I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2003)

Will Graham (Clive Owen) is living as a drifter, until he learns his kid brother - a local drug pusher - died. He returns to the old neighborhood to find out what happened.

It's not really a revenge flick, not a proto-John Wick or anything like that. Most of the first half-hour of the movie is focused on Owen's brother, Davey, as he goes around selling drugs to wealthy partygoers and fooling around with different women. Occasionally, the film cuts to Owen, living in a van out in the woods or at a truck park or wherever he can pull off for the night.

Even once he learns Davey's died, Owen's more concerned with the whys of it. Davey killed himself, the coroner's report says. Why? Davey's friends don't know, Owen's old flame doesn't know, and Owen's been gone for 3 years, hasn't called or written in months, so he sure as hell doesn't know. Yet somehow he's sure there's more to it, as though Davey couldn't have changed drastically in the interim. So it's Davey's friend that's trying to figure out Davey's movements in his last hours, while Owen gets an independent autopsy done, then has a long conversation with an expert about the findings.

It's kind of a hard movie to get a bead on. The music is this discordant jazz, like people are playing out of tune or hitting the wrong notes on purpose. It doesn't fall into a flow, nothing quite fits. Owen plays Will Graham very quiet. It's not one of the roles where the quiet person seems to be visibly holding back, or repressing violence. If it's there, its buried deep. Instead, he's deliberate in how he does things. Always watches before he moves. Lets other people talk themselves out, then maybe gives a short response. I guess he'd been hasty or quick to violence in the past, so he won't let himself act like that again.

The local movers-and-shakers think he's come back expecting to establish himself, so they waste time preemptively warning him off, but he never responds directly to any of it. People keep expecting violence from him, but he doesn't really do anything until the very end, when he catches up with Malcolm McDowell. Even then, he seems more interested in answers than revenge. He wants to know why, but as he reflects at the beginning and the end, it's all just guesswork. People make assumptions based on what they think they know, filtered through their own biases.