Slumming with the Brits

By Richard Schickel

Low lives recounted in high style. That has become the sensational British movie genre of our times. Think I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. Or Sexy Beast. Or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The newest, Layer Cake, is among the best of this mutt breed--undistinguished bloodlines that have somehow produced a sleek, fast-moving movie creature.

Layer Cake features, yes, an antihero with no name and no backstory. He's simply called XXXX in the credits, and he's played by a gelid Daniel Craig. He is a) a drug dealer and b) a man who, having made his pile, wishes to abandon his life of crime and start hanging about at posh country clubs. But prosperous as he is, he is still only middle management in the criminal pastry shop. He has obligations to his masters, chief of which is to help them recover a vast shipment of ecstasy pills that have gone missing somewhere between Amsterdam and London. This story line is essentially incomprehensible in its complexity. Mostly what one observes about it is that from time to time, not-very-nice people get dead in a variety of not-very-nice ways. Having a hot steam iron pressed against the chest is perhaps not the way any of us would choose to leave this life.

But movies like this one are not about story. They are about--dare we say it?--lifestyles. XXXX must occasionally venture into the darker depths of the underworld, visiting dank crack pads and scuzzy lairs where money is laundered or drugs cut for street sale. These director Matthew Vaughn presents with a glum and familiar realism.

This being Britain, fastidious attention is paid to class issues, even among the criminal classes. That's especially true of XXXX, yearning to breathe more rarefied air. His apartment is done up in white-on-white style--chic photos on the wall, excellent Scotch on the coffee table, which is, of course, artily shot from the floor, looking up through the glass. This is, we think, a provisional environment, blank, characterless, impersonal. What he really wants is something darker, more traditional.

Put simply, he wants something more along the lines of Eddie Temple's library. Eddie's the cherry on top of the Layer Cake, a master criminal with interests in legitimate real estate. Played with casually silky menace by Michael Gambon, he has developed a taste for opera (The Damnation of Faust naturally comes up in his conversations) and for rare books. We don't know that he reads them, but, by golly, he has them--housed in a burnished, glowingly lighted library. You can practically feel the sweat of desire forming on our antihero's lip when he penetrates this lair.

Will he complete his rise? Or will he fall back down into the pits? We're not saying. What we can say is that if you can stomach its bursts of violence (and some unpersuasive tosh about the drug world being the dominant culture of our day), Layer Cake is a treat--especially if your taste in desserts is devil's food. --By Richard Schickel