{"id":15716,"date":"2021-01-13T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-13T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=15716"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:17:19","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:17:19","slug":"nothing-good-happens-after-2-am-paul-schraders-light-sleeper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/nothing-good-happens-after-2-am-paul-schraders-light-sleeper\/","title":{"rendered":"Nothing Good Happens After 2 AM: Paul Schrader’s Light Sleeper<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cA D.D. told me when a drug dealer starts writing a diary, it\u2019s time to quit,\u201d thinks John LeTour (Willem Dafoe) as he watches the black-plastic mountain range of New York\u2019s unclaimed garbage blur past his backseat window. \u201cI started writing after that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tour, as his friends call him, is old enough to lie about it, if \u201cJohn LeTour\u201d is even his real name. Despite his best efforts, the past is all he has. The journals he shouldn\u2019t be filling up get thrown out as soon as they\u2019re full. He swears the faces of his clients are all the same but knows one regular well enough to call his brother for an intervention. Nostalgia is an occupational hazard for dealers, yet Tour is only at home among the city\u2019s collectively trashed memories, camouflaged against the bags in his best black leather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reality is split all the way down the middle in Light Sleeper<\/em>. No faith or evidence, but credit and cash. No heaven or hell, but night and day. No god or devil, but luck and fate. Night brings clubs and penthouses and seductive neon. Day brings hospitals and funeral homes and cheap sunglasses. In the dark, everything seems to happen for a reason. When Tour spots Marianne (Dana Delany), the codependent that got away, on the side of the road in a midnight downpour, it\u2019s a sign. In the light, everything is chaotic coincidence. When his first customer of the afternoon warns him about cops hassling dealers over an underage O.D. in the headlines, it\u2019s just a bad forecast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Not that Tour pays much attention to the writing on his naked apartment walls. His long-time boss, Ann (Susan Sarandon), is giving up the business to try her hand at cosmetics, legitimacy. When she asks him, point blank, what he\u2019ll do after she retires, he reminds her they had the same conversation two years ago. No need to consider the future when the past is still piled up at the door. Even as a psychic proves herself a genuine seer and warns him about a coming betrayal, Tour treats her like a therapist and asks only about luck. Deep down, he knows the party\u2019s over – one particular journal entry notes that once upon a time he was the same age as his clients – but he doesn\u2019t want to turn the lights on yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Willem Dafoe is a monument to old vice, his face a worn-out comedy mask occasionally stretching like it used to with eyes that can\u2019t take the act anymore. The film\u2019s greatest act of intimacy isn\u2019t sex, but Dana Delany leaning across a cafeteria table to see if Tour\u2019s pupils are dilated. It\u2019s the only way she\u2019ll believe him. It\u2019s the only truth he has left. In one look, Dafoe and Delany lay out everything these people miss about each other and can only live without. \u201cA convenient memory is a gift from God,\u201d she says, diagnosing him better than any psychic, killing him where he sits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writer-director Paul Schrader considers Light Sleeper <\/em> the end of his \u201cman and his room\u201d trilogy, after Taxi Driver <\/em>and American Gigolo<\/em>. In a contemporary interview with Filmmaker<\/em><\/a>, he admitted the progression was autobiographical: \u201cThe character has gotten older as I\u2019ve gotten older. When he was in his twenties he was angry. When he was in his thirties he was narcissistic. And now he\u2019s forty and he\u2019s anxious.\u201d That speed differential could be why Light Sleeper <\/em>hasn\u2019t been dusted off and dissected like its counterparts. All of the later-in-the-day characters are coasting, one way or another, toward dawn or dusk. It\u2019s not ultra-violent. It\u2019s not ultra-chic. It\u2019s the only movie of the three not named after a romanticized line of work. Dafoe claims that\u2019s because Drug Dealer <\/em>didn\u2019t have a ring to it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Whether or not that\u2019s true, Schrader found his replacement in the first book of Corinthians. Chapter 15, verse 51: \u201cBehold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed.\u201d It means Armageddon, an ending only insomniacs like Tour will see coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The music tries to warn him. After rejecting songs from Bob Dylan\u2019s Empire Burlesque<\/em>, Schrader turned to musician Michael Been, who already knew him and Dafoe from playing the apostle John in The Last Temptation of the Christ<\/em>. The resulting soundtrack is a soft rock death march of sacrificial drum machines and mourning guitars. It haunts Tour, the perfect ghost for a man with nothing to his name but a boombox and recording of his ex\u2019s away message. The lyrics are never less than literal: as Tour walks into the lobby of his final deal, Been narrates, \u201cNow to seal my fate, now to step inside.\u201d The effect is disconcerting, maybe even annoying for certain viewers. But in this nocturnal world of good-time vampires who can\u2019t admit the sun\u2019s coming up, it\u2019s nice to hear a little honesty now and again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Tour writhes through another sleepless night on his bare mattress, Been dreams for him: \u201cI don\u2019t think you\u2019ll recognize me on the other side of day.\u201d God, if only. \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Light Sleeper” is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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