Sleepers

I genuinely don’t even know what to say, this is a thought provoking, hauntingly emotional masterpiece of a film. Even if I feel like a lot of people here don't agree, the pacing was phenomenal in my opinion and really brought the story across in the way it needed to and took it’s much needed time with it. If you think this movie was stretched out or too long you might want to check your attention span and if you really listened to what kind of story this movie was telling. Because it’s not just a much needed good look on sexual violence against male victims but also really well done representation of what sexual assault does to its victims even in the long run.  Michael closed himself off towards having any type of sexual contact with anyone and also struggles to maintain romantic relationships, which I know is something many SA victims suffer from because they struggle seeing intimate acts in a positive light after what happened to them. He’s a very VERY good lawyer (as he literally planned the whole trial out on both sides) but he doesn’t hesitate to put his career at risk to try and serve justice to his friends and maybe also himself. Shakes as mentioned in the movie is as an adult still very shy and quiet like he was as a child. He goes about his day in his safely set routine and leans towards burying the memory of what happened deep within himself. He also tends to push others away and keep interactions on a basic level with what feels safe for him. Other than his friends he tends to avoid looking at Ferguson when he entered the court room and all the way through his testimony. Michael also mentions that he still sleeps with his light on. I assume that’s because it allows him to feel safe and in control. To not suddenly wake up in the dark when he hears a noise and feel like he’s back at the home. Because the fort that he build up around himself is just that fragile. He still feels the need to pull himself together and force himself to tell the story he spent so much time repressing because he feels responsible for his friends even in adulthood. Tommy and John are very noticeably different from the way they were as kids. They are gang leaders and murderers. This shows how some victims are never able to leave the cycle of abuse and sometimes even become criminals and fall victim to heavy drug addiction because they can’t deal with what their trauma and not ever talking about it had done to them. From the moment the abuse happened to them they were trapped in a downward spiral they would never be able to make it out of again. With all that I want to say how greatly the movie showed that people who’ve been heavily abused in their childhood don’t just move on or forget about it just because a lot of time has passed since. If something this severely traumatizing happened to you and you don’t get any type of professional help, you don’t talk about it to you parents and you just bottle it up inside of you, hoping to forget about it, you are really just eternally binding yourself to that thing. Rape and sexual abuse in general shapes someone drastically into a different person. With that I also want to pay homage to the acting in this film because the younger as well as the older versions of the boys were all eye-acting so hard you could really tell how badly they were traumatized just by the empty look in their eyes. I especially almost couldn’t bare to look Billy Crudup (older Tommy) and Ron Eldard (older John) in the eyes. They definitely looked like tough gang leaders that are not to be messed with from top to bottom but as soon as you saw their eyes, all you could see were those deeply broken and traumatized kids inside of them. Their eyes looked so deeply sad and emotional like they had tears in them but so empty at the same time, both Crudup and Eldard really looked like they had a genuine thousand yard stare. I can only say the same for the child actors as well by the way. It baffles me how much emotion those eyes held and how in the world you’d be able to act out a thousand yard stare. Again, Hollywood exploited and ruined Brad Renfro as long as he lived, but we lost an unbelievable acting talent with him. Rest in peace to this beautiful young soul, gone too soon. (That is not a dig at Jason Patric and Brad Pitt at all by the way, they also ate up their roles and the way their eyes looked fit their characters journey very well. Like I said, they all started out more or less the same but turned out so different. They are incredibly actors in general but I really think they knocked it out the park with this one, they were that good.) To conclude, I’m very excited to read the book, this type of topic is very important to me. I truly don’t know how mothers deal with knowing something like this happened to their child. My heart goes out to all the (young) victims and their families out there, this world is a horrible horrible place.