I’ll Sleep when I’m Dead: A Cool Thriller

In 1998 director Mike Hodges and actor Clive Owen produced a modern classic with Croupier. Unlike so many other crime films of the 1990’s with their hyper kinetic, music video style, this was refined, paced filmmaking. It launched Clive Owen’s career and jump-started Mike Hodges’s flagging one. They return together for another crime film, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, the title taken from the late Warren Zevon’s song of the same name.

Similarly to Hodges’s best-known film, the 1971 Michael Caine classic Get Carter, this is a revenge tale. Jonathan Rhyes-Myers’s Davey Graham is a young, carousing Londoner who dies of an apparent suicide. Owen plays his older brother Will Graham, a hermetic former gangster who returns to the city from the countryside and investigates his brother’s death.

Dressing like Paul Bunyan for most of the movie with plaid flannel shirts and blue jeans, his repressed emotions are further hidden under a scraggily beard.

Will learns that before killing himself, Davey had been sexually assaulted by Malcolm McDowell’s character Boad. Hearing phrases like “forced genital-mouth contact” uttered may make a few male audience members squirm the way women have for years. Issues of masculinity get further tweaked when evidence shows Davey, biologically at least, enjoyed the rape.

Hodges has remarked of his films, “I think there’s enough utter pap, romantic pap in the cinema that there’s plenty of that catered for. I like to have a different clientele” and as one can see, this is a rough film. Those lacking a strong constitution may consider avoiding it in favor of more lightweight fair. But those willing to take the film on will be well rewarded.

As Will uncovers more and more, and denies more and more about his brother and himself, the loose strands are pulled tight into a finale of vengeance. In a simple but ingenious set-piece, we watch Will prepare for settling the score not through the stereotypical caressing parade of weaponry but an extended grooming session, in which his beard is shaved off and tailoring significantly upgraded. Arriving out of the barber’s chair is a cool, urbane killer.

The scene could be an adequate analogy for what this fine, elegant film does for the thriller genre: trimming it of its excessive, ratty, disheveled look and updating it into a sleek, modern, mature design.

Promoting the film in the United Kingdom, Hodges asked an interviewer, “I think audiences are screaming for intelligent films that don’t manipulate them all the time, wouldn’t you agree?” A better, more truthful teaser for the film there could not be.