Sleepers

I just remember at this moment a 1996 movie that caused a lot of impression when I was twelve. It´s called Sleepers, directed by Barry Levinson, based on Lorenzo Carcaterra's 1995 novel. It's about four wicked boys arround ten to fourteen years old that lived on Hell's Kitchen, a shanty neighborhood in New York City. They always played pranks and in one of them they almost kill a man, so they are sentenced to serve time at Wilkinson Home for Boys, a child correctional institution.

This was a very hard and corrupt institution. The boys suffer there the most terrible situations, from humilliations to rape by the guards of the place. This made a very hard impress to me, because I was just a child and as I am a very romantic person, this connected me very hard with my emotions because of the injustice and madness that I saw in that characters, for example the thing of  how they ruined for ever the life of this four boys. I think that was the first time I experimented this deception and horror to the human being as a society. Obviously it was just a movie, a drama, but when I was an adolescent I leaned to mix everything jajaja.

Any way, as this was a shanty neighborhood, obviously on the history were involved gangsters and the tipical locel priest that tried to correct these boys, and all the interesting aesthetic and social movements that integrates this kind of places. So, after all this traumatic experience that happen on this Wilkinson Home, obviously their friendship changed for ever and they separated their ways.

One day, when years have passed, two of them were on a bar having a beer, and they saw enter one of the rapists on the bar and they kill him. So they were arrested and one of the other boys that have becomed a lawyer tried to save the souls of their childhood friends. So he makes a plan that involves all these people of their neighbordhood that I mentioned, like the priest.

It's a very good film on a direction way and it counts with a great cast: Kevin Bacon, Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Jason Patrik, Minnie Driver, Terry Kinney, Vittorio Gassman and Jeffrey Donovan. The characters are very well done and the art direction is very pertinent, despite is a realistic drama because sometimes those kind of movies tende to fall on the common, but I think this one is very well done. :)