BEWARE any movie that ends with a cliché as dire as “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
What comes before that in “Sleepwalking” is relentlessly depressing
– almost a parody of movies at Sundance, where this one premiered in January. Co-producer Charlize Theron, evicted from the house she shares with her pot-farmer boyfriend, briefly moves herself and her daughter (AnnaSophia Robb) in with her underachieving younger brother.
Soon she takes off with a new boyfriend. The daughter is left in the care of the brother (Nick Stahl), who in short order loses his job, is himself evicted – and takes off on a road trip to the farm where his father (Dennis Hopper), who terrorized him and his sister, is happy to dish out fresh abuse to him and the granddaughter he’s never met until now.
Even comic relief by Woody Harrelson as the brother’s buddy can’t cut through the gloom of William Maher’s “Sleepwalking,” set in the Southwest but shot in Saskatchewan.
SLEEPWALKING
Running time: 100 minutes. Rated R (profanity, violence). At the Sunshine, the Lincoln Square, the Empire.