In this age of reality television, it is a paradox that often the last thing a moviegoing audience wants is reality. Cinema Verite has gone the way of the daguerreotype and the nickelodeon. What today's audience wants is fiction, and so even the documentaries are dramatized.
Therefore, it is an interesting experience to find a glimpse of truth in this Hollywood world. This is not to say that Layer Cake is anything but fiction, because it isn't. What it is, however is a more realistic look at the world of the gangster.
Layer Cake focuses on a successful London cocaine dealer yearning for early retirement, but roped into one last job by his unscrupulous and overzealous mafia boss. Rather than focusing on the actions, however, the director, Michael Vaughn, takes a step back and tries to bring something much less tangible into focus: the ever elusive code of morals that a criminal lives by. Or dies by.
As the story unfolds, the dealer (Daniel Craig, who remains unnamed for the entire film) finds himself getting pulled deeper and deeper into a mire he did not create, and trying desperately to extricate himself without compromising his own set of morals. Like a character from a Hemingway novel, the dealer is not actually amoral, as much as he might like us to think he is, and struggles to come to terms with his own personal moral code as he is forced to do ever more despicable and devious things.
After the dealer is forced to kill someone, the director gives us a unique insight into his regret, his disgust with himself, his own moral emergency that goes on in the quiet of his mind. It is accomplished beautifully without heavy handed techniques through the cinematography and editing and conveys a true sense of horror at what he has done.
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