Sleepwalking
This one is a really interesting experience. I’ve been looking forward to it for AnnaSophia Robb but the rest of the cast ain’t too shabby either. Charlize Theron is fantastic in her short bit of screentime, in fact when she left the movie so early I was a little disappointed as, it has to be said, it’s not one of AnnaSophia’s most memorable or brilliant performances – at least in those early scenes. Nick Stahl and Woody Harrelson, too, are great.
But for almost a full half of the running time, it’s not much to write home about at all. It’s very melancholy, very downbeat, for the most part perfectly played by the actors and crew etc – but, kinda like The Wackness, it’s the kind of small movie that’s been done a thousand times before and at least a handful of those thousand times were miles better.
It’s when Nick Stahl and AnnaSophia hit the road to find Theron, however, that the movie really switched gears for me. There are some really beautiful moments in the second half of the movie – it’s almost the inverse of Robb’s performance in Have Dreams Will Travel – that disappointment I had in her performance early on pays off as her character finds herself on the road, playing hide and seek with Stahl, that almost iconic image of her that graces the movie’s poster, a scene in which she grabs the attention of two pre-teen boys by smoking and then rollerskating to the edge of a diving board before jumping in the water – it’s one of those stories about a young girl discovering to her surprise the things that she can do and the power that she has; and no matter how average the rest of the movie is, moments like that in movies always mean a lot to me.
When the third pleasant surprise in the cast – Dennis Hopper – shows up, it almost begins to feel like True Romance ... and then things get really squiffy. If it weren’t for the cast and the skill with which its all done, I wouldn’t hesitate to call this movie a mess – in fact, I still wanna call it a mess. But it has just enough in it, for me at least, to keep it floating gently.