By Sandra Hall
SLEEPING DOGS ★★★★
(MA) 111 minutes
Russell Crowe has never allowed vanity to dictate the direction of his career. Nine months before his trim, taut and terrific appearance in Gladiator, he aged himself by 20 years to play the lead in The Insider, Michael Mann’s expose of the tobacco industry, and earned an Oscar nomination for his trouble.
Russell Crowe plays a retired detective with Alzheimer’s in the thriller Sleeping Dogs.Credit: Sarah Enticknap
Now, in Sleeping Dogs, he does it again, adding bulk as well as years as a retired detective suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Overweight with a plodding walk, Roy Freeman also has a large scar on his bare skull. It’s from an experimental brain operation aimed at recovering his memories, but in the film’s opening scene, all you can see is his pain.
Amnesia of one sort or another has a long and eventful history on the screen. Film noir has thrived on it, as Sleeping Dogs’ director and co-writer Adam Cooper knows, having cited Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island as influences on its script.
Freeman’s door into the past is an old case that comes back to haunt him through a message from a death row inmate. This man desperately wants to see Freeman because his execution has been scheduled, and he’s still maintaining his innocence. He claims Freeman and his former partner secured his conviction by bullying him into a false murder confession.
This is enough to awaken Freeman’s conscience, along with his long dormant curiosity. And it’s the cue for Cooper to embark on a tale with enough twists to rival The Big Sleep. The film was shot in Melbourne by Australian cinematographer Ben Nott but the amber and sepia palette and shadowy atmosphere is pure Chandler. We’re not in the mean streets of Chandler’s Los Angeles, however. Melbourne is standing in for the American university town where the murder took place.
Adding yet another strand to the script’s ruminations on the nature of memory is the news that the victim, Joseph Wieder (Marton Csokas), was a college professor doing research into brain function. From here, Freeman’s investigation turns up a dispute between Wieder and his highly ambitious research assistant, Laura Baines – played by Karen Gillan (familiar to Doctor Who fans as the Doctor’s former companion Amy Pond) and the casualty rate looks set to increase.
Laura is one of a small but compelling cast of slippery characters who include Freeman’s ex-partner (Tommy Flanagan), who has little interest in revisiting the case, and Laura’s former lover Richard Finn (Harry Greenwood), a writer whose pretensions have eclipsed his talent. We encounter him only in flashbacks because he’s been done in by a drug overdose, but he’s left behind a manuscript that he grandly described as a “literary memoir”. Freeman is finding it invaluable.
The upshot of all this won’t do much to advance any ideas you may have on the way memory works, but it’s an engrossing plunge into the film noir tradition and it’s a pleasure to watch Crowe embody the very fallible Freeman. Along with his added heft goes a convincing gravitas. Whether he’s cast as a leading man, he’s always been a great character actor.
Sleeping Dogs is released in cinemas on August 1.
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