SLEEPERS
A film review by Stephen Hopkins
Copyright 1997 Stephen Hopkins
Director: Barry Levinson Starring: Kevin Bacon, Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Patric, Brad Pitt, Brad Renfro, Joe Perrino, Geoffrey Wigdor, Johnathan Tucker UK release: January 3, 1997
Based on the controversial bestseller by Lorenzo Carcaterra (who co-produced the film), Sleepers tells the story of four boys growing up in "Hell's Kitchen"--west Manhatten in New York City.
After a prank goes horribly wrong the boys are sent to reform school in upstate New York, where they become the victims of horrifying verbal, physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the guards who run the place. Years later one has become a journalist and another a lawyer, having risen to the position of New York assistant district attorney. In a chance encounter the other two, by now killers for the mob, run into one of their former tormentors and shoot him dead.
The events that follow bring the four friends together in a final attempt to lay to rest the demons of the past. Their plan is as simple as it is audacious: to avenge their past suffering and punish those who caused it. A plan that culminates in a courtroom showdown, and quite literally calls for all involved to get away with murder.
The film falls into three parts, charting the boys' adolescence in Hell's Kitchen and the stunt that lands them in reform school, through to the shooting of the guard and the trial. The first two parts focus entirely on the young actors, led by Brad Renfro (The Client, The Cure) and newcomer Joe Perrino. All four deliver strong performances and successfully portray a depth of character that seems missing in the film's later stages.
Its main disadvantage is that it doesn't have the time to go into the depth of detail that made the book such a gripping read (I read my way through from start to finish within 24 hours). It is also manipulative and slightly over-produced, relying too much on background music to rouse the emotions. As the guards' ringleader Kevin Bacon is too theatrical, shouting and yelling his way through the role when a quieter, more mundane approach would have been far more terrifyingly effective. There is no attempt to scratch the surface and explore more deeply the lives of the guards, or delve into their actions in any but a superficial way.
The abuse scenes would have the power to shock anyone who had not already read the book upon which it is based. That said, they are scattered throughout the movie, some recalled later on as flash-backs. They are also depicted in such a low-key way that it is all too easy to miss the full impact of what the boys are supposed to be going through. One scene in particular occurs when one of the boys is about to be released, and the guards decide to have their evil way with all four of them for the last time. The viewer sees them being frog-marched down a long, dark, narrow passage. The camera moving backwards, you see their faces and the guards behind them, talking. That they are about to be viciously gang-raped is never hinted at. The scene cuts to first-person perspective, camera moving forwards towards a patch of light at the end of the tunnel. Special effects kick in; the light rushes to fill the screen and hey presto! years have passed and the boys have now grown up. The way the abuse scenes are handled spares the viewer from the dirty detail of what the boys endured, but in doing so glosses over how severely the system affected them, so that it is far harder to empathise with their subsequent actions as adults.
The film pays too little attention to how deeply the boys have been scarred by the abuse at reform school. No indication that it brutalised and destroyed two of them so much that they grew up into cold-blooded killers. No mention that the year at reform school ripped into the gentlest of hearts and emptied it of all feeling, leaving instead a boy devoid of his sweet-eyed charm, his face a resting place for all the torment and abuse he had endured, who could kill a man and not give it a moment's thought. When watching Sleepers, it was always bits I recalled from the book that helped to set numerous scenes in context. While it is in some ways harder for a film to convey how a character is thinking and feeling, Levinson could have done better here.
One of the most powerful scenes is where the four of them are sitting down at a table talking, and one of them says all he wants is to not be afraid of the dark again, or hear a door in the night and wonder who's coming in, what's going to happen to him. In a film that is by turns mind-numbingly disturbing and coated in sacchrine, this is one of the few really poigniant moments that make it to the big screen.
Overall, Sleepers is well worth seeing, in spite of its flaws. I really wanted it to be a good film and a success, having been so deeply affected when the paperback came out in the shops. There is little wrong with what is in it; the one or two flies in the ointment are what was omitted. If you read the book before hand, you won't go far wrong.
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Stephen Hopkins
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