No way I'm sleeping after this

Sleepers
Robert De Niro
Brad Renfro
Brad Pitt
Jason Patric


Only a few notes for this film. Was mostly just trying to steel myself to get through it.

1. Didn’t know John Williams composed the music for this film. There were no notes bthat were particularly memorable, but the music did enhance the graphic scenes of the film.

2. It’s interesting to see Brad Pitt in the middle of the five-year span where he was in movies just about every year that were major hits.

3. Had another scary moment where I thought I was watching a defective DVD. Turns out we bought this DVD so long ago that it's one of those you have to turn over half way through.


This film centers around four young boys who are sentenced to time in a boys’ detention center after a prank they play tragically hurts an innocent bystander. While incarcerated, some of the guards take a violent interest them. All four suffer physical and sexual abuse the entire time they are locked up, the worst being the last day. The consequences of these events are far-reaching. Sleepers is a classic story of revenge, and even going into this film blind you would realize this within the fist ten minutes. By the time one of the boys is given a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, it is clear where the rest of the film is headed. This isn’t the most subtle film ever made.

And this leads me to something else. As I have gotten older, I have had a more and more difficult time watching films with rape scenes and implied rape. I have been able to deal with some, like Mystic River, that feature vague references to it, and don’t show much if anything. As mentioned above, Sleepers isn’t exactly a subtle film. It spends an extended amount of time dealing with the raping and implied raping of children, in my mind the worst kind of rape. I haven’t been able to watch it since it was released more than a decade ago. And no, I'm not an idiot who bought a movie I didn't want to see. It was not for me. My husband thinks it was very well made, so he decided to buy it. Naturally, Murphy’s Law has the last laugh, and it came down to me to watch it.

While the graphic scenes of abuse disturb me, I cannot deny that the first two thirds of the film are very well executed. All four of the young actors give outstanding performances, and the story is very strong and moving. Unfortunately, the movie stumbles in the third act. Somehow, Brad Renfro and the three other young actors whose names I don’t even know are far better than most of the adults, all of whom I do know. Brad Pitt is fine, if a bit bland. Cruddup and Ron Eldard are interesting, if stuck with one-note characters. The real problem lies with Jason Patric. He is so bad he brings the film down a notch from the greatness it could have achieved. The worst part of this is that he provides the voice-over for the entire film. He sounds like a guy trying to memorize his lines in monotone rather than someone who’s actually ready to record. He makes Harrison Ford’s voiceover in Blade Runner sound energetic. He sounds like someone that showed up to collect a paycheck. In other words, he is a blight on this film

The actor who stands out as great happens to be a great actor: Robert De Niro. He plays a priest who tries to watch over the four boys, and ends up playing a pivotal role in the revenge playing out in the third act. To me, this is one of his finest performances, proving that he is more than capable of playing a likable, conflicted man in a low-key, nuanced manner. There is a scene where he is finally told what the boys were put through while incarcerated. The camera stays on a close-up of his face the entire time. While his face barely even moves, his growing realization of the horrors the boys experienced storms through his eyes. It is one of the best scenes in the film.

Sleepers covers several different themes, unfortunately not all explored when the boys have grown up. The first part of the film deals extensively with what it means to be a man. The four boys are constantly told that men are to never take anything from anyone, to never appear weak. One of the boys' fathers tells the story of a hero in their neighborhood who was attacked by a man who disfigured his face. The hero waited eight years to get his revenge, shooting the man in his legs while he was lying in a bathtub. Being taken advantage of by men stronger than them had a very obvious effect on the boys in the second act. All four boys tell their parents not to visit while they're locked up, and will only tell their parents they are doing fine. In one scene, De Niro visits one of them, and the boy is so ashamed he can barely look the priest in the eye.

All of this was explored in the second act, yet the theme was dropped by the third act. This made no sense to me. I was wondering the entire time how these men must have felt all these years later about their abuse after listening to men for years tell them that real men do not allow themselves to be taken advantage of. Two of them talk about how they're still scared, even leaving the light on to sleep, but it seems as if the men should feel more than just fear. The issue of how men deal emotionally with being taken advantage of is not something Hollywood explores often. Unfortunately, in a story that seems the perfect opportunity to deal with this issue, the filmmaker shows no real interest in it.

All in all, despite my distaste for the abuse scenes, I have to acknowledge that the film is pretty good. Jason Patric is just bad, and the third act is underwhelming, but De Niro more than makes up for it. The priest's personal struggle in the final act over the decision of whether or not to lie under oath, to swear to God to tell the truth, in order to help the four men he watched over as boys get revenge on those who abused them makes it worthwhile.