Steeped in an ultra-indie glumness that makes for a very dour journey, William Maher’s Sleepwalking is the kind of mumbly, bleak, rural-set melodrama that actors and festival directors love and that audiences avoid in droves. And you can’t blame Joe Public for that – spending 10 minutes with this sour group of no-hoper dope growers, dysfunctional siblings and abusive parents would be tough; 100 minutes is a real struggle.
Charlize Theron stars as loving-but-lost Joleen, in yet another of her interpretations of the small-town woman that has become her stock-in-trade since the 2003 Best Actress Oscar for Monster (think North Country, 2005; In The Valley of Elah, 2007; Battle in Seattle, 2007; The Burning Plain, 2008). When her latest boyfriend Warren (Troy Skog) is shipped off to jail for cultivating marijuana and their house becomes an off-limits crime scene, Joleen uproots with her daughter Tera (Anna Sophia-Robb) to the ramshackle apartment of her younger brother, James (Nick Stahl).
With no income in sight, Joleen abandons Tera (and the film – she disappears for the next 70 minutes). She leaves her daughter with James, a man plagued by his own health and mental issues and barely able to hold down his construction job. At the urging of a sympathetic local detective (Mathew St. Patrick), Family Services intervenes and forces Tera into shared living in a foster care facility; after one too many no-shows brought on by his new family commitments, James loses his job.
During a visit from James on Tera’s birthday – the day Joleen fails to return, despite her last-word promise to them both – James and Tera flee, heading cross-country to the isolated farm of Mr. Reedy (a villainous Dennis Hopper), James and Joleen’s father, and the source of their instability. It is a mistake; although James hopes that his presence is enough to soothe the beast within his father, the resultant turn-of-events – shocking as they are – come as no surprise.
At the heart of the drama lies the growing bond between James and Tera – two abused and abandoned children of different generations: one struggling with the immediacy of her loneliness and realisation that her mom is a loser; the other a grown but deeply-introverted man who remains a victim to his paternal tyrant. But James and Tera are so ineffectual in their understanding of and quest for some form of happiness, their plight loses emphasis or meaning. From the midway point of the film, and certainly with the introduction of Dennis Hopper, there is no way this film can end on a high note and honour its trajectory with realism.
With the exception of Theron’s frantic, desperate Joleen, the acting from all cast members is of the less-is-more, ultra-minimalist style. Stahl, who dresses down his leading man looks, carries the burden of James’ life with contorted features and hunched shoulders (he misses work regularly due to a sore back) and is very good; Sophia-Robb, whose most high-profile roles to-date have been in tween adventures (Because of Winn-Dixie, 2005; Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, 2005; Bridge To Terabithia, 2007; Race to Witch Mountain, 2009), plays tough at first, responding to Joleen’s waywardness with a smart mouth and door-slamming physicality, but she softens into a trusting friendship with James. She does some fine work, although increasingly, she becomes the one-dimensional victim, particularly at the violent hands of Hopper in some confronting, unpleasant scenes.
Support work from construction site buddy Woody Harrelson (who lends the film some fleeting, much-needed humour) and Deborah Lee-Furness as the one strong motherly figure in the film is solid and very welcome. However the plot strands introduced via their characters – Harrelson sees some easy cash to be made selling dope when he learns Warren is now in prison; Lee-Furness soothes a sobbing James with an obvious fondness – go nowhere.
There is a pall that hangs over Sleepwalking from which the film struggles to break free. Cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchia shoots with an almost-monochromatic commitment to the symbolic bleakness of the wintry mid-West landscapes, and the resulting film yearns for a ray of sunlight. One surreal sequence, in which Tera, clad in a pink angora top, smokes and roller-skates around an azure hotel pool for the bemusement of two young boys, provides a welcome blast of colour as well as a respite from the protagonist’s sullen journey.
Carrying a similar sense of impending doom as James Foley’s father-son crime drama At Close Range (1986), which pitted Christopher Walken against sons Chris and Sean Penn in a small-town setting, Sleepwalking is less about the (largely-absent) plot and more a soulful journey to redemption. It’s easy to admire the film, which occasionally wears its dark heart on its flannel sleeve to muted effect. But its damn-near impossible to like it, filled as it is with characters struggling to connect with themselves, let alone the audience.
