs to parties, is popular on the circuit, picks up girls for a night, will steal anything not nailed down. But there is a tangible pleasure in following enigmatic characters through the shadows of their lives deprived for a time of a plot, given characters who are not clearly labeled and assigned moral categories, we're allowed to make judgments based on their manner and speech.
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That assumes we want a simple story, simply told, and indeed many mainstream movies and TV shows treat audiences as simpletons. Some of the reviews have complained that "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" is needlessly convoluted - that we're asked to spend too much time trying to identify the characters and become oriented within the plot. For Hodges, this isn't a matter of keeping us in the dark, but follows simple logic: The characters know who they are and don't have to tell one another, and we are outsiders who will need to fit it together. At the beginning we don't even know who the characters are, or why they matter to one another.
We don't know if he intends to return to his mobster ways or make a new clean break with the girlfriend.Mike Hodges' gritty new film noir "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" begins in enigma and snakes its way into stark clarity. Not only is there no plot resolution, no big shoot-'em-up ending, there's no moral resolution, no closing emotion: we don't know if Owen is heading back to the girlfriend's house to be killed, or if he's just driving off into the sunset alone.
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So, did they run out of filmstock? Money? Screenplay? Did they just decide a cool ambiguous ending was better than, say, an actual ending? Are we supposed to picture a room full of movie producers locked in eternal combat, fighting over how the film will end?
Well, they're just left to their own devices, ignored by the plot. All the hired muscle from Clive's old mob, from the enemy mob and from the bad guy who got the brother killed. The hired Irish assassin is left sitting on the stairs of the girlfriend's house with the girlfriend at gunpoint. In the end, the mobsters are left hanging around London. This is the result of his righteous anger at his brother's killing himself after being brutally raped. Then he goes out and stands on a beach watching some guy hit golf balls into the surf. He tracks down and shoots one dog and one bad guy. Everyone's afraid of him.Īnd what does he do? He gets a haircut and gets his antique Jag out of storage. They hire a special assassin to stake out his girlfriend's house to kill him when he appears. He's so bad that the local mob starts arming up in fear at what he might do to those responsible for his brother's death. So, what's with this film? Does my DVD only contain the first 3/4s of the movie or did it not have an ending? They've got this whole slow run-up to the ultra-badass Clive Owens returning to London (Brixton, actually). This post contains spoilers for "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead", although probably you shouldn't care because it's a crap film.
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