Review of Sleepers (1996) by Hector C — 12 Dec 2011

Lorenzo: There are no clear pictures of the sexual abuse we endured. I buried it as deep as it can possibly go. .

"When friendship runs deeper than blood".

There is only one way to describe Sleepers and that is that it is a great movie. It comes with flaws, which I won't discuss as they are very apparent and because I just can't take away from how great this film is. Sleepers is easily Barry Levinson's best film and features amazing performances from a variety of really talented actors like Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. Those are the legends in the cast, but there are so many more like Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, and Jason Patric. That is just scratching the surface on all the great performances that came out of this movie.

Sleepers begins with a great introduction to the life of four friends in the slums of Hell's Kitchen. Levinson does a tremendous job with the setting. He shows just how bleak existence is in Hell's Kitchen. From there we move into a childhood drama, where the four friends rob a hot dog vendor and end up almost killing someone by accident. Then the story moves into a juvenile facility where the kids are sent. The kids all go through hell there. That's as far into the story as I'm going to go. The last thing I'll add about it is that the movie skips ahead to when the four kids are in their twenties and the story resumes from there. .

This film captures three different situations and make the movie feel like three shorts all combined into one. The first being a childhood drama, the second a prison drama and the third a courtroom drama. The first is very nostalgic and fun to watch until it ends in tragedy. The second is extremely hard to watch, but insanely well done. And both the second and third are very sad. Watching this again now is even harder, with the stories from Penn St and Syracuse dominating the news.

Sleepers is a film that you won't forget after watching it. Despite not knowing if the story is really true(the author claims it is, but the juvenile facilities say it is not), you feel for the characters because even if this story isn't true, it still is. This is happening somewhere. As hard to watch as it is, it needs to be seen.