Snooze, you lose.
That about sums up all the profundity the dramatically inert Sleepwalking offers up after almost two hours of tear-filled despair and pseudo-psychological sap.
Granted, it's not for a lack of trying -- indeed the film may be as stridently bleak as any in recent memory (yes, even Semi-Pro).
Yet for all the on-screen angst, it left me restless and unmoved.
It's more disjointed than stirring, more listless than wounding and mostly a misfire -- despite some memorable performances and the fittingly desolate backdrop of Saskatchewan.
Multi-tasker Charlize Theron, also one of the producers, plays Joleen Reedy, a delinquent single mom who, after her boyfriend is busted for operating a grow-up, unloads her 11-year-old daughter Tara (AnnaSophia Robb) on her emotionally stunted younger brother James (Nick Stahl), then bolts for presumably cheerier horizons.
That leaves us stuck with dim, hapless James as he copes with the pre-adolescent old-soul who has been jettisoned into his life-support-only existence.
Yet the cathartic, soul-enlivening experience we expect to unfold between the two materializes sluggishly.
Instead, James first loses his job, his apartment and even Tara to a foster home. Only then do uncle and niece hit the highway together -- think Road Trip with an amber alert -- retreating to the only true home James has ever known: the family farm he and his sister fled years earlier and where his abusive father (Dennis Hopper) still resides.
The tension and violence that follows is intended, however improbably, to snap James out of his funk -- he's been "sleepwalking" through life, get it? -- and offer closure. But honestly, outside of movies and Maury Povich marathons, who ever receives closure?
It's one of the script's fallacies that in illustrating the collateral damage of family dysfunction, it uses Hallmark-ready hokum as a crutch.
That's a shame, too, because the ham-handedness undermines excellent work from Stahl, who conveys a lifetime of soul-deep scars with a minimum of exposition, and Robb who, at 14, proves a revelation.
Clearly, she has a bright future ahead -- especially now that this movie is thankfully in her rearview mirror.
(This film is rated 14-A)
More Movie Reviews
