Out on the edge

Movies aren't just stories on film; they're journeys we take. "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," the latest entry in the too-sparse career of director Mike Hodges, ends where it begins, though when we arrive there we are nonetheless surprised.

There is a moment in midfilm when a man whose brother's life has been abruptly and cruelly terminated takes out some photographs and looks at them. The conventional movie thing would be to cut to the photographs as the man sorts over them. Hodges doesn't. The photographs wouldn't tell us anything. "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" looks only at what it needs to look at it. The looking is mesmerizing: bleakly gorgeous, a kind of voluptuous minimalism. If a character steps into an apartment bathroom, the few details, camera movements and adjustments of perspective allow us to know the place as completely as if we'd lived there for two dreary years. In grad school, maybe, or as a willed, hermit-like retreat.

Like Budd Boetticher's great journey Westerns, this movie has a plot you could summarize in two sentences, but such a summary wouldn't tell you a thing about how the movie played, what feelings it engendered, what values it defined or discretion it honored or dread it tapped into. The movie is an English gangster picture, you could say, like Hodges' first film, "Get Carter" (the Michael Caine version), back in 1971. But it's gangster picture raised to a metaphysical principle - the closest British emulation of the genre and worldview of Jean-Pierre Melville, whose 1970 "Le Cercle Rouge," lovingly restored, was the greatest film to bow in Seattle last year.

We see something terrible happen in the first reel; two somethings, actually, though one has nothing to do with the rest of the movie except to reveal a man¹s character and lead us to appreciate how mysterious that character is. This is the sort of man Clive Owen was born to play, and so far apparently only Mike Hodges knows how to find such characters for him. (They made "Croupier" together; Hodges did not make "King Arthur.") Where he goes, and how, is fascinating to witness. Why he chooses the how is private.

Thanks, Mike