RE: Sleepers
 
Personally, I didn't care too terribly much for the film, though I thought
it had its moments:  some of the early interplay of the kids, the truly
harrowing prison scenes (yet another nice job by the underrated Kevin
Bacon), Robert DeNiro's hearing the horrible story in silence (and
close-up), and the nicely drawn work by Dustin Hoffman and Vittorio
Gassman.  But I felt it protracted overall (the romance between Jason
Patric and Minnie Driver mattered not a whit to me), and I found myself
throughout the second half wishing I was back in the first, which was far
more atmospheric and convincing -- the sort of boys-will-be-boys stuff that
Barry Levinson always does well.
 
But as for the truth of the story:  After Carcaterra's book was released to
great furor, both the Archdiocese of the city of New York and the Manhattan
District's Attorney's office denied any knowledge of a murder case in which
the testimony of a Hell's Kitchen priest enabled two guys to get off a
murder rap.  Moreover, the D. A.'s office added that no one as
inexperienced as the prosecutor-conspirator (Brad Pitt) is supposed to have
been would ever be assigned a capital murder case.  When Carcaterra's own
past was probed, it was further revealed that he had never served any time
personally in a reform school.  And nobody in the neighborhood had ever
heard of a death like the one depicted in the film.  Eventually, he
partially recanted his story, saying he set it in Hell's Kitchen even
though it happened somewhere else.  But since he grew up in that
neighborhood, it's hard to see how he would've known any of the alleged
events.  And when the film version came out, Carcaterra, who was very
visible when the book was published, was nowhere to be seen; Warner Bros.
and Baltimore Pictures (Levinson's company) repeatedly distanced themselves
from his initial claims that the story was true, and he was said to be
someplace out of the country.  In short, there ain't much to hang a hope of
truth on....
 
None of which ought to affect our understanding or appreciation of the
film, of course, but it does raise the interesting question of how our
response to a narrative of this sort is conditioned by whether we take it
to be 'true,' 'fictional,' 'a lie,' or something in between.
 
Shawn Levy
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