Asleep At The Wheel | AnnaSophia Robb and Nick Stahl somnambulate their way through the bleak landscape of Sleepwalking.
SLEEPWALKING
Directed by William Maher. Starring Nick Stahl, AnnaSophia Robb, Charlize Theron, Dennis Hopper. Opens Fri, Mar 28.
1 1/2 Stars
You know what you’re in for with Sleepwalking’s very first shot: a closeup of a pair of cheap, battered high-heeled boots in white snakeskin, a pair of ugly prefaded jeans tucked into them. The camera pulls back a little farther, and we see we’re in a police station. The camera pulls back father still, and we see that the boots belong to... oh my God, can it really be Charlize Theron again? Yes indeed, and she’s playing yet another poor, uneducated, lower-class woman struggling to make the rent, getting into tearful, defensive, self-sabotaging arguments with landlords, cops, and judges, trying to hold her chin up high as she drives her beat-to-shit car through a wintry landscape as bleak as her career prospects. I can understand Theron’s desire not to put another Aeon Flux on her résumé, but gee whiz, after Monster, North Country, In the Valley of Elah, and now Sleepwalking, would it kill her to play a sexy secret agent sometime soon?
In Sleepwalking, Theron plays Joleen, an unemployed single mom whose boyfriend’s home has just been raided by the cops due to the marijuana grow operation he was running in the yard. With nowhere else to turn, Joleen and her 12-year-old daughter Tara (AnnaSophia Robb), move in with Joleen’s brother James (Nick Stahl), who’s just barely hanging onto a crappy minimum-wage job building playgrounds.
And let me tell you: the scenes in James’ barely furnished, barely lit shithole apartment may be the ultimate achievement in relentlessly dismal Sundance Festival realism. All you other directors trying to capture the drabness of working-class life in red-state America: you can give up now: you’re never going to be able to lay on a thicker impasto of depressing, mud-brown murk than director William Maher does in Sleepwalking. James, who’s been living in this place for months, has a pale, clammy, greasy pallor to his skin—he looks less like a human being than some kind of fungus that’s been growing in the corner.
Theron exits the movie surprisingly early; Joleen ducks out one night, leaving Tara a note promising vaguely to return in time for her birthday. I can’t blame her for wanting to escape that apartment as quickly as possible, and I can even forgive her for leaving her daughter behind. What I can’t forgive, however, is the way Joleen’s departure leaves us with James as the movie’s central figure—a more passive, inarticulate, borderline-cretinous protagonist would be hard to imagine.
Unable to figure out how to drive Tara to school and still show up to work on time, James loses his job, gets kicked out of his apartment, spends a week or sleeping on a half-inflated air mattress in a buddy’s basement, and then, as a final act of almost willfully self-destructive foolishness, he pools his last few hundred dollars and takes Tara on a road trip—destination unknown and possibly nonexistent, hitting every dreary motel and featureless strip of highway along the way.
Sleepwalking presents itself as having a commitment to realism, but what it really has a commitment to is its own self-important air of unflagging somberness, to a world utterly lacking in spontaneity or joy, to characters who seem defeated by the screenplay even before the movie starts. Sleepwalking is a particularly irritating kind of bad movie, the kind that sets out to narrow your vision of the world instead of enlarging it—all in the name of “art.”
“My whole life I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking,” James tells Tara near the end of the film, adding that now things are different, that he’s finally awake. That makes one of us.
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