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 [log in to unmask] ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]