The
almost perversely gloomy miserablist drama Sleepwalkers belongs to a strange subset of American independent
film about pathetic characters who begin a film with next to nothing, then
proceed to lose even that. It's the kind of punishing arthouse fodder where a
pair of kicked-around misfits seeking shelter from a cruel world willingly
subject themselves to the cartoonish cruelty of a poisonous patriarch, played
by Dennis Hopper as the even more transcendently evil identical twin of the
arch-villain he played in Blue Velvet. It's just the latest stop in Charlize Theron's ongoing
campaign to make the world forget that she is a beautiful woman. Beyond her
well-documented ability to look like a bedraggled small-town nobody, it's easy
to see what attracted Theron to this role: Every scene in this grungy acting
Olympics constitutes a big scene, an actor-friendly opportunity to bare the
most painful recesses of the human soul.
Theron
stars here as a desperate, pot-dealing single mother who leaves her bratty
12-year-old daughter (Annasophia Robb) with good-hearted brother Nick Stahl
following her latest brush with the law. After the child welfare folks take
Robb away, Stahl scoops her up and takes her on a voyage of the damned to a family
farm where the ghosts of childhood traumas linger.
Stahl
plays Sleepwalking's directionless protagonist like
an abused dog. His soulful sad sack is all instinctive loyalty and blind
devotion with little in the way of common sense or street smarts. Once Stahl
and Robb show up at Hopper's farm for a harrowing endgame, seeking comfort and
security but receiving only cruelty and abuse, Sleepwalkers becomes the story of a battered
mutt mustering up the courage to turn on its master. Working from a script from The
Chumscrubber scribe
Aaron Stanford, director William Maher (no, not that Bill Maher) favors an endlessly overcast
dishwater-gray palette that puts a gloomy exclamation point on all the human
suffering. Well-intentioned to a fault, Sleepwalking blurs the line between dramatizing free-floating
misery and spreading it.