Of Robbed Innocence and Revenge!. Review on Sleepers Movie

Well before I begin I want to thank mouthshut.com for being such excellent company for me during the past weeks while I was bedridden with a burnt arm. I couldn?t really write, but reading and rating reviews, really did help keep depression at bay. Now for my review:

Sleepers is a movie about friendship, loyalty, love and more so about folly and revenge. It is a stark movie and though it shows signs of stylized film-making now and then, is not a movie meant to be commercial with action, drama, romance and stuff. This is serious, about as serious as you can get.

On the commercial side however the film has a stellar star cast, mixing both superstars and brilliant actors and ending up with performances that are amazing to watch and touching too. Among others the movies boats of casting Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, Jason Patric and Minnie Driver. The four protagonists are played by Jason Patric (Shakes), Brad Pitt (Michael), Geoffrey Wigdor (John) and Jonathan Tucker (Tommy).

Robert De Niro plays Father Bobby, the priest who is friends with the boys and takes care of them and Dustin Hoffman plays a lawyer Danny Snyder. Kevin Bacon however excels in a horribly negative role making you hate the very guts of the man and yet he never overdoes it. The movie is directed with great sensitivity by Barry Levinson.

The film is based on a book of the same name written by Lorenzo Carcaterra and Lorenzo a.k.a Shakes in the film is played by Jason Patric. The film is in a narrative format with Jason Patric giving a voice over throughout and giving us insights on the events. The movie is based in New York, more specifically in Hell?s kitchen. It centers on the life of four friends.

You are introduced to these friends as children, living their lives in a melting pot of a neighborhood where they are shown to be carefree and street smart and all that you expect petulant boys of the ages of twelve to fifteen to be. These boys go to school together are best friends and spend most of their summers lazing around and having fun. Their lives are good even in surroundings which are not too normal and not affluent at all.

The story begins on one fateful day when the children decide to pull a prank on a hot dog vendor. One of them (Shakes) goes up to the vendor and asks for a hot dog. When the vendor supplies that to him, he is to take off running, leaving the vendor in a dilemma whether to run after him or stay with the cart and cut his losses.

If he does run after him, then the other boys get to take whatever they want from the cart, if he doesn?t, then well, Shakes has a free hot dog. The prank goes as planned and the vendor chases Shakes all through Hell?s kitchen, while the other feast. However, things go horribly wrong as the kid try to pull the cart to the brink of some stairs at a subway opening, as the cart slips and kills a man walking up the subway stairs.

All four children are put in a home for boys as they are juvenile. Then the most horrible thing that could ever happen to an innocent child happens to them. They are tortured and abused in the home by the guards. These guards are lead by Kevin Bacon and they torture the boys for the entire period of their stay. The horror of this torture is very brutally put across by the movie. The child actors are exceptional and by this time you are so entangled in their lives that this cannot help but move you.

The movie then shifts seamlessly to the future when the boys have grown up. Two of the boys end up becoming thugs; these are played to perfection by Wigdor and Tucker. Michael, who is played by Pitt, becomes a lawyer and Shakes becomes a journalist of sorts. You are then introduced to Carol, played by Minnie Driver who is their best friend and ex girlfriend of Michael, who is now with John (Wigdor).

Both the thugs are in a restaurant, where they recognize Kevin Bacon in one of the booths. Knowing that this is the time for revenge, they kill Bacon point blank without attempting to hide themselves. What follows next is the crux of the movie. It is an ingenious plan of Brad Pitt to prosecute the two and get the abuse that they suffered, out in public. The rest of the movie is a trial which is filmed beautifully. The editing is taut and the story flow is brilliant. Levinson is amazing in his way of involving his audience. You cheer out the entire effort up to its bittersweet end.

The strength of this movie has got to be performances. Not only by the accomplished actors but even by the support and the supreme efforts of the child actors. The children excel in this movie and their innocence and its subsequent loss is shown with such mastery that it will remain etched in your mind. The screenplay is taut and lucid. The editing is brilliant. The cinematography is so good that you can almost feel the atmosphere and smell the smells of New York. De Niro as the responsible priest is outstanding, as is Hoffman as the drunken lawyer. Pitt handles his role with a great sensitivity that has now become a regular feature of his performances. Patric is very good and this is definitely one of his best films. Wigdor and Tucker give good support to the cast. Driver brings a little color to the film and brings out a very nice side in the characters she deals with.

On the flipside this movie is depressing. It is not a movie you want to see too often, because it can embitter you a great deal. The colors are gloomy, the subject is too brutal. And if this is indeed a true story as Carcaterra would have us believe then it is just very sad to see that such things are happening to the innocent of our world.

All in all it?s a must watch for those who wish to see serious issues being dealt with in cinema. This is a rare occasion where commercial cinema is handled with such thought and sensitivity and yet stylishly done. To watch this movie I guess you can always rent it, but for people here in India, the movie is very regularly shown on Star Movies and am sure you can catch it there. Do tell me what you thought of the review.