Sleepwalking

Directed by William Maher
Charlize Theron, Dennis Hopper

First-time director Maher organizes this family melodrama around the most uninteresting of the film’s cardboard characters, all of whom are made from 100% recycled materials. Naïve man-child James looks after his eleven year-old niece, whose down-and-out mom ditches. Even Hopper’s monstrous patriarch is a shadow of his Blue Velvet role. The rural North California settings are elegantly filmed, but the script’s simplistic family psychology is hopelessly clichéd.

This review appears in the March 12 issue of The L Magazine.