Robert J. Maxwell Paul Schrader gives us a downbeat story about a nice guy, Willem Dafoe, who is in the employee of the good-hearted but fiercely businesslike Susan Sarandon. He runs drugs for her to high-end clientèle. He's not your typical seedy dealer. Sarandon has a car and driver available to take him to the night clubs and penthouses where the users pay cash for hard drugs. Dafoe even delivers Valium to users pacing around in a hospital waiting room. Sarandon likes him. He likes his job, now that he himself is no longer a user or juice head. It all runs smoothly.This garden of earthly delights is interrupted by the appearance of his ex wife, Dana Delaney, whom Dafoe still loves deeply. She wants absolutely nothing to do with him because the two of them did little except get high during their marriage. He pursues her nonetheless.Fate intervenes. Delaney's mother dies. Dafoe always liked her but Delaney goes ballistic when he tries to attend the funeral. She's so distraught that she throws herself out the window of one of Dafoe's rich clients, Victor Garber, who, for the purposes of the role, affects a flawless Swiss/German accent. He's convincing.I don't think it's a good idea to get into the narrative more deeply. Dafoe gets himself into trouble and there is a shoot out at the end. We'll leave it at that.All of the principals give unimpeachable performances. No problems there. And Dana Delaney looks eminently squeezable. Schrader's direction is effective in evoking New York's night-time streets during a garbage strike. But all those piles of deep green garbage bags lining the streets are kind of symptomatic. Everything is dirty at its core. In case we missed that, Schrader shoots a scene in which Dafoe tries desperately to convince his ex wife to get together again -- only the camera is so situated that a wide cement pillar blocks the space between them. It's like being hit over the head with a crowbar.Two other weaknesses, at least in my judgment. Dafoe has an uncanny feeling that he is in mortal danger. He has some reason to feel this way, but not enough to prompt him into buying a pistol and packing it in his belt. I didn't feel the jeopardy gathering around him the way he claims. Let me put it another way. That climactic shoot out looked unjustified.Worse was Michael Been's lugubrious imitation of Leonard Cohen. I'm not criticizing him as a musician, but only for this score. Good God. The lyrics are enough to make you slit your wrists. They're a mishmash of doom-laden phrases like "wrapped chains around me" and "twist the blade" and "hunger and fear" and "who stole my orgone accumulator?" Well -- not that last one, but you get the picture.Yet, if you can disregard the musical score, what you wind up with is a decent story of a fundamentally decent guy who suffers for his sins and emerges a better man for it.Finally,

merklekranz An upscale drug dealer, Susan Sarandon, trying to get out of the business for a future in cosmetics, leaves her runner, Williem Dafoe, with an uncertain future. This straightforward story is propelled by Dafoe's heartfelt performance. Make no mistake, this is Willem Dafoe's movie, and "Light Sleeper" takes the audience into his dark world. The acting by everyone is extremely convincing, including an almost unrecognizable David Spade. Willem Dafoe's torment is presented in such a believable manner he elicits sympathy despite his unsavory occupation. .................................................................. Recommended viewing. - MERK

mhantholz Here's Schrader again, spinning his wheels in the same muck:Lowlifes In Torment, for the umpteenth time. This contraption has the same morbid pathology as 'Taxi Driver", an ugly POINTLESS movie about stupid ugly losers doing the things that identify them as a species, like grubs under a rotten log.By endowing his characters with fully differentiated personalities, motivations, ambitions even, God help us, Schrader betrays himself yet again as the perpetual adolescent he's always been.With the grotesque Willem Dafoe and Susan Sarandon, who reminds me of a drag queen on dope, this film should appeal to the depressingly sizable audience who love bad movies about lowlifes-in-torment by kings of arrested development---like Schrader, Scorcese, DePalma and their acolytes.NEWS FLASH: Narcotics dealers, wise guys, hit men and their like have the "inner lives" of venomous predatory reptiles. PERIOD. To maintain otherwise is to indulge in a despicable sentimentality. Which Schrader has made a career of. The inside of his head must be a dark and fearful place.

stuhh2001 Like "Prince Of The City", this is another great drug movie, with the greatest set ever built for a movie, New York City. Very few people saw "Prince", and I'll wager fewer saw this one. It has a cast of New York stage actors, who make the usual run of Hollywood anorexic barbie dolls, and Sunset Strip would be tough guys, look exactly like what they are, refugees from some "hysterical" wise cracking sit-com. I have to mention each one of these artists because they're so incredibly good. Willem Dafoe, Susan Sarandon, Dana Delany (what a performance), David Clennon, Mary Beth Hurt, Jane Adams(the looney sister from "Happiness"), David Spade, and last, but certainly not least Victor Garber. Paul Schrader wrote and directed, and if he never does another production, his mother can know that she gave birth to a major cinematic artist. The story can impress people as very hokey. Dafoe is a coke pusher. But he's very sensitive and loving, and is looking for a "better life". He's so guilt ridden as a pusher, he can hardly sleep. Oh, give me a break. But wait. With Dafoe I bought it completely. I was even rooting for him to get back with his former junkie lover Dana Delany. Delany and Susan Sarandon give major performances, Sarandon as a major supplier also looking to go straight as a cosmetic maven. This is a major manual on acting....look, learn, and enjoy.