Sleepers Review
by Andrew Hicks (c667778 AT showme DOT missouri DOT edu)October 22nd, 1996
Sleepers (1996)
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks
(1996) ***1/2 (out of four)
Any good storyteller knows truth is more compelling and fascinating than fiction. Knowing what you're reading or seeing actually took place makes it that much more amusing or dramatic. No one would have read my Internet diaries if that principle wasn't true. Lorenzo Carcaterra can also attest to that fact. His book SLEEPERS was a huge bestseller in 1995 and is now a hit movie, a chilling tale of torture and revenge. He swears it's all true and, whether it is or not, it lends the story a heightened sense of suspense and interest that wouldn't be there if it was presented as fiction.
SLEEPERS is structured like Stephen King's IT, by
splitting the story between life-changing events that happened when the main characters were adolescents and how those events still affect their present lives. The first hour or more introduces us to four boys who grew up together in New York City's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. Their lives are forever altered by a prank gone awry and they end up in the Wilkinson Home For Boys, where each of them are abused physically, verbally and sexually by the guards (headed by an evil Kevin Bacon).
Flashforward to one night thirteen years later, as two of them, who have since become criminal low-lives, happen upon Bacon in a bar and kill him. The two are identified and arrested, but the other two friends plot a plan to exonerate their friends as revenge for the abuses perpetrated on them over a decade ago. One of the friends, played by Jason Patric, is a newspaper clerk. The other, played by Brad Pitt, is the assistant DA who is actually prosecuting the case.
SLEEPERS is nearly two-and-a-half hours long, but
never bores. Without the seemingly top-heavy scenes that show the characters as children, the crime and eventual payoff wouldn't be nearly as intense or rewarding. The running time serves to establish the bond between the friends and the horror endured at the reform school, while introducing us to supporting characters that figure into the later portions of the movie, people like Robert DeNiro, the worldly priest who is like a father to the boys and is faced with the dilemma of whether to lie for them on the witness stand, and King Benny (Vittorio Gassman), the local crimelord the boys run for.
The characters in SLEEPERS were probably embellished
by Carcaterra and Barry Levinson, the director and scriptor of the movie version, but all are extremely well-defined, a lot of which we probably have the actors to thank for. DeNiro and Pitt always do teriffic jobs no matter what they're in, but the lesser stars like Patric, Bacon and especially the actors who play the main characters as children, are to be commended as well. Dustin Hoffman even shows up in the second half of the movie as the drunken lawyer King Benny hires to defend his boys. Hoffman's character is more one-note than usual, but still adds to the movie. SLEEPERS is an excellent thriller / drama, and one of the best movies of the year. And that's not fiction.
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