"I'll Sleep When I'm Dead"

The director of "Croupier" takes a darkly compelling look at the London underworld.

By Stephanie Zacharek

June 18, 2004 | We know we're living in dangerous times for filmmaking when someone like Mike Hodges -- director of the iconic 1971 "Get Carter," as well as 1998's "Croupier" and the new, unnervingly compelling noir fable "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" -- nearly slips through the cracks. Hodges has been working in the margins of commercial filmmaking ever since he made his debut with "Get Carter," starring Michael Caine as a cold, suave bastard of a London hood who journeys home to Newcastle to avenge the death of his brother. "Get Carter" was a disreputable landmark of English filmmaking, and watching it today, it's easy to see why. No dilly-dallying for Hodges: For a fledgling director, he knew just where to stick the knife, and his confidence as a filmmaker is almost as shocking as the movie's brutality. "Get Carter" is as cold as a movie can be -- we recoil from nearly every character -- and yet its ending leaves us feeling both drained and fully alive: What little juice we've got left in us is running hot and fast. "Get Carter" is both dislikable and great.

It's impossible to talk about Hodges' work without stacking up the paradoxes. His style is what I can only describe as ardently cool -- he's a filmmaker of numerous and insistent contradictions. Since 1971 Hodges has made just nine films (among them the bubbliciously enjoyable 1980 comic-book adaptation "Flash Gordon"), and for American audiences at least, he seemed to have pretty much dropped off the horizon -- until the surprise success of "Croupier."

In "Croupier," Clive Owen plays a coolly ambitious aspiring writer who, in order to make a living, returns to a line of work he both detests and excels at. The picture did poorly when it opened in the U.K. But something strange and miraculous happened when it crossed the ocean: Initially booked into a Loew's Theater showcase series for one week, it ended up running for four months. "Croupier" became an art-house hit in North America, and its success here prompted its rerelease in Great Britain. Hodges began developing "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" years ago (its script is by Trevor Preston, with whom Hodges had collaborated on TV work in the U.K. in the mid-'60s). But when it looked as though "Croupier" would be a failure, Hodges began to lose hope that he'd ever have a chance to make the film. And even after the turnaround success of "Croupier," it took several years for Hodges to pull the financing together.

"I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" may not be the runaway hit that "Croupier" was. For one thing, it doesn't have that picture's sleek, organic elegance (there are those contradictions again). Yet it may be the more emotionally involving of the two movies. It demands more of us in terms of reaching out to its characters: They're sometimes so remote that we forget why we owe them our empathy. But Hodges always allows his characters to exist on their own terms, instead of insisting that they be defined by the degree of sympathy we feel toward them (and there are times when we feel no sympathy for them at all). It sometimes seems as if Hodges has set his characters adrift, as if he were pretending not to care about them at all. But what he's really doing, I think, is shaking the very foundation of our empathy. Faced with a character who does little to endear himself to us, do we distribute our empathy stingily, begrudgingly, just because it's part of what art demands from us? Or do we take the risk (sometimes a very great risk) of giving humanity the benefit of the doubt? Hodges isn't giving us a test with right and wrong answers -- he's not that pedantic. But even within the noirish despair of "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," there's an optimism in even bothering to ask the questions in the first place.

Next page: A rape, a suicide, a brother returns