Light Sleeper

If you want a real deal Paul Schrader outing, I can recommend Light Sleeper.

The final part of an unplanned trilogy that began with Taxi Driver, continued with American Gigolo and ends with this Willem Dafoe flick.

I made some jokes about it on Letterboxd:

Gotta be the most high-class movie that ever made me say, “Now go kill that son of a bitch too.” 

Also, Schrader invented the male loneliness epidemic.

Schrader has a joke of his own given the names of the first two in this trilogy Light Sleeper doesn’t exactly fit. But Schrader said he figured no one would go see a movie called, “Drug Dealer.”

Again, I wouldn’t recommend this descent into the despair of a drug dealer to just anyone off the street. If you know the kinds of movies Schrader delivers, then this is a very good example of that. Schrader has some writing tics that simultaneously annoy and amuse me. The first is that his male protagonists are always writing in a diary and then doing voice overs about the state of society or their own souls.

One of those things that you just accept when you walk in no matter how you feel about it. Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter. Schrader gonna have someone writing in a diary.

There are some fun cameos here of drug users who give Dafoe a hard time. And Dafoe, Susan Sarandon and Dana Delany are all excellent.

Light Sleeper mostly breezes by with a perfect 80s soundtrack and is content (seemingly) to show us Dafoe’s work and romantic troubles. A shock towards the end sets up a final bit of business and something Schrader almost always handles really well: Righteous Vengeance.

Schrader would probably disagree with my assessment. He would tell you (correctly) that he writes tragedies about the human condition and warnings about what society is doing to young and not so young men.

But also, I am a simple creature. And if you give me a villain and then give me a shootout at the end of your movie I will probably be satisfied.

Yes, all those other things Schrader was concerned about, commentary about societal ills, the personal cost of being trapped in a soulless job, and strong character development. They are all here too.

But also, my reptile brain still shouted to Dafoe at the climax, “Now go kill that son of bitch too.”