Nap Time

American cinema seems to have reached some kind of critical mass in the last several years, as nearly every new film seems to be either a remake or uses another film as a departure point for its story. Too Much Sleep fits into this latter category. It uses for its own departure an early Akira Kurosawa film called Stray Dog, which concerns a policeman, played by a very young Toshiro Mifune, who goes on a desperate search to recover his stolen gun. Sleep is aware of its pedigree, and even makes sly reference to Dog in a throwaway line of dialogue. Yet while Kurosawa’s film is a subtle and melancholic meditation on the awkward place of honor in crumbling postwar Japanese society, Sleep is about...nothing.

In short, Sleep, like Dog, concerns a security guard, Jack, whose gun is stolen, and the story follows his strivings to get it back. Yet its narrative is a meandering drift through Jack’s encounters with various characters in his Jersey suburb. Strangely, we only see him at work once, and he apparently has tons of free time to trail suspects and search for leads.

The only bright spot in the film is actor Pasquale Gaeta, who plays the loquacious character of Eddie, the uncle of Jack’s best friend, who because of his various connections is uniquely positioned to help Jack find his missing weapon. Gaeta knows how to milk the East Coast Italian ethnicity of his character for maximum effect, and the only real laughs in the entire film come from his numerous tiny quirks and aging Italian male braggadocio.

Sleep is yet another grim example of the ugly legacy of postmodernism, which introduced the idea of recycling cultural and artistic symbols from various sources in order to cobble them together and create new meaning by their juxtaposition. This has its mirror in all media, such as collage in two-dimensional art, or sampling in hip-hop and electronic music. But in the world of film, instead of becoming a fruitful springboard for new ideas, the postmodern ethic has been transformed into a thinly veiled form of theft. (And if the plots of movies stem from intellectual theft, is it any wonder that an entire generation of Internet users feels no qualms about downloading music without paying?)

Aside from wholehearted remakes such as Psycho, films constantly reference other films, often in nearly invisible ways. Sometimes it becomes a kind of film buff’s inside joke, as when a bird lands on Forest Whitaker’s rifle in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, mirroring a moment in Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill when a butterfly lands on an assassin’s rifle, ruining his shot. Jim Jarmusch even credits Suzuki in his film’s credits. The danger inherent in the reference game is that too often, a beginning filmmaker takes a handful of moments from their favorite movies, mixes them as if they were ingredients, and expects the resulting gumbo to be appetizing. Hollywood even encourages this process, as writers and producers pitch projects as "Film X meets Film Y."

Because writer/director David Maquiling actually has nothing to say beyond weak references to other, better works, his film fails on nearly all fronts. Maquiling self-consciously tries to make "Sleep" an unlikely fusion of David Lynch (especially Twin Peaks) and Martin Scorsese (After Hours and a splash of Goodfellas via Eddie). If Maquiling had only made the film’s other characters as textured as Eddie’s, he might have had a movie. Instead, at its end, we are left with the sense that 86 minutes have passed which might have been better spent napping.