A Life Through Film #036: Sleepers
A harrowing piece of autofiction adapted to make me bored and tick me off
Release Date: 10/18/1996
Weeks at Number One: 2
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
In a sense, all art is a search for the truth. The best creative works seek meaning in topics like society, love, and personal identity. By engaging with that search, we as the viewer are along for the ride. The more people that resonate with a movie and the ideas it explores, the better chance it has at financial success or a lingering legacy.
That’s the thesis of “A Life Through Film,” after all: tracking what America’s favorite movies reveal about us as a society. The results of that thesis have been admittedly mixed (thematic vacuums like Broken Arrow continue to be thorns in my side), but overall I’d say fruitful. The truth of America’s evolving relationship with topics as political as gay rights or as technological as 3D animation can be gleaned from the success of movies like The Birdcage and Toy Story.
The trouble of “the truth” has come a couple of times already in this column. The life of a public figure was totally altered in an effort to make her complicated life more palatable in Up Close & Personal. The realities of a horrific criminal case were flipped and twisted around to make A Time to Kill. Hell, over in my contemporary reviews, A Complete Unknown doesn’t offer a fully accurate depiction of Bob Dylan’s early career, instead opting to offer a compelling narrative over full adherence to reality.
The pillow of fiction allows us to get lost in the craft of a good movie, but it can’t protect every film that we watch. The first question that gets asked whenever a purportedly true story is adapted for film is “How much of this really happened?” For people who care too much about this kind of thing (like me), knowing the differences between what’s presented on screen and what actually occurred can seriously affect enjoyment of a movie. I personally don’t expect every movie based on reality to match factual occurrences absolutely; it makes sense to change things like names or dates to protect identities, or to streamline more complicated aspects of the narrative.
I have limits, though. If you tell me you’re adapting a true story into a movie, I’d like there to be no uncertainty on whether that original event even happened.
Sleepers is a 1996 drama directed by Barry Levinson that stars Jason Patric, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, and Minnie Driver. Based on the 1995 book of the same name by journalist/novelist Lorenzo Carcaterra, the story follows four friends who grow up on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen in the 1960s before being sent to a reform school. There, they suffer horrible physical, sexual, and mental abuse at the hands of sadistic guards (led by Kevin Bacon). As adults, two of the survivors (a young Billy Crudup and Ron Eldard) are career criminals who are arrested after murdering one of the guards who made their lives a living Hell. The other two are an assistant District Attorney (Pitt) and a journalist with ties to the streets (Patric) who conspire to get their friends free while exposing the trauma they all suffered.
The original author, Carcaterra, has sworn up and down for decades that this harrowing saga of terror and redemption is based on the true story of his own life. The abuse, the PTSD, the illegal tampering with a criminal trial, all of that supposedly happened. That journalist in the story played by Jason Patric? That’s Carcaterra in both name, occupation, and narrative role.
Carcaterra began shopping the original Sleepers manuscript around in the mid ‘90s, but the story started a frenzy in Hollywood before a publisher could even be lined up. Studios were chomping at the bit to adapt this true tragedy, and a bidding war erupted in February of 1995, which was eventually won by Propaganda Films. They were primarily known as a TV production house by this point (with both Twin Peaks and Beverly Hills 90210 in their catalogue of projects), but Propaganda Films had recently been moving into the world of lower cost movies. With a budget of $44 million, Sleepers would be their biggest film to date by far.
It helped that they had a guy like Barry Levinson in their corner. The writer/director had been making personal dramas since the early ‘80s, when movies like Diner [4/5] and The Natural showcased his talent for capturing dynamic, human characters on-screen. His movies made money and were critical darlings, none more so than 1988’s Rain Man. The drama not only won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (for Dustin Hoffman) at the Academy Awards, it was the highest grossing film of the year. Oh to live in an era when quality dramas could make over $300 million at the box office.
By ‘95, Levinson wasn’t exactly at the height of his powers (I haven’t heard the best things about Toys and Disclosure, though the latter was a big hit), but he was still respected enough that he was able to draw a powerful cast of both old collaborators (Bacon was a Diner guy and Hoffman owed him for that Oscar) as well as newcomers like Pitt. Once they heard he was interested, Propaganda Films stepped back and let him take charge. Not only did he direct Sleepers, Levinson took it upon himself to single handedly adapt the book into the screenplay as well. He and Carcaterra worked with each other quite a bit during this process, Levinson often going to the book’s author for clarifying questions about his lived experiences.
Throughout his many conversations with Carcaterra, Levinson developed a trust in the man’s story as he told it. This was good, because the authenticity of Sleepers was under fire before the book even came out in July of 1995.
There are multiple New York Times pieces diving deep into the factuality of this story as both a book and a movie. Both the Catholic Archdiocese of New York (which would have been in charge of the reform school the boys served time at) and the city’s District Attorney’s Office were contacted about the validity of Sleepers, and both institutions claimed unequivocally that the story was bunk. Carcaterra admitted to changing names and dates as necessary, but maintains that the events of this movie actually happened to him and his childhood friends.
Carcaterra’s story was backed up by both his publisher, Ballantine Books (who claimed to have an envelope of proof that has never surfaced) and every creative force involved with the film adaptation of Sleepers. In interviews, Levinson comes off as very defensive of the story’s authenticity, probably because he invested so much of his time and effort in adapting the story. He pointed out that if the events of the story were fake, Carcaterra wouldn’t have needed to include all of the terrifying (and, he implies, humiliating) details of his own childhood sexual abuse. Bacon (who called the movie a “thick” film, thematically) pointed out all the details that Carcaterra had ready to go at the drop of a hat whenever anyone asked about his story.
Of course no one with a financial stake in the success of Sleepers would acquiesce to doubts about its validity when the shock of its “true story” is a major part of its appeal. It’s common knowledge that the public loves a revenge story (the movie sure makes a point to repeatedly compare its own plot to The Count of Monte Cristo), but truly cathartic ones aren’t as common in real life as they are in books, movies, TV shows, and games. I don’t know about 1996, but these days it sure feels like there is no recourse for wrongs suffered at the hands of the untouchably powerful. A story like Sleepers, which shows how these suffering kids grew up and got their violent revenge, is appealing, as grim as that may be.
Maybe it’s that drama that makes the story both so captivating and so hard to believe. Bernie Weinraub, in a New York Times article outlining the case against the story’s authenticity, points out that no other recent movie had raised such a controversy about the truth. What was it about this story that a cottage industry arose to try and find out what happened and what didn’t?
I’ll be real: that debate about the legitimacy of its story is the most interesting thing Sleepers has going for it.
Let me pump the brakes here with a disclaimer: Carcaterra remains adamant that Sleepers is a true story with only small details changed to protect some identities. If that is the case, then all complaints I have with the storytelling are a result of Levinson’s adaptation of the story and not an indictment of Carcaterra’s lived experiences as “poor storytelling.”
All that being said, I’m leaning towards Sleepers being totally autofiction, a story that Carcaterra made up about his own life that maybe pulls from a few kernels of truth. I don’t know how legitimate this is, but when I rented this movie on Amazon, the X-Ray trivia feature at the very start of the movie said that people who grew up with Carcaterra were asked about Sleepers and they said that nothing like the events of this story ever happened to the writer. Plus, in a move that whiffs of covering tracks, the book includes a section mentioning that the characters’ criminal records were scrubbed that wasn’t in the original manuscript.
My standard for sniffing out bullshit is things being too good to be true. In this case, the events of this book, as heinous and violent as they are, simply line up in too neatly a narrative arc for me to consider pure coincidence. I will be more than happy to eat my words if irrefutable proof of Carcaterra’s story comes out after I publish this review, but I’ll be writing the rest of this column assuming that Sleepers is entirely fictional.
The movie works best in its opening section. This bright, sunny depiction of Hell's Kitchen in the ‘60s was shot to intentionally bring about feelings of nostalgia, and its use of a lovely period-appropriate soundtrack filled with bands like The Beach Boys and The Four Seasons help to further that vibe. It’s not the most unique ‘60s throwback I’ve ever seen in film, but it helps to frame the actions of our street-tough yet ultimately good-hearted characters as the wistful shenanigans of all-American boys. Their friendship with the local priest helps to further ground them as decent kids, even as they start taking on small jobs for the local mob boss. De Niro does pretty solid work in this movie as that priest. You can really tell as the movie goes on that his heart is broken by what happens to these kids as they grow up.
The chemistry between the child versions of our central characters is very sweet. Only the older two, who go on to be played by Patric and Pitt, have any sort of personality, but it’s fun to watch the whole unit chatter, play stick ball, and grapple with the struggles of growing up poor. Joe Perrino, playing the younger version of Carcaterra, probably turns in the best performance in the whole movie. It’s got this touch of melancholy even in the good times, as he recognizes that both his personal world and the larger world around him is on the precipice of some great change. It’s a shame Perrino didn’t go on to have a more prominent career, since this was a very promising start.
Even in this opening hour though, as the story shifts from a heartfelt reflection on how things used to be to a harrowing story of terror and torture at the hands of terrible men, Sleepers already stumbles. The tone and CONSTANT narration from Patric make it clear that the movie is going for Goodfellas [5/5], and it just cannot live up to those lofty expectations for itself. There are so many ideas probed early on that have a lot of promise for later thematic exploration, like generational trauma, toxic masculinity, and the importance of offloading troubling secrets. By the time the movie hits its second hour though, it becomes clear that Sleepers isn’t interested in plunging the depths of its ideas or its characters.
I have to take a second to mention the incident that gets our characters thrown from the streets to the reform school. Basically, after a scam gone wrong, the four kids are responsible for a hot dog cart falling down the steps of the subway and seriously injuring someone at the bottom. Again, if this is a real thing that happened, sure, it makes sense to be in the movie. But I’m operating under the assumption that most if not all of what I’m seeing here didn’t actually happen, so I think it’s a silly storytelling decision.
I’m sorry, but the slow motion, dramatic footage of the hot dog cart falling down the stairs is so funny to me. This is the before and after moment in these kids’ lives, and all I can do is laugh as wieners are flung everywhere and a rainbow umbrella flies over the stairway bannister. Maybe I’m hoping that none of this actually happened because I feel bad finding this crucial story beat to be so goofy looking. But if all of this is the invention of Carcaterra’s imagination, why not tie the boys being arrested to the criminal work they were already doing in the story?
It’s after our characters are sent to the Wilkinson School for Boys that the cracks truly start to show in the foundation of Sleepers. Kevin Bacon is terrifying in a believable, human way. He, like many people, get dangerous once they’re afforded a modicum of power over those lower on the totem pole. From the jump, anytime he’s on screen, you know that the next few minutes are not going to be pleasant. Sleepers isn’t too explicit with the abuse it depicts, but it has so much implied sexual assault of these boys that it’s still extremely heartbreaking to endure as the audience.
But this section is still bogged down by so much narration that refuses to let the story be told through performance or cinematography. Patric’s voice will audibly explain obvious character moments and story beats, refusing to allow the audience to pick up on some of the subtler, sadder moments of Sleepers. The scene where Carcaterra struggles to hold a conversation with the visiting De Niro is fine until the narration comes in over it to point out how hard it is for the character to make eye contact, or speak directly, or healthily exhibit emotions. It removes all mental burden from the viewer, and lets us do nothing but watch the story play out on a surface level.
And on that surface level, this is a surprisingly poorly put together movie. There are so many strange filmmaking choices in Sleepers that do nothing but make the movie worse. Entire subplots will play out in these awful flashbacks, with overly reverbed audio and all blue color grading. The use of montage in Sleepers is straight up poor, often convoluting timelines instead of streamlining them. The editing during what should be cathartic moments in the third act’s courtroom is so disjointed and strange that it removes all impact from what should be major turning points.
Let’s jump to the part where everyone’s grown up, which constitutes the second half of this two and a half hour long movie. It’s here where everything just goes off the rails for Sleepers, at least in my eyes. It starts with a strong moment where two of the central characters shoot Kevin Bacon to death in a bar, finding the vengeance that we know they deserve. Sadly, the rest of the movie cannot hold a candle to this great scene. As the plot begins to focus more on the boys, now men, seeking further revenge, all the previous themes broached earlier in the movie fall to the wayside, never to be touched again. Instead, the plot unfolds as you’d expect it to, with very little tension thanks to the questionable filmmaking choices on Levinson’s part.
None of that is helped by extremely flat performances by basically everyone involved. These are characters shaped by terrible trauma that has changed them into troubled, stunted men. And yet there are no voices raised in anger, no tearful panics at the memory of their abuse, no emotion at all from Patric, Pitt, Crudup, or De Niro beyond stoic determination, even as one of those actors plays a character who murders a man in cold blood. This is by far the most tepid performance I’ve ever seen from Brad Pitt (making his third appearance in this column), even as he plays a figure that the real Carcaterra says “always seems to be 10 minutes away from taking his own life.” There’s none of that anguish or despair here, just more flat dejection.
The effect is a boring movie that goes on for far too long. Of all the court dramas I’ve watched from 1996, Sleepers is by far the least engaging. There are no shocked gasps from the audience and jury, no screams of order from the judge, no fiery cross-examinations by the lawyers. And it isn’t like it’s played straight for a sense of realism. The crux of the drama in this legal case is a question over whether De Niro will agree to show up and commit perjury to give the defendants an alibi. Sleepers must think we’re stupid as hell, because our characters are scrambling to convince him to appear as a witness up until the morning his character is supposed to give testimony.
Listen, I’m not expecting perfect legal accuracy in these kinds of movies. But if you’re pretending to be based on a true story, at least try to keep to the reality of how a court case actually goes. Witnesses and evidence cannot be pulled out of nowhere during the trial like what happens in Sleepers. To center a huge part of your climactic tension around it isn’t just dumb, it makes me think that Levinson and Carcaterra think that we the audience are idiots for believing this could be based on reality.
The one bright spot throughout Sleepers is the John Williams score. It’s got all of the big swelling strings and dramatic movements that you’d expect from the guy. Williams’s work here lacks the iconic refrains of something like Star Wars or Indiana Jones, but that’s not necessary here in a story that, even if it isn’t real, is at least a bit closer to our world than fantasy. Williams’s work was nominated for an Oscar at the Academy Awards, but lost to Gabriel Yarid’s score for The English Patient.
The final nail in the coffin for Sleepers is a text splash that pops up right before the credits roll, acknowledging that the Diocese of New York and the New York District Attorney’s office don’t recognize the validity of Carcaterra’s story. Maybe some people get so wrapped up in this movie’s plot that they think they’ve been let in on a great conspiracy that the Church and law enforcement don’t want you to be aware of. I did not feel that way. After seeing the confusing execution of the third act’s plot, I was ready to side with the authorities here and call the plot of Sleepers total bullshit.
This movie covers some tragic subject matter, and honestly the parts that take place back in the ‘60s are mostly affecting. But irritating narration throughout and a messy second half loaded with weak performances just ruin any good will set up by the first hour. Sleepers is an attempt at prestige drama that just ends up feeling half-baked and unrewarding, even as it delivers the revenge the characters desire and deserve by the end.
I’m in the minority here though, and I recognize that. Sleepers is Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with an aggregate score of 73%, and it’s got nearly a four-star average on Letterboxd. Even as she dismisses the story’s legitimacy in her New York Times review, Janet Maslin recommended it, calling it “slick” and highlighting Kevin Bacon’s all-too-brief performance. Owen Gliebermann over at Entertainment Weekly, however, was a bit more glib with his negative feelings towards the story:
By the end, the main thing that’s been abused is the audience’s intelligence.
Sleepers was a moderate hit here in the States, offering some proper grown up entertainment after months of nothing but comedies and action movies of varying quality. After topping the box office for two straight weekends, it stuck around in the top 10 until nearly December before vanishing from theaters near the tail end of January. That $53 million domestic take was okay but not great, given its budget, but it didn’t really matter.
The international crowd came through in a big way for Sleepers, and while I can’t find details on which countries contributed most to this, it more than doubled its domestic gross overseas. It was an even bigger hit internationally than Maximum Risk, which is wild. Other countries loved JCVD in the ‘90s! I had never heard of Sleepers before researching it for this column, but was shocked by that impressive final gross of $165 million. Maybe if you’re from another country, this is a much more beloved hit. As an American, it isn’t a canonical film for any of its legendary actors.
The controversy around Carcaterra’s story was well-known long before Sleepers hit theaters, but with the exception of The Island of Dr. Moreau, all press is good press. When combined with an Academy Award winning director and a cast as stacked as this, I’m not surprised people turned out for the movie. It hasn’t lingered in the cultural zeitgeist at all, but more importantly than that, it made its money. I don’t like it, but Sleepers did exactly what it was supposed to.
Maybe one day we’ll get a firm answer on whether Carcaterra’s story is real or not. I won’t hold my breath though. Instead, I’ll recommend another movie about the horrors of a 1960’s reform school for boys. Nickel Boys is currently up for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars, and I was lucky enough to catch a screening last month thanks to the DC Film Society. You can read my full review here, but it’s better than Sleepers in every way. When you get a chance, you should try to see Nickel Boys before it’s canonized as one of the great films of the mid 2020s. Unlike Sleepers, I’m sure that it will stand the test of time.
Rating: 2/5
Next Week: Valentine’s Day may have been a couple of weeks ago, but it’s time to get romantic as hell. Let’s revisit Romeo + Juliet and see how Leo became a star.
See you then!
-Will