Friendship...pain...revenge

I remember being unable to sleep half the night after watching Barry Levinson’s Sleepers way back in 1998. Probably because the images of four teenagers being repeatedly brutalized by sadistic prison guards kept me awake. But did it really? Wasn’t the fact that the boys came back ten years later to avenge their humiliation a greater pull? In hindsight, maybe it was. That emotion does not change, eleven years later as I switch off the TV after watching the film again. The ensemble cast of the film—Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Bacon, Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro—had gotten me interested in the film in 1998. In 2011, I watched the film again for what it really was. A brutal, sad, but strong story well-told. Based on a controversial book by Lorenzo Carcaterra, Sleepers attempts to peel the layers off the truth behind juvenile justice in the United States of America, no less. And did we think that juveniles languishing in remand homes in India were victims of sexual abuse, rapes, and prolonged torture! Carcaterra is the protagonist of the film who, along with his friends—Michael Sullivan, John Riley, and Thomas Marcano, all growing up in Hell’s Kitchen—pull a prank on a hotdog vendor, which goes horribly wrong. The result is 18 months of incarceration at the upcountry Wilkinson’s Home for Boys. From the frame where the guard Sean Nokes (played by Kevin Bacon) forces the young Carcaterra to strip in front of him, to the scenes—shot in black and white—of rape and abuse, the film is demanding…in places painful, where except for the sporadic meetings with the local priest, Father Bobby (Robert De Niro), the boys are pretty much on their own.

Out of the correction centre, and ten years later, John and Tom are small-time gangsters, Carcaterra (Jason Patric) is a clerk at the New York Times and Michael (Brad Pitt, quite remarkable) is a district attorney. The rest of the film is a courtroom drama with both De Niro and Dustin Hoffman (as the defence attorney) pitching in with brilliant performances. John and Tom shoot Nokes dead and are put on trial. Michael and Lorenzo—Shakes to his friends—plan the proceedings of the trial so that Nokes’ friend and torturer-in-arms is brought on as a witness and humiliated in full view of the jury, another one in the group is arrested and tried for dealing drugs, the fourth member of the gang is shot by the brother of a boy the former guards killed at Wilkinson’s. Revenge taken, the boys spend an evening—their last one together—before walking away. As the story goes, John and Tom were found dead, shot at close range just shy of their thirtieth birthdays; Michael quit practice immediately after the trial and lives alone in England; while Shakes is elevated from clerk to trainee reporter at the New York Times. Michael never married. Young lives lost forever. Powerful!