“I just want the truth,” Will intones to a coroner he’s hired to perform a second post-mortem on Davey, but discovering the truth also means succumbing to the long-dormant fury he knows will inexorably lead to murder. The city is alive with the stench of moral and physical corruption, and Will, Davey, Boad, and Davey’s faithful friend Mickser (Jamie Foreman) are all hopelessly stuck in the muck. Aided by Michael Garfath’s lush, inky cinematography and Simon Fisher-Turner’s use of atonal jazz as a dissonant complement to the disquieting urban setting, Hodges enmeshes his tortured protagonists in an asphalt jungle that’s an interminable breeding ground of degradation and wickedness. Hodges flips back and forth between these characters and story strands with elliptical, trance-like agility, carefully revealing past and future glimpses of the story to create an atmosphere of ethereal portentousness that throws into question whether individual scenes are real, dreams, or as implied by Will’s statement at the film’s onset that “Most thoughts are memories, and memories deceive,” one man’s untrustworthy recollections.
Upon his return, Will is greeted with frustration by his old crew-who don’t take to his new detached disposition and warn him that “people like us don’t change, not really”-and with suspicion by crime boss Frank Turner (Ken Stott), who fears that the long-absent crook will want to reclaim his turf. Will’s search for the dangerously insecure Boad is born from his irrefutable sense of duty toward his brother, and from an overpowering repulsion toward the random, disgusting malice of the world. A shot of Will’s van surrounded by unbroken traffic lines on an empty street suggests his inability-despite his best efforts to alienate himself from the past-to successfully change the course of his life, and the character’s subsequent vision of Davey immediately draws him back to London, where he learns that his brother had slit his throat while fully clothed in a bathtub rather than deal with the shame of being sexually violated by a man. Uninterested in the chronological neatness of traditional narrative, Hodges begins his film by fluidly intercutting scenes of Will holed up in his beat-up white van (which functions as both his home and sanctuary from the outside world) and being fired from his woods-clearing job with those of Davey selling coke at a posh party and, while walking back to his city flat, being raped by a wealthy car dealership owner named Boad (Malcolm McDowell). Will Graham (Clive Owen) had run London’s underworld until, besieged by guilt and regret, he deserted his loyal restaurateur girlfriend Helen (Charlotte Rampling) and mischievous artful dodger brother Davey (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) for the countryside in order to cope with his “grief for a life wasted.” Three years later and partially hidden underneath a scruffy woodsman beard and baggy flannel shirts, Will lives a solitary existence of quiet serenity, untouched by the vileness of his previous life and intent-as he proves after altruistically transporting a brutally beaten stranger home to his wife-on becoming something approximating a compassionate person.
Ill sleep when i am dead code#
As in Jean-Pierre Melville’s quintessential 1967 neo-noir Le Samourai, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead’s protagonist is a no-nonsense killer who, like Japan’s warrior class, is bound to adhere to an unspoken code of honor (criminal and personal) he cannot reject. Hodges, working from a bleak Trevor Preston script, is fascinated by the aspirations, desires, and base compulsions that propel society’s murderous fringe population. Raw and nasty, the film-about a reformed gangster who returns to his criminal stomping ground to avenge a murder-intently examines humanity’s darkest impulses while hinting that our choices are not fully our own, and turns a conventional genre setup into a sleek, dreamy, jet-black treatise on the immutability of man’s vicious nature. The overpowering inevitability of failure and death is the genre’s lifeblood, and it seeps into every grimy back alley and grungy apartment in I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, Mike Hodges’s cool, intensely morose follow-up to his stunning Croupier. In film noir, you’re doomed if you do and doomed if you don’t.
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