Movie Didn’t Capture Depth Of Book
Barry Levinson’s “Sleepers” is well-hyped, but the book, written by Lorenzo Carcaterra, was what captured my attention.
The book was excellent, yet the movie left out a good deal of the personal descriptions and development of the main characters, so the audience has a hard time figuring out why each boy’s life turned out the way it did.
The movie is told through the eyes of Lorenzo Carcaterra (played as an adult by Jason Patric). Called “Shakes” by his friends, Lorenzo spends his summers working for King Benny, a mobster who runs the integrated neighborhood.
Shakes, along with his best friends Michael, John and Tommy (played by Brad Pitt, Billy Crudup and Ron Eldard as adults) look for adventure in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood by swimming off the dock and playing stick ball in the street.
One day, a practical joke goes terribly wrong and the four friends are sentenced to a year in the Wilkinson Home for Boys. Wilkinson looked like a college campus, but it had a deep hidden corruption. Over that year, the boys were subjected to rape and bloody beatings given out by the guards, headed by Kevin Bacon.
The four friends went into Wilkinson as naive children and came out as bitter youths.
The second half of the movie portrays the boys in their late 20s; Tommy and John are professional hitmen who accidently run into the head guard while drinking in a bar. It is their relentless pursuit of revenge that brings the four boys together again in a court of law.
The book gives wonderful descriptions of the boys, making me realize each one had a quality of someone I know. It gives you each boy’s history, making it easy to figure out why each one acts the way they do. Little John was sweet, Michael was the leader, Tommy was the clown and Shakes was the sensible one.
You don’t get that background in the movie.
The book takes the reader on a journey, not to a fantasy world but to a place that has a striking resemblance to our world today. The book will make your hate for conformity and injustice burn passionately.
It made me want to get up and fight against anything and everything that had ever held me back and controlled me. Maybe we can’t all identify with sexual torture and abuse, but this book shows how sometimes it is just so much more important to get revenge than to do the right thing.
John and Tommy, while important in the book, were two very undeveloped characters in the movie. DeNiro, who plays the boys’ confidante Father Bobby Carillo, performs like a pro. He becomes the one character you wish you knew in real life.
I found Pitts’ performance disappointing as a prosecuting attorney. He came across as wishy-washy; it appeared to me he was unhappy with his supporting role. Dustin Hoffman plays a befuddled lawyer for the defense who reminded me of the dysfunctional character he played in the 1991 movie, “Hero.”
The movie was powerful, but to me lacked the punch of the book. The audience reaction at the end of the movie made me wonder if a few people around me had experienced those dark cellars at Wilkinson. The movie portrays abuse as a cycle that never seems to end. It wants to ask us, “Who speaks for the children?”, yet we never receive the answer.
Instead, we brood over the injustice children face as salty tears run down our cheeks.
Grades: B- (movie)
A+ (book)