Wider Screeningsfilm review

LIGHT SLEEPER (1992: d. Paul Schrader)
d. Paul Schrader; pr. Linda Reisman; scr. Paul Schrader; ph. Ed Lachman; m. Michael Bean; ed. Kristina Boden; cast. Willem Dafoe, Susan Sarandon, Dana Delaney, Victor Garber, David Clennon, Mary Beth Hurt, Jane Adams, Paul Jabara, David Spade (103 mins)
(updated 06-Nov-2011 3:09 PM )

The American Cinema of Lonliness & Alienation

Although he is frequently cited as one of the most distinctive of American auteurs few of Paul Schrader’s films have reached beyond the so-called art-house circuits.

Perhaps only American Gigolo and Cat People have had any real box-office impact upon the movie-going public. However, Schrader’s presence is certainly felt in his screenwriting tasks for others. Before becoming a director, Schrader was an established film critic and screenwriter. His screenplays for Martin Scorsese in particular made him one of the more prominent of cinema dramatists in the late 1970s. The pinnacle of Schrader’s screenplays arguably remains also one of Scorsese’s most distinctive films – Taxi Driver [Blu-ray]. A masterpiece of insomnia, longing, addiction and contemporary urban alienation, Taxi Driver [Blu-ray] would prove to be not only one of the enduring classics of the 1970s but the first of a trilogy for Schrader, all concentrating on sad men focused on dangerous or even self-destructive women. Schrader would direct the second two films of this trilogy himself, firstly in 1980 with the sleek and stylish American Gigolo and then a decade later with Light Sleeper. There was a progression in Schrader’s alienated protagonists, from the psychotic despair of Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver [Blu-ray] to the vain, narcissistic egotist Richard Gere in American Gigolo to the mellower and even hopeful Willem Dafoe in the nocturnal melancholia of Light Sleeper.

Synopsis (contains spoilers)

In Light Sleeper, Willem Dafoe plays a middle-aged, mid-level drug courier working for a comfortable drug operation run by Susan Sarandon. Sarandon has dreams of escaping the drug dealing business and getting into cosmetics but Dafoe has little sense of his own future beyond the addict scene.

His nights are spent chauffeured around from client to client as he dispenses his wares. One such client is a rich sophisticate (Victor Garber). Visiting Garber to deal, Dafoe runs into the sister of his former girlfriend. Through her, he gets back in touch with this former lover (Dana Delany) who is now a recovering drug addict who feels that if she gets back with Dafoe it will precipitate a slide back into the drug scene. Dafoe believes that this time it would be different. Dafoe frequents a pop-psycho-therapist in the hope of finding some guidance in his life, specifically wanting to know if he has run out of luck. When he realizes that Sarandon, his only close friend, intends to genuinely quit the business he fears for his future. Meeting Delany again, they consummate their lingering passion but she too seems lost, leaving him quickly as she senses she may have recommenced the slide she so feared. Soon he goes to supply Garber. There he sees Delany, wasted on drugs. Shortly afterwards outside, he realizes that Delany has fallen to her death and when reading the police report later knows that details are amiss.

Emotional Desperation and the Longing for "Connection"

Like many of Schrader’s films, Light Sleeper is about the behaviour, needs and even the emotional longings of desperate people barely even able to acknowledge their underlying desperation.

In a perfect metaphor, Schrader’s film is a play of associations on the idea of “connection” – its meaning in the drug world as a link to dealer able to supply the next high and its more interpersonal meaning as the needed emotional and communicative bonds that form between people. Few of Schrader’s characters have ever been able to find a sustained connection of the latter kind, though most could easily find the former, whether it is drugs as here or sex as in the later re-teaming of Dafoe and Schrader in Auto Focus. “Need” is where these twin plays of connection overlap: a need for connection being Schrader’s subject here. But there is a danger in such joint need, for the quick fix of a narcotic high may soon translate into the want for an emotional quick fix. Delany realizes this as an impossibility and cannot adjust, preferring death to a life of perpetual, unfulfilled need. Her plight thus forces Dafoe to realize what is perhaps his (and Schrader’s) greatest enemy: despair. Such despair wholly pervades Schrader’s cinema, from the porn-fuelled streets in Hardcore to the sad, collapsing patriarchal bonds in Affliction. Yet, Light Sleeper allows a tentative optimism rarely found in a Schrader film, making this ironically perhaps his warmest picture to date.

The more Dafoe realizes that he has nowhere to go in life, the more he seeks to reform his character, believing that he too can change. This sense of purpose as redemption underlies Light Sleeper.

The people who inhabit Light Sleeper are creatures of the quick fix – however, such is the world now that the quick fix is all there is left. Dafoe needs the validation of his pop-psychologist, Sarandon of her new age spirituality. For Schrader, the one thing lost in this search for meaning is a sense of true purpose, a process of self-validation and therefore finally of redemption, or re-connecting with grace after the Fall. Significantly in this film’s scheme, Garber is referred to as “the connect” and as such personifies an indifferent, self-serving fatalism – the all-consuming ego whose self-indulgence trivializes those around him and reduces them to refuse. As Dafoe is made aware of this, so too his own sense of self-validation is propelled by the need to remove Garber, the burden of connection. In this way, the ritualistically cathartic gunplay thus brings Schrader’s trilogy of films back to Taxi Driver [Blu-ray] and the notion of redemption through violent confrontation. But Schrader is too cynical to finally allow such and there remains the sense that for all the human hope of redemption, it remains at best illusory and self-deceptive: perhaps only a private rite. The redemptive and the violently psychotic are thus fused for Schrader.

Lonliness & Isolation in a World of Refuse

The anamorphic widescreen transfer captures the studied nuances of this noirish movie, making much out of nocturnal journeys through the garbage strewn city, Dafoe’s loneliness complete in a world of refuse contrasting the Armani suits worn by many.

The feverish hold of drug addiction is captured in the behavioural glimpses of Dafoe’s clients as not everyone is as coolly detached and mannerly Mephistophelian as Garber. Indeed, the glimpses into these addicts offer a cross-section of the reasons people use drugs – selfish rationales and needs ranging from the ontological to the interpersonal. Coloured neon lights, shadows and cool, reflective surfaces abound. In this detached and glistening world, Sarandon’s home is the primary source of any warmth here, its bright colours lurid perhaps, but comforting for Dafoe. The innately dispassionate elegance of modern architecture features regularly in the film, which seems like a journey through the interior places of human interaction as much as a vehicular journey through the city streets. Enclosed, compartmentalized interiors recur. As Dafoe nears his cathartic explosion of violence, so too the garbage is finally being removed from the streets – another allusion to Taxi Driver [Blu-ray]. The ending features a nice indication of Dafoe’s rapid eye movement, his ability to finally thus sleep deep enough to dream being an ambiguously triumphant rest considering his actions.

Rendering the Addict's Hope for Self-Erasure

The Dolby Digital 2.0 transfer is mono only but manages to maintain the forceful song selection throughout, the film’s damnation motif nicely found in the “world’s on fire” refrain in the lyrics.

The expected backdrop of urban noise, especially traffic noise (differing between night and day), works well and is contrasted to the stillness of some indoors, particularly in Sarandon’s place. Dialogue is always telling as when Dafoe and Delany are about to have sex and Dafoe says “let’s disappear”, the addict’s hope for self-erasure in the quick fix being evident to Delany at this point. The rhythms of the drug delivery man are nicely captured as Dafoe seems to cling to rituals, his regular voice-over likewise suggesting his increasing introspection and his fears – of luck running out and it being too late for change. Although a mono transfer, it captures the sly sense of the subjective perception of off-screen sounds when needed, entering into Dafoe’s perceptions. Indeed, the subtle stress on certain key words throughout this film has a rather paranoid sensibility, especially regarding those words that would have additional meaning to drug users – “connection” being the primary example. Good use is made of a tape-recorded message, the name repeating to signal Dafoe’s slide into obsession wherein for Schrader, redemption and psychosis become almost inseparable, played out in cathartic violence.

Placing the Film in Context

There are several special features. In addition to a knowing trailer are two commentary tracks.

The first, by director Schrader, covers his personal views of the film as a continuation of a character type he had dealt with before, as the only film which came to him in a dream and his research procedures involving real drug dealers. He talks of his visual style, the film’s theme of luck, the use of New York City locations, on working with Dafoe and how it was only Sarandon’s participation that secured funding for the project. He talks of the autobiographical nature of the film and of its structure as a “song cycle” for which he wrote lyrics into the script before working with musician Michael Bean. He discusses his economical approach to the filmmaking process, cut to cut, and his fondness for dialogue scenes relating how people talk. He discusses the deliberate use of décor so that Dafoe’s sparse room is a reflection of the character and admits his regrets about the suicide and resort to violence aspects of the film’s final plot twists as overly contrived. The second commentary track is a scene-specific one by Dafoe and Sarandon in five sections as they discuss character (working with Schrader, how they came to the project), shooting (Schrader’s methodology as a director and the validity of the white-collar drug plot), the research and preparation process, their approach to acting and the film’s modest theatrical release.

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UK DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION: Light Sleeper [DVD] [1991]

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