"I'll Sleep When I'm Dead"

The first character we meet in "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" is Davey (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a dashing young rapscallion and small-time drug dealer who struts around London as if he's certain he'll own it one day. We barely get to know him before he dies, submerged in the bloodied water of his own bathtub, apparently having cut his own throat. He's just been raped by a vicious, insecure, thuggish businessman named Boad (Malcolm McDowell), and in the macho underworld that Davey travels in -- or aspires to travel in -- even the merest taint of homosexuality is a liability (although, notably, the movie never spells out Davey's orientation).

Davey's only relative is his older brother, Will (Clive Owen), a former gangster who, after suffering a breakdown, abandoned both his criminal life in London and his younger brother. He now lives in a van -- he has the unshaven, vaguely deranged look of a mountain hermit -- picking up odd jobs to make a living. Will is a gloomy, troubled, isolated soul, and he knows that seeking the company of other people is out of the question for him. He can't bring himself to go anywhere near the city, and the mere thought of doing so fills him with anxiety. Owen is a subtle, intense actor: You can't see his quaking, but you can feel it as if it were in Sensurround.

When Will intuits that something horrible has happened to his younger brother, he rushes back to London, only to be greeted by Davey's grieving best friend, Mickser (Jamie Foreman, in a small but perfectly tuned performance), who had been entrusted to look after him. To avenge Davey's death, Will begins to piece together what happened to him, reluctantly re-entering the world of mobsters and heavies he used to inhabit. He also reconnects, cautiously, with his old love, Helen (Charlotte Rampling), a respectable restaurateur who understands why Will had to ditch his old life, even though she can't help resenting him for ditching her along with it.

The plot of "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" sounds more melodramatic, and possibly more sentimental, than it is. Hodges and Preston let the action unfold slowly, almost languidly, the better to wrap small but significant details into the story. For example, we can see that Helen is anything but corrupt -- she's comfortably ordinary and middle-class, which suggests that Will, in his former life as a gangster, must have been attractive to her precisely because of his dangerous aura. It's clear that Will fought (and killed) for any respectability he ever had. But if his very ruthlessness made him a success (and ironed out the class differences between him and Helen), it also drove him mad. Their affair is doomed, of course, but Will's eyes betray a desperate hope that he can resurrect it -- he holds more hope than the wounded but self-sufficient Helen, which only tightens the caul of mournful isolation around him.

Next Page: In the world of noir, grief is often a great motivating force

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