Levinson: Sleepers (1996)

Sleepers is an adaptation of Lorenzo Carcaterra’s controversial memoir of the same name and, like the original, it’s divided into three fairly distinct episodes. The first is set in Hell’s Kitchen in the late 1960s, where Carcaterra and three of his school friends rob a hot dog vendor and inadvertently commit manslaughter. That leads to them being incarcerated in Wilkinson Home for Boys in upstate New York, where they’re systematically raped, tortured and abused by a ring of guards led by Sean Nokes (Kevin Bacon). Finally, we jump to the early 1980s, where the four friends – now played by Jason Patric, Brad Pitt, Billy Crudup and Ron Eldard – plan their revenge against Nokes and his colleagues, with the help of a corrupt lawyer, played by Dustin Hoffman. On paper, that sounds like a trajectory towards catharsis, or at least closure, but what’s striking about the film is that Levinson doesn’t prioritise any one segment, making each episode feel quite free-floating and self-contained. Even as adults, the four friends still feel like boys, which is perhaps fortunate, since the film only feels convincing when dealing with relationships between adults and children, all of which are peculiarly, paedophilically charged, especially in the first section, which basks in a loose, dispersed eroticism that’s all the more unnerving in that you can’t quite pinpoint its object or origin. If all you knew was that this was a film about paedophilia, you might suspect pretty much any adult, just as Carcaterra seems to have cast a kind of retrospective question mark around all the adults who populated his childhood, culminating with the neighborhood priest who helps the group with their revenge, played by Robert de Niro in one of his subtlest and most unnerving roles. Compared to that, the last section feels a little rote, especially since it’s clear that the friends were never as sympathetically aligned as on their last night at Wilkinson, which was when the most extensive, brutal and tortuous gang rape occurred. After that, the film suggests, they could never be a single unit again, if only because that’s exactly how the guards took pleasure in them, with the result that they always feel as if they are pursuing separate paths, or inhabiting different films, even at the very epicentre of their revenge. Time and again, Levinson reaches for a connective tissue that’s not there, a Hell’s Kitchen fraternity that slackens, grows dissonant and finally vanishes under his touch, grasping in vain for the skeins of a story that’s already unravelled, memories too traumatic to confront in their totality.