With Willem Dafoe as a truly charming/haunted drug dealer, as he navigates what may (or are) his final days as a drug dealer for a high-class lady (Susan Sarandon in a 'take-no-s***' performance), Light Sleeper is the more somber but still stylized cousin of Taxi Driver, down to the rainy New York city nights and the diary-writing narration ("There is a change"), only this time it's a man trying to crawl out of his life instead of digging in to a darker corner.
It's no less deeply felt despite Schrader putting a bit more... Distance in the heat from his characters (I don't even mean sexual per-say, I just mean that some of the characters here are combustible). It's seedy and measured in equal time, and Schrader directs it with a total commitment to his psychologically and emotionally how it should be (when Dafoe and Delany are having that conversation in the hospital, such a simple conversation where we get so much out of the camera placement and the cutting). He also uses color in wonderful ways, like how green lines an entire bedroom or light comes through the ceiling in a particularly important place in the third act. If Schrader gets documentary realism in the process (ie someone on the street knocking in to two people, one Jane Alexander in an early role, talking as a funeral goes on, all the better).
On top of this, connecting back to Driver, is how on fire the casting is: Dafoe has an all-timer performance as Johnny, a character who relies twice on the words and guidance of a psychic (Hurt, incidentally Schraders wife), and we feel for him because he is at least trying to get out or find some thing that isn't *this* life, and eventually as things get really, really bad, the tragedy hangs over him like a swinging dagger. He's magnetic, alluring, moody, and an air of total danger is there right around the corner. It's essential work from this actor, led by a script that is ridiculously rich. It's status - a sleeper - is there in the title. It's a tough little masterpiece of darkness and sorrow on the streets of early 90s NYC - which means it still has the DNA of the 70s and 80s by the way.
.. I could've done without the overuse of the theme song though.
It's no less deeply felt despite Schrader putting a bit more... Distance in the heat from his characters (I don't even mean sexual per-say, I just mean that some of the characters here are combustible). It's seedy and measured in equal time, and Schrader directs it with a total commitment to his psychologically and emotionally how it should be (when Dafoe and Delany are having that conversation in the hospital, such a simple conversation where we get so much out of the camera placement and the cutting). He also uses color in wonderful ways, like how green lines an entire bedroom or light comes through the ceiling in a particularly important place in the third act. If Schrader gets documentary realism in the process (ie someone on the street knocking in to two people, one Jane Alexander in an early role, talking as a funeral goes on, all the better).
On top of this, connecting back to Driver, is how on fire the casting is: Dafoe has an all-timer performance as Johnny, a character who relies twice on the words and guidance of a psychic (Hurt, incidentally Schraders wife), and we feel for him because he is at least trying to get out or find some thing that isn't *this* life, and eventually as things get really, really bad, the tragedy hangs over him like a swinging dagger. He's magnetic, alluring, moody, and an air of total danger is there right around the corner. It's essential work from this actor, led by a script that is ridiculously rich. It's status - a sleeper - is there in the title. It's a tough little masterpiece of darkness and sorrow on the streets of early 90s NYC - which means it still has the DNA of the 70s and 80s by the way.
.. I could've done without the overuse of the theme song though.