Dying Of The Light/Dark

And Dementia Behind Bars

If you love movies, the teaming of Nicolas Cage and Paul Schrader had to perk your attention. In 2014, they united with producer Nicolas Winding Refn (“Drive”) for this crime thriller, once a hot property, only to be filmed independently. Before Lionsgate could get this one out to the public, almost everyone involved, in some way, trashed the final result. How bad could it really be?

It’s hard for me to offer a lucid opinion of this, because I have gone through an intriguing viewing experience watching this film. Unfortunately, knowing that heavyweights were involved, and aware of their disapproval over the final product, I had an eye for what looked like compromise on the part of producers and editors. But then Schrader, that noted hellraiser, took agency of the project, and re-edited it himself. The result, called “Dark”, is not a director’s cut (as he was taking unauthorized ownership of the footage) as much as it’s a chopped-and-screwed version of the story, one that conceptually preserves what Shrader and associates were trying to do all along. “Dark” has since been released to the Internet Archive by Shrader, though it is not an officially-released film. In some cases, there is original footage that was previously excised, and in others, Schrader has gone wildly experimental with the editing in order to capture the mindset of the lead character.

That lead character would be Evan Lake, who is winding down an illustrious career with the CIA. He teaches seminars and warns about the post-9/11 lessons that the government has learned, or failed to grasp. Due to trauma in the field, Lake is suffering from a degenerative brain condition and can no longer summon key facts or engage in complex reasoning. Nonetheless, he is recruited back into the field to chase a terrorist, the same terrorist that tortured Lake all those years back, causing the early dementia he now experiences. So now this is a revenge story, in addition to a tale of a superagent doing the right thing one more time before his expiration.

Cage is assisted by a younger agent played by the late Anton Yelchin. Yelchin is good in this role, though in the theatrical cut of the film, he is a super-supportive sidekick, one who questions Lake before giving in to his plans. In a role originally meant for Channing Tatum (alongside Harrison Ford), Yelchin is vulnerable and even funny bouncing off Cage, realizing this living legend might be worthy of respect but also maybe a bit of ridicule? When he finds out about Lake’s condition via confession, he is admirably straightforward and tender with the information.

Lake is a man going rogue for entirely selfish reasons, and the theatrical cut give his tragic quest a sense of nobility and valor, complicating the arc by allowing Cage to be difficult and unpleasant at times as a result of his deteriorating mindset. But “Dark”, it must be said, includes moments where Lake is openly racist and sexist, suggesting that he has been an egomaniac all along. The released version is a movie about a war on terror. “Dark” is about the war on terror, showcasing an unrepentant, ugly and paranoid lead character. Instead of a big action finale (which the original has, hampered by budget limitations), Schrader edits “Dark” to reflect the slipstream of Lake’s memories, allowing sequences to bleed visually, thematically and even chronologically into each other, wrongfooting you as to what Lake wants and even where he is. The final moments of “Dark” seem to sweep the viewer up as well, into the hazy memory of our lead character, and leaving us with open-ended questions as Lake makes some final, disorienting discoveries as to how much the terrorist’s mission and the actions of the government are relatively simpatico. A political realization, late in life, or a deathbed rationalization? 

In either form, this is not a terribly compelling movie. Despite a few moral dark corners, “The Dying Of The Light” is a stagnant wannabe thriller that you would have normally seen Val Kilmer doing during that period in 2014. The thrills are minimal, and it seems clear that most of the action scenes are not the product of Schrader. “Dark”, while a fascinating experiment of sorts, is assembled amateurishly. It gets across Schrader’s original intentions, but those are more intriguing avenues a better movie, and/or better assembled footage, would explore. It’s a late-stage auteur experimenting with his craft in a way that nourishes only his hardcore fans and ignores any actual casual moviegoer in the audience. Which, frankly, I approve.

Dementia isn’t all-too-accurately represented in this film. I have a parent dealing with this problem, and it was first a suggestion before being a full-blown affliction that demanded attention. But I also saw it in prison. Again, I return to the three pillars of the federal prison system among the lower levels. Inmates will be convicted typically of drug crimes, sex crimes and white collar crimes. You don’t see too many old drug dealers end up in federal prison, since selling drugs is a young mans’ game. And elderly finance criminals will always have their zealous advocates, and the worst circumstance for them will be to end up in a camp somewhere, not a lower-security institution.

So that leaves the older sex criminals, and to my knowledge, federal sex crimes were typically related to computers. There are hundreds and hundreds of sex criminals at low security institutions, and you won’t find a lot of rapists there. Typically, these are men who started “clicking” and never stopped, either collecting illicit pornography or engaging in inappropriate conversations with minors over the internet. And in a few cases, these were old men overwhelmed by their desires and of technology who do not know better. 

This was not exactly a majority. But I came across many kindly old men who had just clicked, and clicked, and clicked their lives away. They were fathers, often grandfathers, and hardly the portrait of domestic bliss. But I also watched them make that precipitous slide into dementia almost overnight, and a few genuinely lost their bearings in increasingly ugly ways. Some started walking around without clothes. Others began telling stories that jumped from one decade to the next with no thoroughline. In one case, I knew a man who began entering the showers to clean the floors with a towel, which he viewed as entirely rational behavior. None of them were violent, none of them threatened the peace on the compound. And as such, the staff had no reason to observe and evaluate them. So they would shuffle from one room to the next, aimlessly, until they would run into the wrong person. Prison officials aren’t equipped to deal with dementia because prisons are no place for the sick. There are more than two million people in American jails and prisons right now. How many of those have developed a mental handicap? And how many of those men are suffering in silence as they waste away? It’s more common than you’d think.