One dead giveaway of a wannabe indie movie is the fallacy of the two-day scruff. That’s when a male character wakes up with exactly two days’ growth of beard, every day, no matter how many days or weeks the movie covers, and regardless of whether or not he has the means to shave. That’s a small thing, but it indicates that the director is grasping at straws trying to come up with a visual look for his story, perhaps something cool or grungy. The new Sleepwalking, directed by William Maher, is filled with such things, like a serenely spooky shot of a girl swimming underwater with weird sunglasses on, or swirls of powdered snow wisping across a lonely highway. These images may fill out a two-and-a-half-minute trailer, but they don’t help much in this feature film.
Stahl plays the “sleepwalking” James, a dead-eyed slacker with a dead-end job and a dreary apartment. If only all this dreariness had felt palpable, rather than painted on by a production designer. One day James’ sister Joleen (Theron, who also co-produced) disappears, and his 11-year-old niece Tara (Robb) turns up hoping to enlist his help in finding her; she eventually coaxes her uncle to skip town. Their money carries them only as far as James and Joleen’s father’s chilled, dried, wind-blown farm. The old man (Hopper) immediately puts them to work, barking at them and slapping them around when he’s displeased. Worse, James has lied about his sister’s disappearance and claims that Tara is his own daughter, which only angers Dad all the more.
This all leads up to an all-too-obvious conclusion, and every shot that Maher sets up points inexorably toward it. Maher and screenwriter Zac Stanford (of The Chumscrubber) lazily attempt to build tentative layers into the relationship between James and Tara. James gets a speech at the end in which he tells Tara how he’s been sleepwalking and that she has woken him up, which we never really see; the character is so dull and passive that this revelation has to come through dialogue. Indeed, the problem with Sleepwalking is right there in the title.
Sleepwalking
**
Nick Stahl, AnnaSophia Robb, Charlize Theron, Dennis Hopper
Directed by William Maher
Rated R