Sleeping with the light on (Sleepers (DVD))

Member Name: Belgian999

Product:	Sleepers (DVD)
Date:	09/11/01 (115 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A compelling story of violence, abuse, revenge and above all, friendship

Disadvantages: Harrowing story, definitely not light viewing

Sleepers is a chilling story, and one that is made all the more powerful simply because everything in it is based on real events. It is the story of four young friends who live in the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan, a tough area full of tough men, run by a respected gangster known as King Benny, and populated by a mix of immigrant families from all over Europe. The boys – Shakes, Tommy, John and Mikey – spend their summer days running errands for King Benny, and catching some sun on the roof of their apartment block, while Shakes tries to avoid his father’s violent outbursts and seems to spend much of time comforting his beaten mother.

Much of his free time was spent in the company of the genial Father Bobby (played superbly by Robert De Niro) at the local church – Shakes and John often worked there as altar boys, and even entertained thoughts of entering the priesthood, but soon enough such thoughts were driven from their heads for good. One hot day, a prank goes terribly wrong – the boys try to get a free lunch by nicking some hot dogs from the vendor on the street corner, but the scheme has near-fatal consequences, and all are remanded in custody at the Wilkinson Home for Boys. Shakes gets off lightly with a minimum sentence of 6 months, but his 3 friends have to stay there for at least a year.

At this point, the smiles disappear, the sunshine fades, and the story takes a very dark turn. What you have to remember is that everything that is described, every beating and every moment of physical, mental and sexual abuse that you see took place inside that home for young offenders. Shakes is the nickname of Lorenzo Carcaterra, who grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, who suffered at the hands of a sick and twisted group of prison guards, and who finally plucked up the courage to write about what happened, many years after the event.

The four teenagers were systematically abused by the four men whose job
it was to protect and care for them and their ringleader, Nokes, is played with chilling callousness by Kevin Bacon, in what I think is one of his best performances. It is impossible to like Nokes, a man who clearly thrived on punishing and hurting those who were weaker than him, and took perverse pleasure in raping defenceless boys. The scenes of violence and abuse are haunting, without ever resorting to anything explicit, but they will probably leave you with a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, much like the events in ‘Scum’ (the seminal British film on institutional abuse, which I’ve also written an opinion about...).

However, the key to the story here is that it does not stop with the harrowing scenes inside the prison – over a decade after their release from the Wilkinson Home, the childhood friends’ paths have diverged and they see each other only rarely, but one chance encounter brings them crashing back together again. John and Tommy have become local hoodlums, heads of the West Side Boys, murderers, alcoholics and junkies, but sitting in McHale’s bar one evening who should they stumble across but Sean Nokes.

This is the turning point for all four of those boys of 1968 – in an instant, the past comes flooding back to haunt them as John and Tommy mete out the only justice they know, pumping bullets into Nokes as they remind him what he did to them. The twist is that Shakes now works for a local newspaper and Mikey has taken up a legal career, working as a state prosecutor. All four of them still have connections to the old way of life, to the men who pull the strings in Hell’s Kitchen, and despite the fact that it is clearly an open-and-shut murder case, Mikey and Shakes begin to see that there is a way out. This is their chance to exorcise the demons of the past, and bury the ghosts from the Wilkinson Home for Boys once and for all.

This course of action throws up many twist
and dilemmas, both for the audience and for the people involved – is it ever right to commit what the legal system would see as a perversion of the course of justice, and how can you justify bringing mob pressure to bear to ensure that the court reaches the ‘just’ verdict? On the other hand, how else can the four boys ever prove what happened to them back in the 1960s? Brad Pitt and Jason Patric perform very well as Mikey and Shakes, Robert De Niro is excellent, as ever, this time as a priest struggling to make the right choice – does he remain true to his oath and to the Bible, or does he stand by those innocent children who were changed irrevocably by their stay in the home?

Dustin Hoffman delivers an outstanding performance as Benny Snyder, the lawyer engaged to defend John and Tommy – he is a failure, his once bright star now firmly on the wane as he looks at life from the bottom of a bottle and battles with ‘a small drug problem’. He sports a greasy mullet and mumbles and stumbles his way around the courtroom in cheap suits, looking every inch the shyster. His almost incoherent manner and faintly ridiculous look are perfect, and Hoffman plays the part to a tee – until I watched the film again recently I had forgotten just how good he is, and his performance is the highlight of the second part of the film.

Although the ending will put a smile on your face, the feeling of joy is as transitory for the viewer as it was for those involved – this is part violent thriller, part courtroom drama, and a pretty long way from being a feel-good film. It raises the same basic questions that were asked in ‘Scum’ – how is it possible for people such as Nokes to be placed in positions of responsibility that are wilfully abused? And how is it that their only option was to subvert the legal system, why could they not bring their abusers to justice any other way? Shakes asks Mikey why they
are looking for revenge so long after the events occurred, and his reply says it all: ‘Do you still sleep with the lights on?’ This is a story of innocence lost, lives changed and revenge taken, and it will keep you gripped from start to finish.

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