Sleepers

Sleepers (1996) is about what happens to four boys in a reformatory and the reckoning years later. On Manhattan's west side four friends play a prank that badly injures a man. They are sent to a juvenile facility, where guards abuse them for months. Years later two of them meet one of those guards in a bar and shoot him. Of the other two, one has become a prosecutor and takes the case in order to lose it. The film builds a revenge plan inside a courtroom, and the plan depends on the truth emerging without ever being said. Lorenzo Carcaterra published the book as his own experience and the film was marketed as a true story. That claim collapsed. The New York district attorney's office and the juvenile authority said no record of such a case existed. A New York Times reporter could find nothing resembling it in the paper's archive or anywhere else. Carcaterra's school records showed he could not have been in the facility for the period he described. Officials at the Wilkinson Home for Boys said such conditions never existed. A disclaimer was added to the video release: no records were found, the institution denied it, and the author stands by his account. The cast is formidable: Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, Jason Patric. Barry Levinson directed. It runs 147 minutes. Good for: crime drama, courtroom films, and the nineties. Less good for: child abuse is treated directly and those sections are hard.