A couple of weeks ago, I asked if anyone had seen the movie
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead and could tell me if it was simply a
remake of director Michael Hodges's earlier film adaptation
of Get Carter (the one with Michael Caine, not the later one
with Sylvester Stallone, which I haven't seen). No one seemed
to have seen it (though Jim sent a link to an opinion on
imdb, thanks Jim), so I thought I'd give my own answer, now
that I've seen it.
The premise is very similar -- a gangster comes back to town
to find out how and why his brother died, to find out who is
responsible. In both cases, the protagonist's presence
disturbs the underworld status quo. However, there are some
obvious differences in the execution. First, Carter was still
an active gangster in London, going back to his smaller home
town. Will Graham (the great Clive Owen) is an ex-gangster
who comes back to the London he left three years earlier; he
has been
"living rough," living in a van and working manual labor jobs
off the books. Get Carter is very plot driven, following
Carter as he finds out what happened and what he does about
it. Sleep is character driven. Although Graham is intent on
finding out what happened to his brother, there is some
question what he will do about it, even if he will do
anything about it.
This movie reminded me of westerns where a retired gunfighter
must decide if he will strap on his guns once more. I don't
want to say too much, but this movie even has the
iconographic scene (brilliantly parodied in Cat Ballou) where
the gunfighter pulls out and puts on his old clothes -- is
that enough to revive the old persona? I will warn you that
the ending is kind of nebulous, even by the standards of a
Michael Hodges movie -- I'm not sure if it was an existential
statement or Hodges just lost interest in the plot (I saw it
twice in order to resolve that question, to no avail) -- but
I did enjoy the movie quite a bit. Hodges's direction,
Owens's acting and Simon Fisher Turner's evocative score
(never calling attention to itself, but essential to the
mood) team up to make a great character study of a man
struggling with the man he was, trying to determine whether
or not he has really left that man behind.
As much as I liked the movie, though, it really made me wish
Hodges had adapted another Ted Lewis novel, GBH. That novel
was about a gangster in self-exile as his empire is falling.
Alone near a beach town, he slowly loses his hold on reality,
both his understanding of what happened to him in the past
and what is happening to him in the present. I'll Sleep When
I'm Dead makes me think Hodges is the perfect person to bring
this novel to the screen.
Mark
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 14 Jul 2004 EDT