SLEEPWALKING
Watch the trailer for "Sleepwalking"
California is a big state, big enough that it can’t all be a land of permanent sunshine and palm trees and shirtsleeve temperatures. Think of the opposite of all that and you’ll have the part of California where Sleepwalking is set. (If you’ve pictured Lackawanna in mid-February, you’re not far off the mark.)
In a miserable factory town in this miserable climate lives James Reedy (Nick Stahl), in an apartment in an industrial building. He is barely able to make it to his job as a road cleaner on a regular basis, let alone make this space habitable. So when his 12-year-old niece Tara (AnnaSophia Robb) is dumped with him by her white trash mother (Charlize Theron, who also produced the film), she’s less than happy. James’ attempts to find his sister only make a bad situation worse (the only direction in which this story ever moves), and after a few months they’re on the road, wanted by the police and headed for the Reedy family farm in Utah. By this point in the movie, director Bill Maher (no, a different guy) and writer Zac Stanford have rubbed our noses in so much everyday ugliness that we’ve given up hope that farm life will be a big improvement. There is something to be said for films that try to show the lives of people on the less fortunate end of the scale. But as anyone who saw
Funny Games a few weeks back knows, there’s only so much pain that you the viewer can be expected to let your self in for without some kind of aesthetic or intellectual reward. The cast of
Sleepwalking (which also includes Dennis Hopper and Woody Harrelson ) is of sufficient caliber that you can’t lay its faults simply to the ineptitude of first-time filmmakers. (For what it’s worth, it’s reasonably well made.) But it’s the kind of movie where we cringe when a character says of the near future, “It can’t be any worse than it’s been,” because we’ve been shown repeatedly that it certainly can.
—m. faust
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