Entertainment, Movies - Marine Corps Times

‘Sleepwalking’ clicks as a portrait of small-town despair

For many people, movies are about pure escapism. Fantastic flights of science-fiction, off-the-wall action-adventures, gut-wrenching horror … it’s all about temporarily transporting to a different plane of reality.

Those kinds of thrills can be visceral, but they’re also apt to be fleeting. The movies that stick with you the longest are the ones that tell stories of people with whom we can identify and sympathize — and for whom we root.

“Sleepwalking,” a low-budget indie film that created some buzz at the most recent Sundance Film Festival, is one such film. It’s a grim experience that won’t get anywhere close to blockbuster box office — but if you’re a fan of films that turn an unsparing eye on the human condition, this one is well worth seeking out.

Charlize Theron gets grungy to star (she also produced) as Joleen Reedy, single mother to angel-faced, tart-tongued 11-year-old Tara (AnnaSophia Robb) in a nameless, dying industrial town.

Within five minutes, we learn that Joleen is a loud, angry, selfish, foul-mouthed, asthmatic, chain-smoking train wreck with few job prospects and abysmal taste in men.

Her latest boyfriend has just been busted for growing pot and she and Tara have been evicted from his place. With nowhere else to go, Joleen drags Tara to the rundown apartment of her brother James (the greatly underrated Nick Stahl).

James is just as dysfunctional as Joleen, but in different ways. He has the permanently cowed air of an abused puppy, ready to flinch at any sudden movement or noise. He moves through his threadbare life as if under water, barely eking out an existence as a laborer on a highway road crew whose members affectionately call him “Speedy.”

Whip-smart Tara clearly loves both her mother and uncle, but also can’t help loathing their seemingly intractable weaknesses and minimal functionality as human beings.

Tara’s world is rocked again when she wakes up one morning to find her mother has fled, leaving her behind with James, a short note and a few $20 bills.

James tries, but he can barely care for himself. Their fortunes spiral downward in a hurry, until the only place left for them is the last place James wants to see — a place that finally explains the wounds that he and Joleen share.

For a pair of utter novices, director William Maher and writer Zac Stanford flash remarkably sure hands in roping viewers in — no easy feat, given the downer tone of the material.

They craft a number of eerily beautiful — and largely wordless — sequences, many of which feature the amazingly self-assured Robb, who has a very bright career ahead of her.

In one scene, Tara tiptoes through a nighttime sea of parked semi-trailer rigs at a motel stop, trembling as passing headlights turn the big truck grilles into menacing creatures.

In another, she flaunts her budding sexuality by vamping at a hotel pool for two slightly younger boys, leaving them dazed and confused by feelings they still lack the vocabulary to describe.

It also doesn’t hurt Maher and Stanford that they have a pair of quality pros like Theron and Stahl on hand. But while Theron is the name draw here, and is routinely excellent, she’s really a supporting player.

The film belongs to Stahl, who’s been a standout in a lot of middling films over his career. He gets deep under James’s skin to show the fundamental goodness and decency beneath a shell-shocked exterior.

As an octoplex experience, “Sleepwalking” is certainly no picnic in the park. But anyone with even an ounce of empathy will glean heartbreaking poignancy in the film’s assertion that even people with lives as bleak and damaged as these can find a small ray of hope — if they just take that first step.