Is the definition of an auteur just making the same movie over and over again? To follow the recurring symbols and themes across the decades and to see someone keep returning to their obsessions. For director-writer Paul Schrader, he’s returned to a certain archetype – the ‘God’s Lonely Man’ – from his script to Taxi Driver and then reprised with variations in everything from American Gigolo to his recent First Reformed. (The early 2000s iteration, The Walker, with Woody Harrelson is an underrated drama.) To watch his 90s version with Light Sleeper (1992) was interesting to me – a film I’d often heard about it but had never seen. Picking it up on Blu-Ray, it both served some of my expectations and then also surprised me a bit. Following an upscale white drug dealer played by Willem Dafoe, who is driven around New York while dropping off cocaine and more to regular clients, I expected it to be a neo noir crime flick, which it does become, but only in the last twenty minutes. For most of its running length, it’s a character study of somebody in a mid-life crisis. Dafoe’s boss, Susan Sarandon is planning to go legit and move into cosmetics (a drug dealer character that seems initially unlikely but then is one of the more intriguing constructions in a male dominated genre). Then he also bumps into an old flame from his days as an addict, Dana Delaney, and has to reconcile with his past where he harmed those closet to him. It’s set in New York during a garbage strike and shuffles between Dafoe sleepless in his apartment, writing in his diary expressed in voice over narration, and Dafoe in a stylish 90s scarf, swanning about his rounds with users and connects (which includes David Spade and Sam Rockwell in bit parts) and even a psychic therapist (played by Schrader’s wife, Mary Beth Hurt) that the film takes seriously. I did enjoy its rhythms and Dafoe is great in the lead, soulful and sad. I found the ending and the heaping of Schraderisms (complete with homages to Bresson’s Pickpocket once again) a bit rushed. Michael Been’s ‘song cycle’ score with the pseudo Springsteen blues rock I could take or leave. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 