Light Sleeper

National Review, Oct 5, 1992 by John Simon

PRETENTIOUSNESS may not be the deadliest sin in a filmmaker, but neither is it venial. Paul Schrader, to judge by his films and writings, could not have laughed at himself more than a couple of times in his life. The product of a Midwestern Calvinist upbringing, Schrader seems to have been at equal pains to live it down and cash in on it. Accordingly, he came to the fore with Transcendental Style, his film-school thesis on Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer, which made for a short book in a very grand manner; its index reads like something out of The Bluffer's Guide to Total Erudition.

In the French manner, Schrader began as a writer on film and progressed to film making, first as a scenarist, then as a director. As a screen-writer, he is best known for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull for Martin Scorsese, and Obsession for Brian De Palma. But I wonder how many of the films he directed and, usually, wrote ring a bell in a non-buffs memory: Blue Collar, Hardcore, American Gigolo, Cat People (the remake), Mishima, and Patty Hearst (the last-named from a screenplay by Nick Kazan)? Among filmdom's snobs, however, Schrader is a big name.

Such snobs may be undeterred even by his latest, and possibly trashiest, film, Light Sleeper, which Schrader claims was inspired by his coming upon the New Testament's "Behold, I show you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed." I haven't the foggiest notion what bearing this has on the movie, and would be might fly surprised if Schrader had. The film concerns a kind of via crucis of its hero, John LeTour, a forty-year-old drug deliverer for Ann, a fancy uptown-New York dealer of such sophistication that when she orders in food, it is not Chinese but Thai.

When it comes to sophistication, Le-Tour is no piker either. Wearing Armani and driven to his clients in a limousine, he keeps an existentialist-metaphysical journal in notebooks that he discards as soon as they are filled (this bit is too deep for me, but never mind) and acts as a confessor and counselor to his clients--withholding excess dope here, phoning an overdoser's brother to recommend a rehab clinic there. Our therapeutic pusher has been clean for some time now, but finds himself in a mid-life crisis that includes being hassled by a cop almost young enough to be his son, and uncertainty about what to do when Ann switches to herbal cosmetics now that cocaine, a classy drug, is being driven out-such is the power of Gresham's Law--by (to quote the press kit) its "far more pernicious derivative, crack."

Light Sleeper is a trifle cavalier about motivation, e.g., why a drug pusher stylish enough to wear Armani would live in a burrow unfit for an armadillo. Or why, cerebral as he is, he would need to keep consulting a psychic-unless the fact that the latter is played by the director's wife (Mary Beth Hurt) is considered sufficient explanation. Anyhow, one of those happy coincidences that seem to exist even in a Calvinist universe reunites LeTour with Marianne, the lost love with whom he once lived out a passionately consuming albeit drug-addled love affair. On a rainy and taxiless night, he is able to offer her a ride home in his limo, and promptly tries to implement his rekindled passion. But Marianne, whose shaking the drug is recent and precarious, and whose mother is dying in St. Luke's Hospital, doubts the sincerity of his regeneration. Nevertheless, she weakens.

As usual with Schrader, dark moods and lurking evil pre-empt psychological credibility and sound dramatic structure. Neither Marianne's being driven over the edge (in more ways than one) nor LeTour's redemption carries much conviction. On the other hand, New York's rain-tormented nocturnal pavements are scrutinized with unparalleled doggedness and a Steadicam, and the growing pries of black garbage bags (we're in the midst of a sanitation workers' strike) suggest something midway between Babel and Armageddon. John and Marianne make love in front of an enormous photomural of Vermeer's Lacemaker: if this is, as rumored, an actual suite in the Paramount Hotel, prospective hotel guests should think twice; if it is merely an hommage to Claude Goretta's incomparably superior film, it's rather self-destructive.

The admirable Susan Sarandon does all she is able to for Ann--plenty, but still not enough. Willem Dafoe, who played Jesus in Schrader and Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, delivers cocaine with the same outward impassivity with which he delivered mankind--a boring actor. There are good enough performances from Dana Delany (Marianne)and several others, but any semblance of believability collapses in the final scenes of ludicrous bang-bang mayhem, in which the fevered eschatology of the Calvinist is elbowed out by the febrile violence of the aging adolescent.

What I find particularly odd about this fiasco is that Schrader, for all his vaunted moral philosophy and theological awareness, does not for a moment stop to wonder whether major drug dealers make suitable heroes and heroines. At no point does he even hint that large-scale drug-peddling--as opposed to buying--may be an activity that disqualifies the film's prin- cipals from our heartfelt empathy.