Light Sleeper

Like "Prince Of The City", this is another great drug movie, with the greatest set ever built for a movie, New York City. Very few people saw "Prince", and I'll wager fewer saw this one. It has a cast of New York stage actors, who make the usual run of Hollywood anorexic barbie dolls, and Sunset Strip would be tough guys, look exactly like what they are, refugees from some "hysterical" wise cracking sit-com. I have to mention each one of these artists because they're so incredibly good. Willem Dafoe, Susan Sarandon, Dana Delany (what a performance), David Clennon, Mary Beth Hurt, Jane Adams(the looney sister from "Happiness"), David Spade, and last, but certainly not least Victor Garber. Paul Schrader wrote and directed, and if he never does another production, his mother can know that she gave birth to a major cinematic artist. The story can impress people as very hokey. Dafoe is a coke pusher. But he's very sensitive and loving, and is looking for a "better life". He's so guilt ridden as a pusher, he can hardly sleep. Oh, give me a break. But wait. With Dafoe I bought it completely. I was even rooting for him to get back with his former junkie lover Dana Delany. Delany and Susan Sarandon give major performances, Sarandon as a major supplier also looking to go straight as a cosmetic maven. This is a major manual on acting....look, learn, and enjoy.

This is a pretty good movie about a drug dealer with a conscience. I enjoyed the look and feel of the film, but felt that the script and story-line struggled at points. In one instance, Dafoe's character relates "White drugs for white people". Also, Dana Delaney puts in a good performance but definitely second to Dafoe's - her performance is not quite complete, and I was left feeling as though the film just had that extra something missing.

This is a brilliant film. The raw, humane, unvarnished look at the life of a mid level drug dealer in Manhattan is uniquely captivating, and Willem Defoe plays the part to perfection. The story itself is underwhelming, common, real. The protagonist's struggles through life are much like anyone else's. Anyone else's in New York, at least. But the context of his life, the rhythms of it, are very different. The random encounters with love and violence touch him as arbitrarily as they touch each of us, and he reacts to them with the same confusion, elation, and pain. This is the film's genius, and it allows an unusually close emotional bond to develop between the protagonist and the audience.

Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

Critics often rag on Paul Schrader for writing films about scumbags who find violence a shortcut to salvation. The conventional wisdom is that Schrader's scripts play better if Martin Scorsese directs them (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) and that when Schrader directs Schrader, the result is a heavy, humorless mess. But that's not always true. In directing his own Hardcore and American Gigolo or scripts written in a darkly witty vein (Nicholas Kazan's Patty Hearst, Harold Pinter's Comfort of Strangers), Schrader can be slyly inventive. Crowd pleasing? No. Challenging? You bet.

It's difficult to imagine anyone but Schrader controlling the moral turbulence in his script for Light Sleeper, a boldly resonant thriller that elaborates on Schrader's favored themes of sin and redemption. John LeTour, a drug dealer played by Willem Dafoe, is a loner with direct connections to Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle and American Gigolo's Julian Kay. At forty, LeTour is in crisis. His boss, Ann (a fireball Susan Sarandon), is about to chuck drugs for cosmetics. LeTour is losing his coke customers to crack. And he is spooked by a psychic, strikingly played by Mary Beth Hurt. But in his diary (one of several tips of the hat to Robert Bresson's seminal Pickpocket), LeTour writes, "I can be a good person."

Maybe so, but transcendence doesn't come easy. New York's mean streets, given a noirish sheen by cinematographer Ed Lachman, tempt LeTour as he drives through the night making deliveries to the sleek and the sleazy. He is heartened by a chance meeting with Marianne (Dana Delany), an embittered former love and former addict who lets down her defenses for one night. (Warning: Hearing Delany announce, "I'm dripping," during a hot sex scene with Dafoe may be too much for China Beach fans.) As expected, violence erupts before things settle down. Schrader is out there again, testing the limits of audience tolerance. Good for him. Buoyed by his questing spirit and Dafoe's mesmerizing performance, Light Sleeper might just keep you up nights.

"Light Sleeper" is a great and very effective yarn that follows John LeTour (Willem Dafoe), a drug trafficker/former addict who seems miserable and lonely while bringing drugs to users in the Big Apple. LeTour's life is put to the test when he finds out from Robert (David Clennon), that their boss, Ann (Susan Sarandon), is finally switching to cosmetics instead of drugs and an old flame, Marianne Joseph (Dana Delany), comes to town to visit her ailing mother. The movie moves at a steady pace and doesn't get ugly until the fierce and bloody shootout near the end of the movie. I must note that I'm a big fan of Dafoe and the strong (and moving) performance that he gives here is why I admire him a lot.

The film's photography, shot by Ed Lachman ("The Limey", "The Virgin Suicides"), is nothing short of brilliant and beautiful. In the early moments of the film, there are several small piles of garbages that nearly cover up the sidewalks and the bottom of the street lights. Dafoe, who also narrates the movie, mentions that there's a strike. Also, the musical score that's composed and performed by Michael Been, is good to listen to and it stayed with me during the whole film.

Paul Schrader (who directed the movie and wrote the screenplay) knows very well how to handle the film here with a simple and wise approach. Most of his earlier (and recent) work, dating back (and now) to the screenplay(s) that he wrote for Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" and "Bringing Out The Dead" and one of his own films - "American Giglo" make great examples of anyone who works at night and feels agitated. "Light Sleeper" itself has to be one of Schrader's best films for sure.

With Schrader it always comes back to this. Lonely nights and aimless wandering, always just a step short of being swallowed up in the abyss. But it's always the worst at the brink, where guilt starts eating up inside.

So a jazz ballad about lonely nights, this is what people probably call noir in this. About a man who has come a long, painful way to get nowhere, is tired and looking for his harbor. He's a drug dealer, so we get the awkward encounters in seemy places and travel through other people on the same way down as he has been before.

Sarandon is radiant, fierce but fragile, but this is Dafoe's show, it wouldn't have been the same without Dafoe. He's right inside the character, where the desperation piles up. See how his face lights up when Sarandon invites him to lunch, how he passes through peoples' lives without staying, as though time is running out.

Two instances reveal the betrayal (one involving sex and a madonna painting), both involving mirrors that lie. The reflections reveal people who don't have time to get involved, how everyone's strange when you're a stranger. See if you can spot them out.

It is ultimately about the working out of karma, and how our present hells have been long in the digging. Eventually he has to atone with the one thing he's running out of and can't spare, time.